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"The Borgias in Chicago" is the famous joke, told with tremendous sardonic vehemence. A bit of Murnau gets things rolling, the camera tilts down from a streetlamp and sweeps into the jungle of streamers in an after-hours nightclub, the old kingpin is liquidated by a whistling silhouette. A choice close-up at the barbershop unwraps the killer on the rise, Paul Muni embodies him magnificently between Mamoulian's Mr. Hyde and King Kong. "You sure are a funny mixture, Tony." He seizes the throne from his boss (Osgood Perkins) along with the coolly perverse wisecracker (Karen Morley), his true passion is for the baby vamp at home, the little sister (incandescent Ann Dvorak) he's too stupid to realize he's lusting after. "The world is yours," the neon sign says so, to rule it is a screwball high captured by Howard Hawks in a scalding American snapshot. A match struck on the tin star and a spittoon thrown through the "gentlemen's club" window, a surplus of terse invention in a steady stream of geometric shots. "A cross of white carnations" announces the gangland war, a survivor is visited at the hospital with bouquets and bullets. ("X" marks the bloody spot in the symphony of rattling guns and screeching cars, scattered like Franz Kline slashes.) Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles is roughly concurrent, Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a decade away, Miss Sadie Thompson gets a rave from the hoodlum who has to leave during intermission for a rubout. George Raft's lethal sleepiness with his coin flip, Boris Karloff's metamorphosis into the spinning bowling pin, Vince Barnett's dumb-cluck stare and grudge against telephones—forms as vivid as Chester Gould's, or Quentin Matsys'. "Do it first, do it yourself, and keep doin' it." Last stand in the fortress-apartment (Carné's Le Jour se Lève), then on to the genre detonation of Walsh's White Heat. Cinematography by Lee Garmes. With C. Henry Gordon, Purnell Pratt, Tully Marshall, Inez Palange and Edwin Maxwell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |