|
From beer to ocean, from metropolis to nature on a speeding buggy, Dashiell Hammett's surrealism at play. Trucks roaring over the camera and the tinkling of bottles at the distillery figure in the opening city symphony, promptly added is the pugnacious refrain ("No hard feelings?") which, followed by a handshake, becomes the kiss of death. Gangland baby (Sylvia Sidney) and naïve cowpoke (Gary Cooper) at the fairgrounds, sharpshooters in love navigating through symbols (crashing waves, caged and stuffed birds, porcelain cats). She's caught disposing of the gun after Dad (Guy Kibbee) bumps off a fellow hoodlum (the police station reappears in Le Doulos), behind bars she vows to leave the racket while outside her beau embraces bootlegging for The Big Fellow (Paul Lukas). "The Law don't look so good when it works both ways!" Rouben Mamoulian's take on American crime is a European one akin to Sternberg's, tough and dreamlike: An underworld party is literally punctured with some nasty business involving a fork (a band playing "Happy Days Are Here Again" summarily covers it up), yet the idea of an unfolding murder measured in the ash of a cigar might be out of Cocteau's Le Sang d'un Poète. The high-angled view of the checkered-floor mansion gives it a de Hooch vantage, the low-angled view of prison walls and windows slants them toward Brutalist architecture. The heroine's inner monologue in the cell elaborates on Hitchcock (Murder!), who elaborates on overlapping close-ups of Cooper and Sidney (dolly-in, dissolve, dolly-out) for the miraculous revelation in The Wrong Man. Quite the wry gangster sonata, with the vengeful moll (Wynne Gibson) and a frenzied pursuit on the edge of the abyss setting the stage for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. With William Boyd, Stanley Fields, Betty Sinclair, and Robert Homans. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |