THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE (Raoul Walsh, 1941)

James Hagan’s 1930 play One Sunday Afternoon, which had been filmed with Gary Cooper in the lead in 1933, became a rollicking entertainment in its second screen incarnation, adapted by Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein, directed by Raoul Walsh and retitled The Strawberry Blonde, with James Cagney now playing “Biff” Grimes. (Following Hagan’s death, Walsh directed a third film version using the original title, but it is the 1941 version that matters.) Dully misinterpreted by some as an endorsement of marital complacency and status quo, or simply as an exercise in nostalgic charm, it is in fact a cunning postmodern satire targeting the false, insidious nature of nostalgia. It and Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), from Booth Tarkington, would make a terrific, compatible double bill.
     New York City in the 1890s; Biff, educated in dentistry through a correspondence course, plots “accidentally” killing with too much gas Hugo Barnstead (Jack Carson, brilliantly funny in the role that made Carson Carson), who “stole” Virginia Brush (Rita Hayworth, acting here—and acting beautifully), the girl whom Biff wanted to marry, and who, as the contractor for whom Biff worked, set up Biff to take the fall for his (Hugo’s) illegal activities, including fatal corner-cutting/money-pocketing, sending Biff to prison for five years, during which time Biff’s wife, “second choice” Amy Lind (Olivia de Havilland, de Havillanding up her role only when Amy herself is de Havillanding it up), remains steadfastly loyal and loving. The film is structured as a flashback as Biff recalls the past eight years, his romances, various betrayals at Hugo’s hands, imprisonment, before returning to the present, where Hugo, at last in Biff’s dental chair, is ripe for murder. However, Hugo’s blatantly unhappy marriage to Virginia saves the day by nearly completing Biff’s education in the School of Hard Knocks. (A running gag throughout consists of Biff’s almost perpetual black eyes.) Biff’s diploma: his realization that he loves wife Amy.
     In Walsh’s film, two currents of nostalgia flow in and out of one another, sometimes combining, at other times contrasting, opposing. Correlative to one are the marvelous old songs that either are sung or are woven into the musical score; here is the harmless nostalgia for earlier popular culture, bits and pieces of the American past that we don’t wish to let go of. (I know my father didn’t!) The other isn’t so harmless; here, it threatens a marriage: “If only Hugo hadn’t beaten me to marrying Virginia Brush!” (I am not going to embarrass myself by explicating her unmarried name in full.) It is the nostalgia of the nonsense, “Things were so much better once upon a time,” that is, in Biff’s case, when Virginia was still available to him (in his imagination only, perhaps) as a potential life-partner. The current since the cancellation of this hope has punctuated Biff’s life with disappointment and regret, intensifying his nostalgia for the “superior” past and combining with other instances of Hugo’s using and duping him, deepening Biff’s disappointment and regret—despite a happy marriage, leaving Biff vaguely miserable because unable wholly to shake off the “what ifs.” If you will, this predicts the “nostalgia” that fueled the post-G.E. personality and, eventually, in the 1980s, pathological presidency of Ronald Wilson Reagan, which convinced many that Reagan could restore “morning” to dark times, that he could make America America again by resurrecting social and political currents that were in fact dangerously, for us in the United States largely fatally, reactionary. Biff must learn that his heart should not be allowed to hanker so for the past.
     It is nonsense that any of this has much, if anything, to do with Virginia’s qualities as a woman, although that may be the springboard for Biff’s sense of education. The script insists that Biff is lucky not to have married Virginia, who indeed may have chosen Hugo because she saw that he was the go-getter between the two young men, the one more likely to provide for her a materially glowing life, but whose own burden of misery has most to do with Hugo’s coldness and inhumanity, the product of his being wedded first and foremost to ambitious capitalism. Hugo moves on from business to politics, exploiting and brutalizing the common man, which Biff represents, in the process. Deep down, don’t we know that that’s what the movie is really about?
     Above all, the whole thing plays so well because of its star, Cagney, who charts persuasively and wonderfully, with great pluck, Biff’s education, which takes him finally out of Hugo’s shadow. Walsh’s tale of two women is also a tale of two men.
     At year’s end, the National Board of Review recognized both Cagney and Carson for their acting in this film.

