The Crowd Roars (Howard Hawks, 1932)

James Cagney in The Crowd Roars

Joe Greer: James Cagney
Lee Merrick: Ann Dvorak
Anne Scott: Joan Blondell
Eddie Greer: Eric Linden
Spud Connors: Frank McHugh
Pop Greer: Guy Kibbee

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: John Bright, Niven Busch, Kubec Glasmon
Based on a story by Howard Hawks and Seton I. Miller
Cinematography: Sidney Hickox, John Stumar
Film editing: Thomas Pratt

The "Hawksian woman," able to crack wise and exhibit grace under pressure as well as any man, is one of the glories of Hollywood movies. Actresses as various as Katharine Hepburn, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Lauren Bacall, Joanne Dru, and Angie Dickinson held their own with domineering males like Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne, among others. So when I saw that TCM had scheduled a Howard Hawks film I hadn't seen starring James Cagney and Joan Blondell, I thought I knew what I was in for. If anyone could take down a peg the Cagney who became famous for abusing Mae Clarke with half a grapefruit in The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931) it would be Blondell, Warners' likable tough girl. Blondell never got the chance in The Public Enemy, in which she's linked up with Edward Woods instead of Cagney. Well, here's another missed opportunity: Though Blondell gets top billing with Cagney, he's paired off with Ann Dvorak; Blondell gets the forgettable (and forgotten) juvenile Eric Linden instead. And Dvorak's character is no Hawksian woman: Instead of toughing it out with a wisecrack when Cagney's character dumps her, she goes into hysterics. So instead of the witty battle of the sexes we have come to expect from Hawks, in The Crowd Roars we get a passable and sometimes exciting action movie about race car drivers, with a little romantic entanglement thrown in to bridge the well-shot and well-staged racing scenes. Cagney's Joe Greer is a champion race car driver -- he's won at Indianapolis three times -- who goes home to find that his kid brother, Eddie, wants to follow in his footsteps. So Joe takes Eddie back to L.A. with him, where he's been living without benefit of wedlock -- this is a pre-Code film -- with Lee Merrick. Initially he tries to hide his relationship with Lee to protect the younger man's morals -- to "keep him off of booze and women," as he puts it -- but truth will out. When he decides to break up with Lee, she enlists her friend Anne in a revenge plot: Anne will frustrate Joe's puritanical scheme by seducing Eddie. This doesn't work out: Anne and Eddie fall in love. Meanwhile, Joe and Eddie compete in a race in which Joe's sidekick Spud is killed in a flaming crash -- there's a remarkable series of scenes in which drivers, including Joe, drop out of the race because they're nauseated by having to repeatedly pass the crash site with its smell of burning flesh. Eddie wins the race and goes on to become the star driver that Joe was, while Joe hits the bottle and the skids. Redemption and reconciliation of course ensue. None of this is new and all of it is predictable, but Hawks knows how to pump up the action when everything gets soppy. As for the Hawksian woman, she will have to wait until 1934 and Twentieth Century for Carole Lombard to give her the first satisfactory outing.