The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939)

Gladys George and James Cagney in The Roaring Twenties

Cast: James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Priscilla Lane, Gladys George, Frank McHugh, Jeffrey Lynn, Paul Kelly, Abner Biberman, voice of John Deering. Screenplay: Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay, Robert Rossen, Mark Hellinger. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Max Parker. Film editing: Jack Killifer. Music: Ray Heindorf, Max Roemheld. 

The Roaring Twenties feels like a kind of valedictory to the golden age of Warner Bros. gangster movies, featuring as it does such specialists in the genre as James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and the always welcome tough dame Gladys George. But they're not quite enough to overcome the presence of the inexplicable Priscilla Lane and the charisma-free Jeffrey Lynn, or the dogged hectoring of the voiceover narration. The movie seems out to prove that gangsterism didn't exist before Prohibition and that it disappeared magically once it was repealed. There are some good moments of action, but they're overwhelmed by the repetitions of such tired oldies as "Melancholy Baby" and "It Had to Be You," both on the soundtrack and sung (blandly) by Lane. The story is the old one of three guys who meet in a foxhole in World War I, then have trouble adjusting to civilian life. We know that Bogart's George Hally and Lynn's Lloyd Hart are going to go in opposite directions when, just on the brink of the armistice, Hart holds off on shooting a German he has in his sights because "he looks like a kid, about 15 years old," whereupon Hally picks the German off and sneers, "He won't be 16." Cagney has a more complex role, as Eddie Bartlett, a mechanic who can't find work and gradually shifts into bootlegging, teaming up with Hally, but falling in love with the virtuous Jean Sherman, who eventually marries Hart, now a lawyer. After helping Bartlett with the legal end of his illegal business, Hart goes straight and joins the district attorney's office, leading to threats from Hally to keep him quiet. It's the Cagney-Lane-Lynn love triangle that mostly drags the picture down.

Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra, 1944)

Cary Grant, Raymond Massey, and Peter Lorre in Arsenic and Old Lace

Mortimer Brewster: Cary Grant
Abby Brewster: Josephine Hull
Martha Brewster: Jean Adair
Elaine Harper: Priscilla Lane
Jonathan Brewster: Raymond Massey
Dr. Einstein: Peter Lorre
O'Hara: Jack Carson
Mr. Witherspoon: Edward Everett Horton
Teddy Brewster: John Alexander
Lt. Rooney: James Gleason

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein
Based on a play by Joseph Kesselring
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Art direction: Max Parker
Film editing: Daniel Mandell
Music: Max Steiner

This may be Cary Grant's worst performance. Certainly director Frank Capra put no restraints on Grant's lurching, mugging, groaning, and whinnying as he tries to portray Mortimer Brewster's reaction to the discovery that his beloved maiden aunts have been killing old men and burying him in their basement. But then Capra doesn't bother to restrain anyone else in this too-frantic version of the very popular Broadway farce. It's a film in which nobody listens to anyone else, producing complications that are supposed to be hysterically funny but are just hysterical. The Epstein twins do a fairly good job of adapting Joseph Kesselring's one-set stage play into a slightly opened-out movie -- though some scenes, such as the opening baseball park sequence and the bit at City Hall where Mortimer and Elaine get their wedding license, seem to be staged just for the sake of getting out of the confines of the Brewster house. No one covers themselves with comedy glory here, with the possible exception of Peter Lorre, who remains on the fringes of most of the action, providing a wry, restrained point of view on the nonsense. The film was made in 1941, but was held from release for three years because it couldn't be exhibited before the play had ended its Broadway fun.

Saboteur (Alfred Hitchcock, 1942)

It's heresy to suggest it, but Alfred Hitchcock needed movie stars. It's no accident that some of his most admired films featured Cary Grant, James Stewart, Grace Kelly, and Ingrid Bergman. They seemed to inspire him to do his best work. I don't know if Saboteur would have been a better movie if Hitchcock had got his first choice of leads: Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. But I do know that they would have supplied the kind of charisma and finesse that are sorely lacking in Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane. Cooper and Stanwyck might also have inspired Hitchcock to give the film more than just more than a few now-familiar suspense tricks and one deservedly famous set piece -- the final scene on the torch of the Statue of Liberty. He might have been moved to prod his usually more-than-competent screenwriters -- Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, and Dorothy Parker -- to shape the story into something that makes a little more sense. It's the familiar Hitchcockian "wrong man" premise, one that was done far more skillfully in The 39 Steps (1935), would be improved on in Strangers on a Train (1951), and reach its apotheosis in North by Northwest (1959) -- whose climactic struggle on Mount Rushmore was surely inspired by Saboteur's Statue of Liberty sequence, one national monument standing in for another. Cummings and Lane don't strike any sparks with each other, but they aren't bad considering since they're flung into absurd situations -- his initial flight from prosecution, his encounter with a truck driver and a kindly blind man who are mysteriously motivated to help someone suspected of treason, their rescue by a troupe of circus sideshow performers, their blithely elided cross-country journey, their entrapment in a mansion full of high-society fascists, their perfunctorily treated escape, and the loony decision of the villain (Norman Lloyd) to flee to what amounts to a cul-de-sac, i.e., the Statue. Granted, almost every Hitchcock film can be picked apart on the grounds of plausibility, but he usually does a better job of covering it up. In the end, Saboteur reminds me of his earlier film, Young and Innocent (1937), another movie with charisma-deficient stars and a jury-rigged plot in which the director seems to be trying out things he will accomplish with more skill in his later work.