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WHITE HEAT (Raoul Walsh, 1949)

White Heat, Jimmy Cagney’s return to the gangster genre for the first time in a decade to revive his sagging career, is bookended by blasts of heat: from a steam engine, burning beyond recognition a member whom gang leader Cody Jarrett leaves for dead, failing to recognize him as someone for whom he is responsible, a younger, alternate version of himself; from the blowup of an oil refinery, sending Cody to hell: “Finally made it, Ma: Top o’ the world!”
     From the start, Cody’s world has been upside-down and inside-out. As a child, battling siblings for his mother’s attention, Cody feigned headaches that have since become all too real, still requiring Ma Cody’s soothing touch to quiet these storms inside his brain. Guilt-ridden, the woman has devoted herself to her criminal son’s care, forsaking her other offspring. Viewers are simply wrong when they (ridiculously) say that Cody is “in love with his mother.” Psychotic and infantile, Cody is incapable of loving anyone, including wife Verna; rather, perpetually afraid of losing his mother’s love, he egotistically clings to her guiltily devoted image. After Ma’s death (plugged in the back by Verna), his last attempted robbery conforms to the story of the Trojan Horse that his mother read to him as a child.
     This postwar criminal/cop thriller is nothing like its 1930s counterparts starring Cagney, their emphasis on social context having been replaced by criminal psychology in a world upended by the war. (Cody’s profits from theft are enlarged through the postwar European black market.) Of all the thirties gangster classics, only Howard Hawks’s brilliant Scarface starring Paul Muni (1932) stressed a criminal’s psychosis. But director Raoul Walsh, here at the top of his game, has more than Hawks in mind. White Heat is his hommage to the cinema of Fritz Lang, whose determinism he relaxes a little, but whose geometrics (such as inside the prison housing Cody) and whose eerie otherworldliness (such as inside the belly of the empty oil truck—visually, a space ship; symbolically, Ma’s womb) conjure images of science fiction. More than the pursuit of Cody by federal authorities accounts for the methodical nature of this riveting film.
     Intense, Cagney is superb as Cody, a frightening brute with flashes of charm. However, Edmond O’Brien as federal agent Hank Fallon, who infiltrates Cody’s gang by more or less acting maternally towards Cody, and Margaret Wycherly, once Sergeant York’s Ma (Hawks, 1941) and now Cody’s, are also excellent. Only Virginia Mayo significantly detracts as Verna, whose heartlessness owes nothing to insanity.

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REGENERATION (Raoul Walsh, 1915)

A kid in his twenties, the same year that he played John Wilkes Booth in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Raoul Walsh made a compelling melodrama that already expressed in full the personality that a quarter-century hence would lend such color and humanity to his Strawberry Blonde (1941) and Gentleman Jim (1942). This is Regeneration, based on Owen Kildare’s autobiography.
     It is the pilgrim’s progress of an orphan in an impoverished, raucous New York City neighborhood. As a young man, Owen Conway is the leader of a criminal gang; but the entrance into his realm of a social worker, who operates a settlement house, transforms him once he falls in love with her. The ties that bind him to his former gang, however, are hard to break.
     The story is conventional. What elevates the material is the atmosphere: the teeming tenement, especially on sidewalks and in the streets, the colorful characters, the powerful sense of an environment that has such an impact on human lives—and, I might add, on the lives of three neighborhood cats. A fire onboard a three-tiered boat accounts for an especially dynamic sequence; many children are involved, and none, or anyone else, are lost. The real dangers lie elsewhere in the neighborhood.
     Walsh proves himself more agile and adept at crosscutting than Griffith, and he betrays a soft spot or two beneath his show of toughness. It is easy to imagine that Walsh identified with his protagonist, who is roughly the same age as he.
     Three different actors play Owen—at ten, seventeen and twenty-five. The middle Owen is played by someone billed as “H. McCoy.” Is this who we might think it is? The age is right, and the writer does have an acting credit under his complete name.

PURSUED (Raoul Walsh, 1947)

The inauguration of the noir Western (although Duel in the Sun, 1946, might have been this had it been directed differently and not overproduced), Pursued is the rare film where the approach of a near-total system of flashbacks is essential rather than gratuitous or narratively decorative. Jeb Rand’s flashbacks are correlative not only to his attempt to piece together the solution of a mystery that began in his childhood but also to his pursuit of psychological and moral integrity. One might say that the flashbacks in this film, unlike those in many other Hollywood films, stand up straight. As usual, in addition, the narrative technique fascinates and haunts the viewer—this, correlative, in this instance, to Jeb’s haunted existence. The script by Niven Busch also is haunted—by the father-murder from Hamlet, the biblical tale of Cain and Abel (the fraternal strife of the American Civil War also hovers about), and the psychological incest (where lovers have been raised as brother and sister) from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Pursued, directed by Raoul Walsh in a somber, almost subterranean mode, could also be described as a Gothic Western.
     Turn-of-the-century New Mexico; in the opening long-shot, the panning camera follows a dot on horseback moving against a sunlit background of immense, daunting hills and rocks. This is Thorley (Teresa Wright, Busch’s wife at the time, and at her best); Thorley is heading for her husband Jeb’s hideout. Jeb (Robert Mitchum, wonderful) is being pursued. When she reaches him, they are riddled by shadows, as though some sort of interior darkness has overtaken the sunlight. Jeb has flashes of spurred boots—a childhood memory of being stomped, crushed. We learn that Thorley’s mother, Medora (Judith Anderson, giving the best performance), protects and adopts Jeb on some fateful night, bringing the little boy to her home and, initially at least, loving him as much as she does Thorley and Thorley’s brother, Adam. But it is a family tangle, rife with fraternal conflict in equal measure to the attraction between Jeb and Thorley. Throughout the film, Jeb’s mind is jabbed by flashes of those spurred boots and flashes of light. Medora, we eventually learn, is a study in guilt.
     In one painfully ironic two-shot, the grown Jeb and Adam sing together at Medora’s encouragement. (Mitchum, incidentally, sings beautifully, wistfully—and it’s his voice, not someone else’s dubbed in.)
     One viewing undoes the convoluted mystery, but so rich are its associations that it keeps drawing us in no matter how many times we revisit the film, which is among Walsh’s best.

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HIGH SIERRA (Raoul Walsh, 1941)

There isn’t one of us who is unfamiliar with High Sierra, the good, solid film directed by Raoul Walsh from a script by John Huston and W. R. Burnett, adapted from the latter’s novel. This is the one about Roy Earle, a thief whose toughness invites the press nickname of “Mad Dog” that his streaks of civility and compassion, even poetry, dispute. Earle’s pardon releases him from an Indiana prison, usurping his ability to escape on his own—the result of a power manipulation behind the scenes so that his boss can put him in charge of a heist. Kris Kristofferson might have had this film in mind when he penned his most famous lyrics: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose./ Freedom ain’t worth nothing, but it’s free.” Throughout, the film shows that in the depressed American socio-scape the freedom that is pursued and hungered for doesn’t really exist, not for those at the bottom of the mountains, not for Earle, who scales Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the Sierras, only to be shot in the back and killed.
     I have no intention of discussing at length a film that we all know so well. Rather, I wish to address two points: one a factual mistake that has been attached to this film; the other, an open point of interpretation of what has been recently regarded as a closed matter.
     High Sierra is most celebrated for giving Humphrey Bogart the leading role at last and thus paving the way to his stardom later the same year as Sam Spade in Huston’s brilliant The Maltese Falcon. Roy Earle allows Bogart to give a lovely, involving performance, a thing of astuteness and grace. However, it is just plain wrong that Earle marks Bogart’s first starring role. That came four years earlier, in an even more important film than High Sierra, especially now, given the current Mexican immigration debate in the U.S. I am referring to Black Legion, which Archie Mayo directed from a script by Abem Finkel and William Wister Haines that was based on an Oscar-nominated original story by Robert Lord that, in turn, was based on an actual Michigan murder by an organization of hooded fascists. Bogart plays Frank Taylor, a factory worker who, enraged when he is passed over for a promotion that goes instead to a fellow named Dombrowski, joins the xenophobic group of superpatriots. Bogart creates a profound portrait of a simple-minded man that the National Board of Review honored at year’s end—as it would his Roy Earle and Sam Spade in 1941. Why may you not have heard of Black Legion? Its financial failure sent Bogart back to supporting roles.
     Although Bogart certainly has the central role in High Sierra, top billing went to Ida Lupino, who had scored a personal triumph in another Walsh film the previous year, They Drive by Night. For the record, Lupino is superb as Marie Garson, a taxi dancer looking to “crash out,” “just a woman with a hungry heart.” When Earle, whom Marie loves, is taken down, Lupino’s acting shatters. At year’s end the National Board of Review likewise cited two performances of hers: this one, and her Ellen Creed in Ladies in Retirement.
     The final segment of my informal comments about High Sierra concerns Willie Best’s Algernon, the young servant attending to the gang in their remote cabins. Nowadays commentators disdain the portrayal of Algernon’s lazy, lackadaisical manner. Doubtless, Walsh erred by consigning the character to a regrettable stereotype too typical of the way that African-American males were portrayed in Hollywood movies for too long. (And at times still are.) But that was hardly Huston and Burnett’s intent, and possibly not even Walsh’s intent, and in any case something of the actual intent punctures the primitive, bug-eyed impression that Best’s behavior makes. In one exceptionally witty scene, we see Algernon Tom Sawyerishly asleep on the dock while a convoluted contraption enables him even while snoozing to catch a fish. Yes, Algernon puts forth a minimal effort, but one that ironically underscores his capacity to get the job done. By delicious contrast, the two white men who are constantly fighting over Marie, we are told, “never catch anything,” no matter how persistently they try with their fishing poles. It is also worth noting that Algernon’s capture of the fish is one of the few times in this film that something pans out.