The River's Edge (Allan Dwan, 1957)

Debra Paget and Anthony Quinn in The River's Edge 

Cast: Ray Milland, Anthony Quinn, Debra Paget, Harry Carey Jr., Chubby Johnson, Byron Foulger, Tom McKee, Frank Gerstle. Screenplay: Harold Jacob Smith, James Leicester, based on a story by Smith. Cinematography: Harold Lipstein. Production design: Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: James Leicester. Music: Louis Forbes. 

I don't know whether it says more about the movie or about me that I didn't realize until well into the story began to unfold that I had seen The River's Edge before, and then only after a couple of moments of déjà vu. At first I shook off the feeling by telling myself there was nothing original about the noirish story being told: a criminal seeking out his old girlfriend and persuading her and her husband to aid him in a new scheme. You'd think that the presence of two Oscar-winning actors and a sexy actress who was one of my boyhood crushes would have kept the movie fresher in my memory. But there's really nothing  memorable enough about the film to have made it stay with me, other than Debra Paget in shorts. Ray Milland and Anthony Quinn are predictably good in their performances, and there's some handsome scenery filmed along the California-Mexico border (sometimes not blending well with the fake outdoor sets shot in the studio). And Allan Dwan always directed as if the material were first-rate. But I have the feeling that I'll forget The River's Edge again, and maybe wind up watching it again some day. 

Frontier Marshal (Allan Dwan, 1939)

Cesar Romero and Nancy Kelly in Frontier Marshal

Cast: Randolph Scott, Nancy Kelly, Cesar Romero, Binnie Barnes, John Carradine, Edward Norris, Eddie Foy Jr., Ward Bond, Lon Chaney Jr., Chris-Pin Martin, Joe Sawyer. Screenplay: Sam Hellman, based on a book by Stuart N. Lake. Cinematography: Charles G. Clarke. Art direction: Lewis H. Creber, Richard Day. Film editing: Fred Allen. Music: Samuel Kaylin, Charles Maxwell, David Raksin, Walter Scharf.

The title Frontier Marshal sounds like a generic Western, and it doesn't lie. It's about a stranger who comes to a lawless mining town and cleans it up with his fists and his guns. The stranger, played by Randolph Scott, is Wyatt Earp, and the movie is based on Stuart N. Lake's heavily fictionalized 1931 biography of Earp that established his legend as the man who cleaned up Tombstone by fighting it out with the bad guys at the OK Corral. So yes, you've seen it all before, in later and more celebrated films like John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and John Sturges's Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957). Allan Dwan's film (from which Ford borrowed liberally) is a more modest affair. The famous gunfight in the movie  is almost over before it starts. Nor is Scott's Earp a particularly mythic figure; he even gets seriously beat up before he's able to seize authority in the town. If there's a mythic figure in Frontier Marshal it's Doc Halliday*, played with surprising charm and finesse by Cesar Romero. The character of Earp is also overshadowed by two women: Jerry (Binnie Barnes), a tough-as-nails dance hall hostess, and Sarah (Nancy Kelly), a nurse who has followed her former lover, Doc, to Tombstone, trying to save him from himself. Refreshingly, the two women are given significant agency in the movie, beyond just battling for Doc's affections. What distinguishes Dwan as a director is that he never seems to take for granted the material he's given to work with. Yes, Frontier Marshal is generic and predictable, but Dwan doesn't condescend to it: He gives the scenes snap and vigor, and he gets performances that are in some ways better than they're written. Barnes, for example, turns Jerry into a force to be reckoned with. It took me a moment to recognize her as the same actress who played the snooty Linda Cram in Holiday (George Cukor, 1938). Kelly's Sarah isn't the pallid schoolmarm played by Cathy Downs in My Darling Clementine, but a woman out to get her man. And if Romero, usually a lounge lizard type, ever gave a better performance I haven't seen it. I could have done with less of Eddie Foy Jr., clownishly playing his own father, and Chris-Pin Martin's milking of the stereotypical Chicano bartender role, but they keep the film lively. Scott is less memorable than the other players, but he provides a quiet stability to the film. 

Usually spelled "Holliday," but the alternate spelling was used, reportedly because of concern about litigation from the Holliday family. 

One Mile From Heaven (Allan Dwan, 1937)

Joan Carroll and Bill Robinson in One Mile From Heaven

Cast: Claire Trevor, Sally Blane, Douglas Fowley, Fredi Washington, Bill Robinson, Joan Carroll, Ralf Harolde, John Eldredge, Paul McVey, Ray Walker, Russell Hopton, Chick Chandler, Eddie Anderson, Howard HIckman. Screenplay: Robin Harris, Alfred Golden, Lou Breslow, John Patrick, based on a story by Ben B. Lindsey. Cinematography: Sidney Wagner. Art direction: Bernard Herzbrun. Film editing: Fred Allen. Music: Samuel Kaylin.

In One Mile From Heaven, a reporter happens upon a Black woman who is raising a white child and says that the little girl is her own daughter. The reporter immediately sees it as a hot news item. It's an odd and distasteful premise for a movie, especially if, as in this case, the child is happy, well cared-for, and loves her mother, who's entirely capable of raising her. It's the mere fact of the racial disparity that sets Lucy Warren (Claire Trevor) on the course of exposing the relationship of Flora Jackson (Fredi Washington) and her putative daughter, Sunny (Joan Carroll), leading to the discovery of Sunny's birth mother, the wealthy (and white) Barbara Harrison (Sally Blane). It winds up with what's supposed to be a happy ending. That the movie is played as a sentimental comedy laced with musical numbers supplied by a tap-dancing Black policeman (Bill Robinson) only makes it seem odder. It could, after all, have been an indictment of nosy journalism, or a story of racial injustice, but instead it's a grab-bag of movie tropes, including a press room filled with anything-for-a-scoop reporters straight out of The Front Page (Lewis Milestone, 1931), and a thwarted prison escape that comes out of nowhere and has only a tangential relationship to the main plot. Allan Dwan handles all of this with his usual finesse, but is never quite able to make a coherent film out of it. This was Washington's last film before she retired from acting and devoted her life to civil rights activism. The movie, based on an actual case in Denver, serves as evidence why that activism was needed. 

High Tension (Allan Dwan, 1936)

Brian Donlevy and Glenda Farrell in High Tension

Cast: Brian Donlevy, Glenda Farrell, Norman Foster, Helen Wood, Robert McWade, Theodore von Eltz, Romaine Callender, Hattie McDaniel, Joe Sawyer, Murray Alper. Screenplay: Lou Breslau, Edward Eliscu, John Patrick, J. Robert Bren, Norman Houston. Cinematography: Barney McGill. Art direction: Duncan Cramer. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. 

High Tension is a lively little action comedy that comes in at 63 minutes, just right for the bottom half of a double feature. Brian Donlevy has the boisterous role of Steve Reardon, an underwater engineer for a transoceanic cable company who unwinds from his stressful job by getting drunk, telling tall tales of his undersea adventures, getting into fights, and messing around with his girlfriend, Edith McNeil (Glenda Farrell). It's a little hard to see why she puts up with Steve, let alone wants to marry him, except that she makes a good living writing pulp fiction based on those tall tales. Allan Dwan sets a nice pace for the movie, which puts Steve into a couple of knock-down, drag-out fights, one of which involves Steve and his opponent shoving a piano at each other in Edith's apartment. The more important fight, for the sake of the plot, comes when a couple of guys (one of them played by an unbilled Ward Bond) set upon him with the aim of picking his pocket. The movie's second lead, Eddie Mitchell (Norman Foster), manages to save the money that the thugs stole from Steve when he was knocked cold. Steve wakes up the next morning to find himself in bed with Eddie, who took him home for the night. It's the beginning of a beautiful friendship, with whatever homoerotic undertones you might want to find in it. Grateful for Eddie's help, and discovering that he has a degree from Caltech, Steve gets him a job with the company he works for and trains him to be his right hand man. Eventually, all this winds up with a some romantic complications, with Steve, who has broken up with Edith, putting the moves on Eddie's pretty secretary (Helen Wood), whom the shy Eddie secretly loves. And there's a big underwater rescue scene (done pretty much on the cheap) that sets everything straight again. The whole thing is quite watchable, except for the sexist and racist elements that don't go down as well today as they did in the '30s. Steve has to deal with his boss's prissy assistant, F. Willoughby Tuttle (Romaine Callender in a role probably written with Franklin Pangborn in mind), a prime example of the "pansy" stereotype that afflicted movies of the era. And Hattie McDaniel is cast as Edith's maid, unimaginatively named Hattie, a role that McDaniel plays with more sass and vigor than it deserves -- McDaniel was a true professional, and if you can overlook the stereotyping her performance is a delight. 

Black Sheep (Allan Dwan, 1935)

Claire Trevor and Edmund Lowe in Black Sheep

Cast: Edmund Lowe, Claire Trevor, Tom Brown, Eugene Pallette, Adrienne Ames, Herbert Mundin, Ford Sterling, Jed Prouty, Billy Bevan, David Torrence. Screenplay: Allen Rivkin, Allan Dwan. Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller. Art direction: Duncan Cramer. Film editing: Alex Troffey. Music: Oscar Levant. 

Is it because it stars Edmund Lowe and Claire Trevor, and not, say, William Powell and Carole Lombard, that I had never seen Black Sheep before? Because Lowe, a second-string leading man at best, is perfectly fine as the suave but penniless gambler trying to recoup his fortunes on a ship sailing back to the States. And Trevor is delightful as the similarly broke actress going home after failing to make it big on the stage in Europe. Trevor, in fact, is something of a revelation: She's now best known for playing hard-bitten dames like Dallas, who was run out of town by the respectable ladies and put onto the titular vehicle of Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939). And she won an Oscar as the gangster's moll Gaye Dawn in Key Largo (John Huston, 1948). Who knew she had the gift for comedy that she shows in Black Sheep? And it's mostly a comedy, with a melodramatic twist provided by Allan Dwan, who wrote the story for which Allen Rivkin provided some lively dialogue. Lowe's John Francis Dugan and Trevor's Janette Foster team up to save the naïve young Fred Curtis (Tom Brown) from being fleeced by the card sharps Belcher (Eugene Pallette) and Schmelling (Jed Prouty) and by the slinky Millicent Bath (Adrienne Ames). Young Curtis, from a proper Bostonian family, owes Mrs. Bath a large sum, which she uses to blackmail him into helping her smuggle into the States a valuable pearl necklace that she has stolen. It's the usual shipboard intrigue plot we've seen before, played for comedy. But Dwan gives it a turn toward melodrama when Dugan discovers that the young man he's protecting is his own son. (Dwan seems to have borrowed this device from his own movie, East Side, West Side (1927), which likewise involves a father being separated from his son by a snooty family.) But it's mostly a comedy with some sharp repartee and a gallery of supporting actors like Pallette and Prouty, Herbert Mundin as a man in top hat and tails who's so drunk he doesn't know where he is or even who he is, and Ford Sterling as Mather, the shipboard detective who's Dugan's nemesis. There's also a sappy song, "In Other Words, I'm in Love," with lyrics by Sidney Clare and music by Oscar Levant, sung sappily by Dick Webster, which doesn't bear mentioning except that Levant's Gershwinesque music also serves as the film's score. 

East Side, West Side (Allan Dwan, 1927)

Holmes Herbert, June Collyer, and George O'Brien in East Side, West Side

 
Cast: George O'Brien, Virginia Valli, Holmes Herbert, J. Farrell MacDonald, Frank Allworth, June Collyer, John Miltern, Dore Davidson, Sonia Nodell, Frank Dodge, Dan Wolheim, William Frederic, Jean Armour. Screenplay: Allan Dwan, based on a novel by Felix Riesenberg. Cinematography: Theodore J. Pahle, George Webber. 

In Allan Dwan's silent East Side, West Side, big, likable George O'Brien plays big, likable John Breen, a naïf in the city. O'Brien also played a naïf in the city in his other big film of 1927, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Murnau's film is an acknowledged masterpiece and Dwan's isn't, though Sunrise is melodrama striving to be art, whereas East Side, West is unabashed melodrama, rags to riches, interrupted romances, secret parentage, self-sacrificing heroism, sneaking villainy, happy ending and so on. Somehow Dwan manages to stuff all that, plus a subway cave-in and a sinking passenger liner, into a tidy 90 minutes. It all begins with O'Brien's Breen looking at the Manhattan skyline from the barge he lives on with his mother and stepfather, and longing to be part of it all. He gets his wish, sort of, when the barge is swamped by a passing ship and his parents drown. He swims to shore and hides out in the cellar of the Lipvitch family's home. They take him in and put him to work assisting Papa Lipvitch in the tailor shop, and he begins a shy flirtation with the Lipvitch daughter, Becka (Virginia Valli). A suitor for Becka's hand, known as Flash (Frank Allworth), spots Breen's talent for fisticuffs and helps him get a start as a prizefighter. When he begins to make a name for himself, he catches the attention of the wealthy developer Gilbert Van Horn (Holmes Herbert), who soon recognizes that Breen is his long-lost son -- he was forced to annul his marriage to Breen's mother, who decided never to tell her son about his father. Uncertain whether to reveal the truth to Breen, Van Horn asks Breen what he would do if he ever met his father: "I'd kill him!" Breen replies. (The italics are in the title card.) Van Horn decides to keep the secret, but he takes Breen in and tries to fulfill his desire to become a builder in the city he loves. He also introduces him to his pretty ward, Josephine (June Collyer), setting up a rivalry with Becka. Dwan never wastes time putting all this plot into place, which proceeds as you might expect, the story flavored with evocative shots of the city. The film touches only lightly on the ethnic character of the East Side: The Irish are seen as pugnacious and clannish, and the Lipvitches are obviously meant to be Jewish. There's some stereotyping in the penny-pinching character of Papa Lipvitch (Dore Davidson), but the issue of intermarriage is never raised in the case of Becka and Breen. East Side, West Side is the only silent film in the Criterion Channel's retrospective of Allan Dwan's work, but it makes me wish there were more.