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Fritz Lang kicks off with a raid on the consumerist system of which he knows he's a part: The opening number is a cosmos for sale, amid the flurry of the cash register is the camera itself. (It takes the Godard of Ici et Ailleurs to offer a comparable onslaught.) "You cannot rearrange a plan made by man since the world began," so goes the first of Kurt Weill's refrains, resonating painfully with characters who carry with them the weight of the past. A clerk at the lavish department store reveals his old safecracking ways while operating a can-opener, still the boss (Harry Carey) believes in second chances and runs the place benignly. Among the reformed jailbirds are George Raft and Sylvia Sidney, clandestine lovers who break parole rules by getting hitched—the happy couple braves the darkness of a tenement stairwell, suddenly a single match illuminates like Lady Liberty's torch. "I'd like to sing you a song..." The most radical of Thirties Hollywood hybrids, melodrama shading into screwball comedy shading into noir suspense, more Brechtian than Brecht himself. Shadows creep into madcap romance, the honeymooners' tour of foreign restaurants ends under the gaze of the sinister underworld honcho (Barton MacLane). "The Right Guy for Me" out of Die Dreigroschenoper, "Stick to the Mob" with incantatory stir-crazy nostalgia and stupefying sound-image experiments. The Lang grip, tender and savage: Raft and Sidney lovingly, furtively touch hands on opposite sides of an escalator, before that the villain grinds his heel on the fingers of the comic galoot (Warren Hymer). Gangsterism and capitalism, just a matter of "adding up in dollars and cents," the heroine calculates it on a blackboard while hoods sit amid toys. Even redemption comes with a price tag. With Robert Cummings, Roscoe Karns, George E. Stone, Adrian Morris, Roger Gray, Cecil Cunningham, Guinn Williams, and Vera Gordon. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |