|
The quandary is variously reworked down through the decades, cf. Lumet's Night Falls on Manhattan or Gray's We Own the Night. "So it's cops and robbers you're playing today, eh?" The law means the rules of the game, the New York patrolman (Wallace Beery) labors dutifully for the chevrons on his sleeve, his son (Alan Curtis) seeks a vicious shortcut. Out of the academy and gunning down slum kids, "not just a blue suit walking around in the rain." Railroaded to Sing Sing by the local racketeer (Marc Lawrence), the lad reemerges as a mad-dog fugitive with his pregnant Irish wife (Laraine Day) in tow. "Finest mob of chumps that ever fell for a flash line of sob stuff!" Josef von Sternberg rattling inside the MGM machine, dabbing a few proto-noir shadows to the studio's saccharine orderliness. (He modulates Beery's blarney by hooding his eyes under the darkness of a fedora brim, and sardonically lavishes his most elaborate camera movement on a faceless fashion-plate modeling black veils for a grieving moll.) Dream of "a sunrise through satin curtains," reality of sleepless nights in seedy hideouts. A father's dolorous awakening ("I put a gun in the hands of a killer"), an imitation of conformity by a virtuoso of perversity (De Palma's The Untouchables). "There are things in this world that men don't get medals for, and don't want them." At the hospital baited by the birth of the baby, in an alley cornered by the glowering paterfamilias, "great place for a family reunion." Nothing left for the Prodigal but to contrive his own execution, and for Sternberg to exit the antiseptic milieu with a dirty-diaper joke. With Tom Brown, Fay Holden, Marion Martin, David Gorcey, Ben Welden, John Kelly, Horace McMahon, Etta McDaniel, and Neil Fitzgerald. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |