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.

The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931)

James Cagney in The Public Enemy

Cast: James Cagney, Edward Woods, Jean Harlow, Joan Blondell, Donald Cook, Leslie Fenton, Beryl Mercer, Robert Emmett O'Connor, Murray Kinnell, Mae Clarke, Mia Marvin. Screenplay: Kubec Glasmon, John Bright, Harvey F. Thew. Cinematography: Devereaux Jennings. Art direction: Max Parker. Film editing: Edward M. McDermott.

James Cagney has always seemed to me the movies' greatest loner, and the film that made him a star bears that out. The scene that brings it home for me is the one in which Cagney's Tom Powers is hiding out from the rival mob, and the woman named Jane (Mia Marvin) who looks after him gets him drunk and seduces him. In the morning, when he remembers that they had sex, he's shocked and slaps her, then storms out of the hideout. It's a less famous scene than the one in which he shoves a grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face, but that's partly because the scene with Jane was cut by the censors after the Production Code went into effect; it was restored only after the movie made it onto video. The two scenes are similar in suggesting that although Cagney's characters aren't exactly chaste, they don't connect with women except for their mothers, like Beryl Mercer's Ma in The Public Enemy or Margaret Wycherly's Ma Jarrett in White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949). Almost every major leading man of the 1930s and 1940s can be identified with his on-screen teamwork with a leading lady (or two): Cary Grant with Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy likewise, James Stewart with Jean Arthur or Margaret Sullavan, Clark Gable with Jean Harlow or Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper with Barbara Stanwyck or Marlene Dietrich, and so on. But Cagney never struck sparks with any of his leading ladies. He seems too coiled and defensive to give up any part of himself to a woman. In The Public Enemy, he's matched with Harlow, who does her best to thaw him out, but their scenes are not particularly memorable. In his private life, Cagney was notable for having married only once and having stayed married from 1922 till his death in 1986, without rumors of extramarital dalliance, something of an anomaly in Hollywood. The Public Enemy uses this enclosed quality of Cagney's to good effect, and it's a tribute to whoever made the decision to give him the lead -- claimants include director William A. Wellman and producer Darryl F. Zanuck -- after initially casting him in the secondary role of Matt Doyle, played by the now mostly forgotten Edward Woods. It's largely thanks to Cagney that The Public Enemy still hold up today, even though it has some of the stiffness and uncertainty of early talkies, especially when it comes to dialogue. Robert Emmett O'Connor, for example, who plays Paddy Ryan, tends to introduce long pauses between sentences when he's delivering his lines, as if afraid that the audience won't keep up with what he's saying.

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.