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The uptight moralizing of the bracketing bulletins ("a problem that sooner or later we, the public, must solve") is marvelously undercut by the rollicking sardonicism of the work itself. A zigzagging tracking shot gives a busy Chicago street in the early 1900s, following pails of booze while taking note of an off-key Salvation Army band. William Wellman pares things down to telling images, thus the hood's childhood as a burly father in a police cap reaching for his belt or the eve of Prohibition as a baby stroller filled with bottles. "The trouble squad," the torpedo (James Cagney) and his pal (Edward Woods) fast up the gangland ladder, stealing furs and slugging speakeasy owners. "Just a baby" to his clueless momma (Beryl Mercer) and "a bashful boy" to his mock-refined mistress (Jean Harlow), though his brother the returning doughboy (Donald Cook) isn't fooled—he glares at the keg on the dinner table and cries the theme out loud, "beer and blood." Cagney the model for Nicholson and Pacino, the panther's grace that dodges a hail of bullets and the grin of a child caught doing something awful. "Why, the dirty, no-good, yellow-bellied stool!" An embodiment of the early Thirties, at once medieval play and modern journalism. The protagonist notices the two-timing fence (Murray Kinnell) at the nightclub and exacts revenge at the mansion, the camera pans from piano to doorway as a pistol is pulled, cf. Reservoir Dogs. Later, Cagney strides through a downpour and into a rival's den, shots and moans are heard from the outside before he stumbles back out and into the gutter, a passage remembered in The Limey. (Other studies include Corman's The St. Valentine's Day Massacre and Leone's Once Upon a Time in America.) The ultimate fall is exactly that, a ground-level view of the bundled corpse's homecoming. With Joan Blondell, Mae Clark, Leslie Fenton, and Robert Emmett O'Connor. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |