They Drive By Night

Director Raoul Walsh

Humphrey Bogart

Ann Sheridan and George Raft

Ida Lupino

The line stretches around the block

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT                    B                                                                                USA  (95 mi)  1940 d:  Raoul Walsh

In the best films of Raoul Walsh, you can see the way he can put people into action . . .             where they don’t act but move and express, indirectly, subconsciously, their experience of life.                        What makes something happen?                                                                                                    The placement of the camera                                                                                                        The angle                                                                                                                                        The lens.                                                                                                                                        The distance of the camera from the scene.                                                                                The physical execution.

—Pierre Rissient, written lead-in inscription of Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood's Legendary Director (494 pages), by Marilyn Ann Moss, 2011

Despite being one of Warner Brothers most popular films of the early 40’s, it’s notable for Humphrey Bogart getting 4th billing, the last time that would happen, as he would go on to become the most popular Hollywood star not only of the 40’s, but by the end of the century the American Film Institute will vote him the greatest male movie star of all time (AFI's 100 YEARS…100 STARS | American Film Institute).  For that reason alone this film is a curiosity, also notable for being the first film made about the trucking business, viewed through a working class lens, a product of the hardships of the Depression, with wildcat truckers working for corrupt bosses that would cheat them out of wages and exploit their services, causing them to take enormous chances on the road, all suffering from sleep deprivation, barely ever setting foot in their own homes, constantly hauling produce up and down the coast of California, basically shifting a railroad economy to the highway, where farmers suffering foreclosures took to the road hauling the produce they once grew, one of the few viable alternatives for income.  Largely based upon the first novel of A. I. Bezzerides entitled The Long Haul in 1938, Bezzerides is perhaps best known for writing Jules Dassin’s THIEVES HIGHWAY (1949) and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), while also co-writing Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1952) and William Wellman’s TRACK OF THE CAT (1954).  This story is based upon his own experience growing up as a truck driver in California’s San Joaquin Valley, transporting fruit from grower to seller, going to the market to buy produce, where haggling over prices was routine, often victimized by packing houses blatantly undermining their prices, sowing the seeds of dissension among the ranks while painting an acute portrait of the cutthroat tactics of capitalism, becoming an uncondescending and largely unsentimental view of the working class.  The camaraderie between the truckers is firmly established, each trying to make a meager living, sharing work experiences, all in the same boat, all equally exploited (“always honest and always broke”), recognizing familiar faces, meeting at various roadside diners, scrupulously avoiding the loan sharks trying to repossess their trucks for a single missed payment, each having the same dream of one day owning their own truck and going independent.  While certainly the model for later trucker films like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur) (1953), this elusive, underlying theme of freedom on the road is part of the American landscape, most notably Jack Kerouac’s generation defining 1957 novel On the Road, perhaps most prominently expressed in counterculture youth pictures like Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), and Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), where freedom is always viewed as something undefinable that lies just over the horizon and is not easily attainable.  While those films ushered in an era of existential anti-heroes, Raoul Walsh retains the traditional format of heroic protagonist pursuing the American Dream, who in this film is George Raft as Joe, one of the two Fabrini brothers, the other being Paul (Humphrey Bogart), almost always on the road together with one driving while the other sleeps. 

Joe is the steadier of the two, the one with vision and a business acumen, living by his own credo “We’re tougher than any truck ever come off any assembly line,” while Paul incessantly complains about never being able to spend time with his wife Pearl (Gale Page), who in turn worries about him never being at home, gone for days on end, wishing he’d find a more conventional job where he’d come home every night.  While Paul may also want the same thing, he’s not going to leave his brother to fend for himself, particularly when there’s a chance they could get out from under their debt and actually start to make real money.  Early in the film the brothers suffer a mishap when some idiot ahead has veered into their lane, causing them to skid off the road, breaking a wheel.  Calling their boss from a nearby diner, asking him to wire money for repairs, the boss has other ideas, sending another driver to pick up their load, leaving the brothers stranded.  In the diner, however, they run into Cassie Hartley (Ann Sheridan) behind the counter, who is fending off men’s hands and leers and objectionable comments with apparent ease, a continuing example of the 30’s screwball comedy where a neverending stream of one-liners establishes the brisk pace of the film, while also introducing a complement of familiar truckers, including the overly friendly Irish (Roscoe Karns) and the sleep deprived McNamara (John Litel), a bit grumpy, ill at ease, as he’s obviously overworked, filling himself with coffee to no effect.  Joe is impressed by the way Cassie handles herself, taking a liking to her right away, but to her, he’s just another man to fend off.  After fixing their wheel, disgruntled that their load has been stolen from them by their own boss, they head back to San Francisco to settle the score, basically manhandling their boss for unpaid wages before heading to Los Angeles with another load, picking up a hitchhiker in the rain, none other than Cassie, whose own boss couldn’t keep his hands off her, so they all head to Los Angeles in seek of a brighter future, stopping at another familiar roadside diner where truckers seem to congregate.  In a driving rain, the brothers notice a familiar truck in front of them veering all over the road, McNamara, concluding he’s asleep at the wheel, trying to pull around to wake him up, but the truck crashes around a turn, tumbling down a steep embankment, eventually erupting in flames, killing both drivers inside.  Devastated by what they see, Paul is dropped off with his wife while the other two find a room together in LA, the beginning signs of a budding relationship, with Joe getting into a scrap with another driver, which impresses Ed Carlsen (Alan Hale), a longtime friend, whose wife Lana (Ida Lupino) takes more than a casual interest in Joe, suggesting they have history together, but Joe deflects her interest, steered into a lucrative load by Ed, picking his brother up along the way, making a handsome profit, even enough money to pay off the loan shark, finally starting to establish themselves.  But on the return trip Paul falls asleep at the wheel, losing an arm in the crash (sequence shot by Don Siegel), but their uninsured rig is totaled.  At the hospital, Pearl strangely finds the accident fortunate, as it will finally keep her husband at home, thinking it’s a small price to pay. 

Paul grows bitter at being treated as a charity case, yet Joe provides for all his needs, given a new job opportunity by Ed, who initially wanted to hire him as a driver, but his conniving wife convinces him he needs to hire him as a garage manager, selfishly allowing her more time with him, a decision with drastic consequences.  Lana undermines their marriage at every turn, hating her husband’s drinking habits and his interest in sharing his success with the drivers, enjoying their camaraderie more than the ice-cold looks he gets from his wife, who is viewed as a social climber, marrying for money and the prestige it brings, showing no interest whatsoever in her husband, fawning over Joe every chance she gets.  As for Raft, his portrayal of Joe is a little too saintly, too nice of a guy, hardly representative of someone from Hell’s Kitchen who grew up in the school of hard knocks, friends with mobster Dutch Schultz and a driver for childhood friend Owney Madden, delivering bootleg liquor during Prohibition.  His character has few rough edges, overly cleaned up, where he’s just too squeaky clean.  When Ed gets inebriated at a party, Lana drives him home, concocting a plan to leave him in the garage all night with the engine running, deftly conveying the mood almost entirely through her eyes, showing a melodramatic sign of remorse for the police, who call it an accidental death.  Enlisting Joe as a partner, he’s initially suspicious, knowing her real motives, but it’s a great business opportunity if they can keep it strictly business.  Moving Paul into a dispatcher position, the business thrives beyond their wildest dreams, with Joe and Cassie finally having the money to get married, a decision that leaves Lana devastated, as if punched in the gut, suddenly seeing all her scheming plans flying out the window, so she returns to the police claiming Joe forced her into murdering her husband, that he forcefully overwhelmed her and intimidated her.  Ida Lupino turns her into one of the most vile and wretched characters to ever grace the screen, synonymous with the lies and betrayals of a murderous Lady Macbeth who could never wash the blood off her hands, consumed by guilt and plagued by madness (You know the saying – Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned), she delivers a ballsy, off-the-wall, tour de force performance with exploding fireworks everywhere, like a walking time bomb that could detonate anytime.  Her erratic behavior starts slowly but builds to a climactic courtroom scene where she grows hysterical, spewing utter nonsense, creating a courtroom climate of utter chaos.  Before they can regain their collective breaths, all charges are dropped, with Lana sent to the funny farm.  Borrowing heavily from Archie Mayo’s BORDERTOWN (1935), there are similar plot points that seem fused into this picture (recycling scripts is a Hollywood studio tradition), feeling overly contrived, where the spontaneous freshness in the early dialogue sequences is replaced by a grim, overwrought melodrama that leads to a conventional ending.  Surprisingly, it’s the women who exhibit a hard edge in this picture, driving the storyline into even darker territory, with the men resorting to more conventional Hollywood caricature.  It was the final picture featuring Raft as a headliner star, soon to be replaced by Bogart, literally, as Raft turned down roles made famous by Bogart in his very next picture, HIGH SIERRA (1941), working again with Raoul Walsh, then again in THE MALTESE FALCOLN (1941) and CASABLANCA (1942), astonishing opportunities that made Bogart a star.  Raft even turned down the lead role in Billy Wilder’s fabulously successful Double Indemnity (1944), ushering in an era of film noir in American film.  Bogart’s success allowed Warners to let Raft walk away from his contract, but his career as a freelancer never blossomed. 

Wild Girl

WILD GIRL        B+              

USA  (78 mi)  1932  d:  Raoul Walsh

This is actually a remake of several earlier Silent film versions, all based on the 1898 Bret Harte novella Salomy Jane’s Kiss, from William Nigh and Lucius Henderson’s SALOMY JANE (1914) starring Beatriz Michelena, and George Melford’s SALOMY JANE (1923) starring Jacquelyn Logan, to this early 1932 Pre-Code Raoul Walsh version starring Joan Bennett, where all three versions are adapted from Paul Armstrong’s 1907 four-act stage version called Salomy Jane.  Set out West after the Civil War during the mid 19th century, it takes place entirely in the redwood forests of California’s Sequoia National Park, a supremely beautiful location that only adds a unique element to this film.  Walsh grew up in New York City as childhood friends with John Barrymore, becoming an actor for the stage and screen before being hired by D.W. Griffith, working as his assistant director while also playing John Wilkes Booth in Griffith’s racially controversial but also highly influential epic film THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), the first film to ever be shown in the White House under Woodrow Wilson.  Walsh lost an eye in a car accident while making the film IN OLD ARIZONA (1928), where actor Warner Baxter went on to win the Best Supporting actor in the part Walsh intended to play, effectively ending Walsh’s acting career, but he wore an eye patch for the rest of his life while still directing well over 100 feature-length films.  Walsh discovered Marion Morrison, an unknown prop boy at the time working on THE BIG TRAIL (1930), turning him into the star of his film while also changing his name to John Wayne, after Revolutionary War General Mad Anthony Wayne, who happened to be the subject of a book the director was reading.  Walsh became known as one of the most competent craftsmen during the heyday of the studio system, specializing in adventure stories, a director who knew how to utilize outdoor locations and drive the action through pace, composition, and editing sequences, becoming a classical Hollywood filmmaker. 

This early talking film shows how effortlessly Walsh made the transition from Silent to talking pictures, using the opening credit sequence with photograph album photos introducing the cast, but the characters come to life on camera humorously introducing some little tidbit about their character, “I'm Salomy Jane, and I like trees better than men, because trees are straight,” a clever and charmingly amusing aural and visual cue that not only introduces sound, but enhances the audience’s appreciation for the cast even before the movie begins.  Another clever device is an optical page-turning effect, where each transitional dissolve into the next scene is a rarely used technique reinforcing the storybook aspect of the movie.  And the opening of this film is a true delight, somewhat dated with a black Mammy character, but there’s never the least inference of bias or mistreatment, as she becomes the mother figure, best friend, and playmate of Salomy Jane, Joan Bennett as a feisty young frontier woman who is something of a tomboy in perfect harmony with the natural world around her, at home among the trees, the creatures in the woods, and playing with little children.  When she sees the stagecoach arriving, she waves to the driver before running home through the woods, grabbing Louise Beavers as Mammy, where the two have to fend off a half a dozen or more live bears en route, which is a dazzlingly filmed sequence as they are all in the same frame together, no computer graphics, making this a most impressive opening.  Eugene Pallette as stagecoach driver Yuba Bill is another revelation, as he’s a hearty old soul who loves to tell stories, something of a Shakespearean Falstaff character with his rotund girth, his gift for gab, his embellishments of stories making him the true hero, and of course, his ultimate cowardliness.  Again, when making the transition to talking pictures, it helps to have such a natural born raconteur and scene stealer who is as thoroughly entertaining as Pallette, who eventually became too physically large for screen roles, building a secondary career just doing voice effects.  His best scene here is when he describes a conversation between horses, using hysterical voice inflections to describe the different animal’s sound as well as their intentions.  If that’s not inventive enough, Bennett, alone in her element, even goes skinny-dipping in the river showing her bare backside where of course she’s discovered by someone she knows only as Man, continually calling him that until the final frame of the film, turning out to be Billy, aka the Stranger (Charles Farrell), who in the opening credit sequence indicates he fought with Robert E. Lee.   

A stranger in the midst is enough to arouse people’s suspicions, as it matches the unusual occurrence of the stage getting robbed, so the sheriff rounds up a group of men folk to hang by a tree whoever the culprit is before the night is done.  That’s quick and efficient justice in this outland Western frontier.  And if that’s not enough trouble, Jane is constantly pursued by an assemblage of men competing for her affections, including card shark Jack Marbury (Ralph Bellamy), the man in black always seen curling his waxed moustache, or a contemptible swine Rufe Waters (Irving Pichel) who believes he has an early claim on her, or an overly pious man running for Mayor who secretly molests women, Phineas Baldwin (Morgan Wallace), none of whom really catch her interest.  But when she hears the handsome Stranger tracked down Baldwin and shoots him on the spot, settling an old score, apparently from Kentucky, where the two are seen running over rooftops, she develops a sudden attraction for the man.  So the sheriff adds another noose for his double lynching of a stage robber (the poorest man in town) and a murderer (a stranger), which sends Jane into a swooning depression, only to later find a renewed sense of optimism.  Walsh evidently witnessed an actual lynching as a child, adding some degree of authenticity to this sequence, beautifully shot with quick edits and offscreen sound, with the shadow of the hanged man all that’s seen on the ground, a chillingly effective moment in what is otherwise a rather humorous tale, told with a tongue-in-cheek style from the outset, using plenty of exaggeration and understatement mixed together, almost as if the audience is being told a bedtime story, as in subsequent tellings other aspects might be emphasized.  It’s all blended together with a deft hand and a unique mystique, where the simplest of stories is the least of our interest, but the embellishment of the redwoods, the calm and collected Stranger, a man with few words, the joyous energy of Jane, who is the picture of innocence, yet strong-willed and independent enough to stand up to any man, and the mystifyingly beautiful natural setting is an authentic natural treasure.  The enchanting tone gives this an upbeat feel throughout, even when real human issues are addressed like starving, poverty, vengeance as justice, or crime and punishment are ultimately addressed, giving this a mythical feel of living in Divine Eden, a perfect, picturesque world, where early signs of civilization are the purest forms of human expression, where sin is seen as violating the laws of nature, not God or the laws of man, making this something of a Pantheist western.

Simon Killer

SIMON KILLER         No Rating

USA  (105 mi)  2012  d:  Antonio Campos

An American film set in Paris, the follow up to AFTERSCHOOL (2008), where the print received did *NOT* have French subtitles, due to an error on the part of the filmmaker who sent the wrong copy of his film.  As more than half the film is in French, this is a major liability, so much so that the film cannot even be graded or reviewed.  While the film has a strong stylistic sense, once more favoring long shots, this time following the lead character walking down the crowded streets of Paris instead of following students in his last film through the interior school hallways, where the victims of his stalking can be seen just out of focus.  Lead actor Brady Corbet is excellent as Simon, a professional liar, con man, stalker, and psycho killer, just an all around stand up guy who like Cagney in White Heat (1949), is a psychopath with mother issues.  While he continually blends into the surface, finding ways to con his way into people’s lives, his violent meltdowns have a humorous flavor. 

The look of the film, shot by Joe Anderson who was assistant camera in the last film, is terrific, while the aggressive music is even better, showing an edgy side of this character where females seem drawn to him.  As this is a tense and suspenseful psychological thriller, much of what’s left out are the interior thoughts and psychological motivations of the characters, absolutely essential in a film like this.  Much of the violent action happens just offscreen, where instead plenty of sex is shown, as this character seems to have a rabid sexual appetite, where most of the film is, in fact, hopping from bed to bed.  But there are other threatening gestures, blackmail for instance, that make no sense without clarifying subtitles, also the backstories of several of the characters are missing.  One of the film’s highlights, however, is hearing Simon explain on several occasions what he studied in school.  Without understanding most of the dialogue, this instead plays out much like Godard’s intentionally left untranslated American version of his latest movie Film Socialisme (2010), as too much of what’s needed is left incomprehensible.  In Godard’s case that was intentional, while here it’s more of an unintentional slip up. 

White Heat

WHITE HEAT           B                       

USA  (113 mi)  1949  d:  Raoul Walsh

They think they got Cody Jarrett…they haven’t got Cody Jarrett.

—Cody Jarrett (James Cagney), just before his inevitable demise                     

By the late 1940’s, James Cagney was sick of making gangster movies like THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931), ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES (1938), and THE ROARING TWENTIES (1939), films that made him a star, but also typecast him as a tough guy, where he begged Warner Brothers to offer him more variety in his roles, the most successful of which was, of course, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942), where his range as a song and dance man and American composer was utterly remarkable.  But his career floundered after that, making only four films between 1943 and 1948, so by 1949 he had a new contract at Warners and a commitment to make yet another gangster movie, but this time he hadn’t played a gangster in over a decade and he was 50 years old.  With that in mind, they created an iconic role in WHITE HEAT that will forever be associated with him, Cody Jarrett, an outlaw every bit as ruthless as the characters he portrayed earlier, but also energetic and humorous, perhaps a bit savvier, though he’s more of a savage brute here, a seriously disturbed criminal, a deranged psychopath with a mother complex and debilitating fits from migraine headaches, the predecessor to Hitchcock’s Norman Bates in PSYCHO (1960).  While poverty was the driving force behind criminal behavior during the Depression of the 1930’s, with gangleader Cody Jarrett it’s a massive ego and a feeling of invincibility.  He’s indifferent to the needs of anybody else except himself and his mother, Ma Jarrett, Margaret Wycherly, who played Gary Cooper’s saintly mother in SERGEANT YORK (1941), the only person Cody can rely upon and trust.  Loosely based on the life of Ma Barker and her boys, another outlaw gang that gripped the American public during the 30’s, Ma is hard as nails, but overly protective of her boy, basically running the gang during Cody’s absences, handling the money and giving out orders.  

WHITE HEAT is designed to be the last of the gangster pictures, the end of an era when career criminals could generate any public sympathy, where instead they are seen as disturbed, antisocial sociopaths living on the fringe of society, where policework was becoming more in vogue with the public, showing signs of more modern and sophisticated methods that were highly popular with the public, especially with the advent of the television series Dragnet (1951 – 59).  While the late 40’s is the height of film noir, this film is often mis-categorized as noir due to the blatant criminality on display.  Despite the eccentric psychological implications, which are never explored, and the over-the-top performance from Cagney, this is really just a formula gangster picture, where Cody Jarrett is an apocalyptic character already out of step with the times, the last of his era.  Cagney indicated he never told Margaret Wycherly how he intended to play his migraine fits, where even in the film the audience is not sure whether to laugh or cower in fear, as his onscreen behavior was just so unexpected to 1949 audiences.  A childhood friend of John Barrymore in New York City, director Raoul Walsh was probably the most competent craftsman under contract with Warner Brothers, a director who knew how to utilize outdoor locations and drive the action with an unrelentingly fast pace through editing sequences, an example of classical Hollywood filmmaking, including the musical scoring by Max Steiner that never stands out, but matches the mood onscreen.  Even the impressive opening train robbery sequence is a skilled example of setting up the tension by matching the speed of the arriving car (carrying outlaws) with the approaching train (carrying money), where the outlaws, especially Jarrett, are trigger happy, leaving no witnesses.     

The film spends an inordinate amount of time and effort attempting to highlight modern police methods, especially radio tracking technology, not so interesting today as it slows down the pace and removes some of the built-up tension.  Admittedly, some of the side characters never rise above type, including Virginia Mayo as Jarrett’s well dressed but perpetually complaining wife Verna, or Steve Cochrane as Big Ed, the slick haired man supposedly making a bid to take over the gang, or Edmond O’Brien, an undercover cop named Vic Pardo who becomes chummy with fellow inmate Cody Jarrett while in the slammer, trying to get him to reveal information to help build a case against him.  Next to Cagney, O’Brien is really bland and boring, of questionable moral character himself, though there are tense moments when his true police identity might be discovered, but the prison sequences really drag after Jarrett cunningly turns himself in for a lesser crime with the knowledge he’d be out in a year or so.  While there are a few moments, such as an attempt on his life and a memorable prison visit from Ma, who’s intense stubbornness seems to run in the family, it’s her later demise (happening offscreen, discovered by Jarrett through a line of convicts whispering what happened into the ear of the convict sitting next to them at dinner) that leads to a major scene of Cagney having a manic fit on the floor of the prison, taking out half a dozen guards in the process, leading to a departure from the originally planned jailbreak.  Once Jarrett is out, he has to set matters straight, especially with Big Ed and a guy that nearly kills him in prison, an inmate Cody makes sure comes along during the breakout.  As the equilibrium among criminals is being restored, the police obtain the upper hand through Pardo’s ability to tip off the cops and then place a homemade electronic honing device on the truck being used in their next big heist.  What makes this film iconic is the legendary finale, expressed with a kind of psychotic glee rarely seen elsewhere, as Cagney simply operates on another level as everyone else.  When the cops surprise his gang with numbers and chase him up the steps of a fuel refinery storage tank, hopelessly surrounded and wounded but not out of it, it’s his refusal to go out quietly that we all remember.  With flames shooting up all around him before the self-inflicted final blast that has atomic age written all over it, Cagney shouts out to the ghost of his dead mother, “Made it, Ma. Top of the world!”—a fitting epitaph for Cody Jarrett.

This film may suffer from star power, much like John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS (1956), where the audience tends to over-identify with Cagney, despite his murderous, psychopathic tendencies, as they do with John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, a known Indian hater, where it seems hard to believe that when the film was made, Warner Brothers, who produced both films, felt audiences would identify with Edmond O’Brien’s Vic Pardo, thinking he was the hero of the film.  But Pardo’s character is too morally conflicted, as the mere concept of a jailhouse spy is not anyone’s idea of a hero.  Pardo was treated well by Jarrett, and was privy to a more human side of him, as Jarrett actually opened up to him, which makes his double cross all the more demoralizing, especially his escape, where the police actually use excessive force, never even attempting to bring in any of the outlaws alive.  Instead they were all killed, the entire gang, except one fellow inmate who surrenders near the end.  This may be a case of writers and studios thinking so highly of themselves that they actually believe they know better than the public, but audiences loved Cagney and Wayne, where they have become American icons with a longstanding public adulation, where despite their association with violence in pictures, they are beloved family idols where kids at an early age actually look up to them as role models.  This is not to suggest either Cody Jarrett or Ethan Edwards are role models, but kids, especially at an early age, are conflicted over this issue, as onscreen they appear to be the heroes.  They’re the strongest characters onscreen and they always carry the action.  So for kids, if there’s any movie character to emulate, it’s the Cagney or Wayne figure.  Their hateful or murderous tendencies are secondary to the power of their performances, where even for adults, it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer manic energy of Cagney’s Jarrett as he eats a chicken drumstick in one hand while shooting the rat who finked on him in prison with the other.  He’s as entertaining as they come, and his sheer willpower dominates the picture, which is what endears him to audiences even as they know he’s a loathsome psychotic killer who probably deserves the electric chair.