The Criminal Code

Howard Hawks has a marvelous foretaste of His Girl Friday to set the thing up, a couple of police officers squabbling over a game of cards as they move from station to car ride to scene of the crime at a nightclub, the case of "a rotten break" ensues. The culprit is a bewildered youth (Phillips Holmes), the district attorney (Walter Huston) has eyes on the governor's chair and the criminal code for his Bible. "Open and shut, eh?" "Like a knife." The grind of prison life provides the most suffocating version of the director's communal voids, a bit of checkers in the face of tragic news points up the intensity of his sangfroid (cf. Only Angels Have Wings). The penitentiary fills with rhythmic hissing to welcome Huston as new warden, he quells it by calmly lighting a cigar and strolling into the yard to stare down a hundred or so irate convicts. Bluff and vendetta for years, romance with the keeper's daughter (Constance Cummings) as part of a continuous process of breaking and mending, so it goes in "the other half of the world." Darkness illuminated by gunfire in Hawks' big house, a wry draft for the Scarface view. The centerpiece is the slaughter of a stoolie in the midst of a riot—he trembles indoors and who lurches in but Boris Karloff with shiv in hand, the deed is superbly sculptured with the killer's wide and hard back to the camera. (Bogdanovich pays explicit tribute in Targets, Losey a more oblique one in The Criminal.) The folly of escape, the shaving gag like a Beckett verse, the appointment kept at last. "Well, I guess that's one thing the law doesn't cover." Dassin, Siegel and Becker do extensive work on it in following decades. With DeWitt Jennings, Mary Doran, Clark Marshall, Ethel Wales, Arthur Hoyt, Paul Porcasi, and Andy Devine. In black and white.