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The title is how long the man on the electric chair has left to recall his life, cf. Borges' "The Secret Miracle." People look like flies when seen from up on the girders, the view is not Harry Lime's but that of the skyscraper riveter (Edward G. Robinson), "it kinda gives a fellow ideas." His blind date resembles "the rear end of a fire truck," he ducks into a taxi dance hall and amid the glazed wrigglers spots the blonde hostess (Vivienne Osborne). Warnings from the roommate (Preston Foster) go unheeded, the camera circles the nightclub where tippler and gold-digger smooch to derisive cackling and then pulls back from a close-up of the booze cup on his pinkie finger to reveal the rushed wedding. "When it comes around to playing with a dame or pounding on a stick of dynamite, the real smart guy chooses the dynamite." Mervyn LeRoy's spiraling Kammerspielfilm, the grim pre-Code scald par excellence. The ultimate disintegration of the Robinson patsy, the plunge that steals the true love, the psycho that cracks the henpecked chrysalis. "A foothold between you and hell," the wad of filthy cash out of the brazen garter and into the ashamed hand. Striking points of contact with La Chienne and M, a gloating luridness in anticipation of Clouzot. "What have you got to live for that you're so afraid of dying?" The overdue windfall rejuvenates the spirit and unlocks the murderer, the courtroom becomes an abstract stage for a fulminating screed, the coda finds the audience's gaze duly traumatized. "It ain't fair to let a rat live and kill a man!" The properly vile descendant is Noé's I Stand Alone. With Guy Kibbee, J. Carrol Naish, Berton Churchill, Frederick Burton, Harry Beresford, Dorothea Wolbert, William Jenney, Edward McWade, and Gladys Lloyd. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |