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The opening scene is a pip: The jaunty railroad engineer (Grant Withers) jumps off the freight and into the local greasy spoon, wolfs down breakfast and banters with the waitress while counting the cars chugging outside the window, then dashes off to leap back onto the caboose. William Wellman keeps the inventiveness coming, later he has the lunk ambling and talking with a brassy hash-slinger (Joan Blondell) in an unbroken, reverse tracking shot that concludes with an off-screen raspberry. "Say, why don't you cut out the fly-by-night stuff and settle down?" "Because I can't seem to get all my women together in one place." Kicked out of the boarding house, Withers shacks up with his friend (Regis Toomey) and his wife (Mary Astor), a breezy triangle ("just like kids") until a kiss suddenly rekindles old feelings. The men fight at work, the husband is blinded and the goofball is wrecked with guilt, the river overflows. Hardboiled slang (APO? "Ain't Puttin' Out") and proletarian jocularity, plus a comet in the sidelines—a pre-stardom James Cagney savors a couple of virtuosic bits, chatting on top of a moving train (and casually ducking under an overpass) and then strolling into a dance hall, revealing the tuxedo beneath the greasy overalls, and soft-shoeing across the screen. Arresting flashes of impressionism amid the jokes: A low angle of Toomey stumbling around the tracks turns a stormy night into clashing geometric swaths, the camera slips in and out of focus as it dollies in for a close-up of the final chew aboard the barreling locomotive. "Hog wild, baby, no fooling!" Practically a lost Renoir, and seven years later there's La Bête humaine. With J. Farrell MacDonald, Fred Kohler, Lillian Worth, and Walter Long. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |