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"A short life at full speed," its beauties and perils explored as only Raoul Walsh can. The immersive camera announces itself at once, it tilts beneath the East River to acknowledge the vertical structure with glistening sinew under placid surfaces. A tunnel connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan, "sandhogs" at work, a competition between burly foremen (Victor McLaglen and Charles Bickford) at opposite sides. "Those monkeys down there look like a bunch of fan dancers!" The task takes its toll, the effects on the body are explained during a card game in the decompression chamber. ("The only cure is beer," a beeline from the depths to Marjorie Rambeau's saloon.) McLaglen grudgingly dons top hat and tails for a gala event, the swell who jeers at him gets a sock in the jaw courtesy of his buddy (Edmund Lowe). "Always rivals... always pals," the newspaperwoman (Florence Rice) is on the case, "a knockout yarn." The technique advances markedly upon Pabst's Kameradschaft, strange Nature and stranger technology in stark, jocular arrangements, cinema with dirt under the fingernails. (The elemental peak is an infernal collision of air, water and fire viewed from a passing boat miles above as a paroxysmal geyser.) Borden Chase story, uncredited Billy Wilder dialogue. Masculine drive and its corporeal cost: "I build things," the hero declares proudly before collapsing from a damaged leg. Adversaries meeting in the middle with fisticuffs, a deluge braved for a friend, as fierce a portrait of labor as classical Hollywood ever produced. "Whistling in the dark again, eh?" They Drive by Night and Manpower complete a loose Walsh trilogy. With Sig Ruman, Roger Imhof, Warner Richmond, Jack Wallace, James Donlan, George Walsh, and Ward Bond. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |