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The dream of escape is a closed circle, magnificently noted in the finale as a silent-film iris that's really the scope view of a state trooper's rifle. (Renoir is more hopeful in La Grande Illusion that same year.) The three-time loser (Henry Fonda) returns to the outside world to marry the public defender's secretary (Sylvia Sidney), the prison chaplain (William Gargan) notices a lingering anxiety: "You don't seem happy for a man the gates are about to open for." The newlyweds are kicked out of the motel once the convict's identity is found, he loses his job and contemplates his beloved's photograph and the pistol under the mattress side by side. Bad choices, bad luck, grids everywhere. "And I wanted to go straight..." Following Fury, an even more Germanic view of America by Fritz Lang. (Frogs in the honeymoon suggest a premonition out of Die Nibelungen, and there's a telling appearance by the poisoned cup from Der Müde Tod.) The terrible surrealism of the armored car robbery (gas masks amid smoke bombs) prepares the elided trial for the framed hero, contrasting newspaper headlines (recalled in Citizen Kane) dissolve to the jeering crowd outside the courtroom. "It's fun to see an innocent man die, isn't it?" The new start denied, the last meal postponed, the governor's pardon unheard. Unsettled textures for emotional states—thick fog and wandering searchlights in the prison yard, unending gloom and rain through the getaway sedan's cracked windshield. Childbirth in the forest is merely a pit stop on the fugitive couple's road, to the end mapped by Lang with a fusion of steeliness and delicacy. "We were inside a house once... for a few minutes." They Live by Night, Gun Crazy, Pierrot le Fou, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands... Cinematography by Leon Shamroy. With Barton MacLane, Jean Dixon, Jerome Cowan, Chic Sale, Margaret Hamilton, Warren Hymer, Guinn Williams, John Wray, and Ward Bond. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |