Blind Alley (Charles Vidor, 1939)

Cast: Chester Morris, Ralph Bellamy, Ann Dvorak, Joan Perry, Melville Cooper, Rose Stradner, John Eldredge, Ann Doran, Marc Lawrence, Stanley Brown, Scotty Beckett, Milburn Stone, Marie Blake. Screenplay: Philip MacDonald, Michael Blankfort, Albert Duffy, based on a play by James Warwick. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Otto Meyer. Music: George Parrish. 

Blind Alley has a familiar setup: a killer on the run from the cops takes a family hostage in their own home. Chester Morris plays the killer, Hal Wilson, who moves in on the Shelby household, whose head is a college professor and psychiatrist played by Ralph Bellamy. Wilson, it turns out, is a psychopath, plagued by a recurrent dream, and Dr. Shelby sees the opportunity to disarm him by using the tools of psychotherapy. It works, sort of, in a rather too simplistic fashion, as the shrink decodes the symbolism of Wilson's dream as a traumatic event from his childhood that the killer has been repressing. The movie is a little stagy, as any adaptation of a play to screen is likely to be, but it's tidy enough in its storytelling that I didn't mind the obvious curtain lines and creaky attempts to "open out" the action -- for example, by visualizing the contents of Wilson's nightmare. It's nice to see Bellamy playing something other than a stooge for Cary Grant, as he did so memorably in The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) and His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1941). Morris is given to chewing the scenery but Ann Dvorak is good as his moll, Mary, who knows how to handle him well enough that Shelby can work his cure. The movie is sometimes cited as one of the first films noir, which only shows how flexible any definition of that genre has to be. 

Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)

Bette Davis, Joan Blondell, and Ann Dvorak in Three on a Match

Cast: Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak, Bette Davis, Warren William, Lyle Talbot, Humphrey Bogart, Allen Jenkins, Edward Arnold, Virginia Davis, Anne Shirley, Betty Carse, Buster Phelps. Screenplay: Lucien Hubbard, Kubec Glasmon, John Bright. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: Ray Curtiss.

This crisply directed and tightly edited Warner Bros. crime movie is almost too snugly put together. It runs for only a little over an hour and still manages to tell a pretty complex story that spans the years from 1919 to 1932 in the lives of three women as they grow from schoolgirls to adults. The "bad girl," Mary Keaton, is first played by Virginia Davis as a tomboy showing off her black bloomers on the monkey bars. She barely graduates from elementary school, then spends time in a reformatory before taking a job as a show girl, played by Joan Blondell. The "rich girl," Vivian Revere, played by Anne Shirley under her first screen name, Dawn O'Day, is a bit of a flirt, who confides in the boys that her bloomers are pink, but doesn't show them off. She grows up to be played by Ann Dvorak as a bored socialite married to Robert Kirkwood (Warren William) with whom she has an adorable (read: cloyingly cute) child (Buster Phelps), but runs off with a ne'er-do-well played by Lyle Talbot, who gets in trouble with the mob, headed by Ace (Edward Arnold) and his enforcer, Harve (Humphrey Bogart). The "smart girl," Ruth Westcott, starts out as the class valedictorian (Betty Carse) and goes to business school. Her story, even though she's played by Bette Davis, is the least interesting of the three. In fact, she seems to be there only to make it possible for the three women to light their cigarettes on one match, setting off the supposed curse on the third to catch the flame, who happens to be Mary. The result is that Dvorak, though her career never took off like that of Blondell or Davis, gets the juiciest part in the film and makes the most of it. Of course, Warners didn't know that Davis would become its biggest star, but anyone who decides to watch Three on a Match thinking it's a "Bette Davis movie" is going to be disappointed. Still, there are worse ways to spend an hour than watching formative moments in the careers of stars like Davis -- or for that matter, Bogart, in one of his first gangster roles.

Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932)

Vince Barnett, Paul Muni, and Karen Morley in Scarface

Tony Camonte: Paul Muni
Cesca Camonte: Ann Dvorak
Poppy: Karen Morley
Guino Rinaldo: George Raft
Angelo: Vince Barnett
Johnny Lovo: Osgood Perkins
Tom Gaffney: Boris Karloff
Inspector Guarino: C. Henry Gordon
Mama Camonte: Inez Palange

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin, W.R. Burnett
Based on a novel by Armitage Trail
Cinematography: Lee Garmes, L. William O'Connell
Set designer: Harry Oliver
Film editing: Edward Curtiss

Like so many early talkies, Scarface feels a little off in its pacing at times, especially in scenes with dialogue, as if the director was uncertain how much of the exposition was getting across to the audience. Which is surprising, considering the director is Howard Hawks, the master of fast-paced repartee. But the real Hawks shows up eventually, especially in the action scenes, and in some brilliant bits, such as the murder of Boris Karloff's Tom Gaffney in the bowling alley. We see Gaffney start to fall after the shot, but the camera follows the track of the ball he has just bowled: It's a strike, but one pin wobbles uncertainly for a second before toppling. François Truffaut commented on the scene, "This isn't literature. It may be dance or poetry. It is certainly cinema." For many, Hawks's Scarface has been overshadowed by Brian De Palma's 1983 version, and its rough contemporaries Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) and The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931), the gangster films that set Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney on their road to fame, shadowed the Hawks film at the time, delaying its release as Hawks and producer Howard Hughes wrangled with the Hays Office censors, who were edgy about the plethora of gangster films. In response to their objections, the film has no fewer than three screens full of text before the movie actually starts, proclaiming that it's "an indictment of gang rule in America and the callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing menace," and exhorting the audience to demand that the government do something about it. Later there are clearly interpolated scenes that suggest some of the things the government can do include gun control and immigration reform or even the imposition of martial law. The film was even released with a subtitle, Scarface: The Shame of a Nation. This heavy-handedness suggests that Hughes had less clout with the Hays Office than did Warner Bros., which didn't jump through quite so many hoops in releasing Little Caesar and The Public Enemy. Nevertheless, Scarface was a box office success, largely because it's a hugely entertaining film, showcasing what may be Paul Muni's best screen performance -- the only other contender would be I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). Muni has a leering, gleeful quality as Tony Camonte; he's almost sexy, which is something that would never be said of the actor after he began to take himself seriously in William Dieterle's stodgy biopic celebrations of Great Men like The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and The Life of Emile Zola (1937). Because Scarface was made before the Production Code clampdown on sex, it's pretty clear what's going on between Tony and Karen Morley's Poppy, but also that Tony's relationship with his sister, Cesca, has a touch of the perverse about it. The film is full of delicious asides, too, like a minor character, a reporter known as "MacArthur from the Journal," a tip of the hat to screenwriter Ben Hecht's former colleague in Chicago journalism, Charles MacArthur, who was also his co-writer on the play The Front Page. The character is played by Hecht and MacArthur's friend John Lee Mahin, one of the screenwriters on Scarface. 

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.