Pre-Code Capsules 8: THE NARROW CORNER, WEST OF BROADWAY, HEADLINE SHOOTER, THE CROWD ROARS, TOP SPEED

THE NARROW CORNER (1933)
Directed by Alfred E. Green - ****
Finding this on TCM (part of Ralph Bellamy day) cemented the proof that 1933, not 1939, was the best year for movies. You never know what classic authors are going to ferment into wine and which to vinegar, but the South Seas commonwealth parables of W. Somerset Maugham have become a very potent wine and THE NARROW CORNER is the good stuff you keep for yourself during dark nights of the soul. Why is it so forgotten compared to, say, the self-absorbed modernist whining of THE PETRIFIED FOREST?  Where Leslie Howard's maudlin rambling smacked of self-pity in that film, Maugham's dead-eyed stare into the riptide, where life is wrest from us as a berry from a branch by a half asleep Mexican gardener, is admirable, heroic, and damned hilarious in this one! Cheers! Tape it and save it forever.

The story of a wan Brit boytoy who has to take it on the lam out of Australia when he kills... ahem... her husband, ahem, fits its star--a very young man of Hollywood royalty--Douglas Fairbanks Jr.  to a 't.' We can see in him the natural actor who's absorbed everything he saw and heard as a spoiled child in the thick of his famed father's silent era decadence and brought it to bear on his character, a peevish dork who hates the women who fight over him because then he has to kill their jealous husbands and fiancees, which here include Ralph Bellamy as the good-hearted Dutch plantation owner. And the best character is a debauched doctor (Dudley Digges) who tells his trusting Chinese servant how many (opium) 'pipes' he'll have that night, "Seven pipes tonight, no more no less," rendering him useless at critical junctures but leaving him always very droll and self-effacing and clear-eyed in his into-the-void stares; he's the type of character who no longer exists ins a cinema too busy fighting and blowing things up to ever have time to address mortality head-on.

There's also Henry Kolker as a mean old Swedish sea captain, who boasts to Arthur Hohl that he used to pilot slavers, and that he wants to gut his son-in-law (Reginald Owen) with a scaling knife. Patricia Ellis is the hot daughter, who's engaged to good-hearted Bellamy and it all makes Fairbanks feel the heel, but you can't argue with the beautiful scenery and sense that once upon a time it really was possible to buy passage on a boat from Sydney Toler pre-Chan and run out on your past, and immediately repeat it.

WEST OF BROADWAY (1931)
Dir. Harry Beaumont - **1/2
Here's a curio starring former-matinee idol John Gilbert, caught like a fly in the amber of the sound era: when he tries to sound manly and tough he just sounds hung over, speech halting awkwardly like he's sending a morse code S.O.S. in the spaces between the words of his dialogue, hoping his buddies off-camera will translate and rush... to his aid. In the early sound equipment days they were taught to take long pauses and say words... clearly.

But it's worth seeing for the brave way Gilbert captures the art of the shaky rebound. His character comes home from the war with four bullets in him, to find Ann (Madge Evans), his sweetheart off with some slime ball and his hired rebound girl Dot (Lois Moran) merely a bit 'pretty in a trashy sort of way.' "Dot the I and cross the Ann," he says, while introducing them to each other at the swanky nightclub. "Double cross."

And it's worth it for the sly way the waiter says "your package sir," and slips Gilbert a fifth wrapped in a white towel, low under the table at the club, so the prohibition cops don't see it. We here in America don't have a scene like that anymore: we do our drugs at home, except for crack. The crack den is our modern speakeasy but the class of people you meet is so much less sparkling, wouldn't you say? Hmmm?

And it's worth seeing for the sleazy, no holds-barred details of life as a hired girl who's brave enough to refuse Gilbert's hand-out (her and her girlfriend owe ten days' back rent), even as she notes of Gilbert's party there were "hands all over me." as she gropes herself in a resigned way.

Also, Gilbert's shakes are incredible. The morning after he marries the hired girl, he's got the Saint Vitus dance. And for her part it's great when she gets all furious, racistly barking at the Chinese cook, or settling down into a chair to shoot the shit about Jerry with his high class friends who come calling. And when he tries to quit drinking the cowboys are singing outside and suddenly you tap into RIO BRAVO's scene where Dean Martin almost takes a shot of whiskey while the Mariachi death song plays down the street from the jail. Moran is a little firecracker but her pal is no Joan Blondell, and when we see Gilbert ponder whether or not to keep her after their marriage's been annulled you may tap into that ambivalence Frank Sinatra had with Shirley MacLaine in SOME CAME RUNNING. But Gilbert, he was almost all the way tapped out, and it shows. Those shakes are something else.

And Gilbert's a good enough actor to use his personal desperation in a scene: you can feel his desperate stiff upper lip trembling as he finds out Ann's moved on. She could be standing for his entire female silent film fan base, which was once substantial and just as suddenly nonexistent. Like Barrymore's drunken has-been in DINNER AT EIGHT, there's a feeling of being outdated and too drunk to care, and seeing the only way to go is to get drunker and plunge into the void like a cock-eyed  W. Somerset Maughm kamikaze. All else is vanity.

HEADLINE SHOOTER (1933)
dir. Otto Brauer - ***
Frances Dee is a swell little half-pint, nearly a decade away from becoming the woman we all fell in love with in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1942). How can any girl ever make sobriety sexy? Dee can. She exhibits some serious chemistry with the main, taller star of this 1933 'press corp.' action-comedy, the briefly beloved Will Gargan as a newsreel cameraman. Lee Tracy is relegated to wingman and wryly notes: "They want you to chase 'em, and once you catch 'em they hang on ya like a ton of bricks." Then he gets crushed by a ton of actual bricks while filming a warehouse fire. Ralph Bellamy is again the jilted fiancee who's really a swell guy hoping to lure Dee home, where the heart is.

This is an early example of tough-ass Warner Brothers action, with an obligatory climactic gangster shoot-out and a quite a few real-time floods, fires, and even some 'collateral value' shots lensed during the Santa Monica earthquake. It's startling how at ease the actors are around these real-time calamities, with reporter Dee offering comfort to shaken witnesses as she makes sure to get the signature on the release statement, showing that solid mix of sexy warmth and maternal compassion that would in 10 years make zombies walk with her through whispering cane fields of admiration.

THE CROWD ROARS (1932)
dir. Howard Hawks - ***
The cars are game and Cagney's explosive, but it's kind of tough to care because he's also such a shit to his women. I know how it is from being in a band: the self-disgust side effect of  being adored by people who don't know you; you come to hate them the way Dean Martin hates his girl in SOME CAME RUNNING, or Clark Gable hates Jean Harlow in RED DUST, or Cagney hates Mae Clarke in PUBLIC ENEMY.

He flips; he leaves. Ann Dvorak chases him down to the Indy 500, and we get some great scenes of Cagney asking for jobs and being turned down by various outfits, because he's lost his nerve. Lost his nerve? Cagney? A laconic, very interesting parade of Hawks-types has to say no to him, and it's here more than anywhere else you can feel the Hawksian touch in its infancy, and when Cagney finally tells Ann about the crash and the smell of McHugh's burning corpse, he cracks up in her arms, from then on it's racing with style and you know it's not just Cagney's macho racer that has to learn women are ten times wiser than men, it's Hawks too. And he does, and maybe Dvorak and Blondell are the ones that taught him, like they teach Cagney. Maybe? Maybe nothin'!

TOP SPEED (1930)
dir. Mervyn Leroy - ***
An early sound comedy-musical (with most of the music numbers cut) starring the rubber-mouthed comedian (willing to 'adopt some' with Jack Lemmon in SOME LIKE IT HOT), and a daring chronicle of the years before the Depression, this is a last gasp of college letters and class resentment. The passing era of sexual repression lingers lines like, "I'm so modest I won't allow lamb chops on the table unless they have those paper pants on." Both suggestively lewd and comically moralist, the film sums up the only sane response to the draconian, near fundamentalist level of sexual repression endured under the watchful eye of hotel detectives, chaperones, and social reform-minded wives. Herein we also learn the origins of now forgotten phrases like "over a barrel" (it's a protean kind of CPR) and "counting sheep" (apparently it was a big fad like Atkins is today, and Brown explains it complete with hand gestures). And since 1930 was such a ' scandalous' time, well, it was very easy to be scandalous. Just being caught in a hotel room with a woman not your wife could earn you a public flogging, and from thence we get those boudoir comedies of sneaking around fire escapes in one's underwear, hiding under beds while the house dick peers through the doorcrack. It's hard to get that kind of naughty steam going in our more permissive age, but here's a world where men can't show their torsos on the beach and have to wear full body swim suits. It explains a lot... about Saudi Arabia today.

Coming off like a primordial Jim Carey, Brown is a surprisingly manly presence, and when his character pretends to be a  millionaire so he can get a room at a posh hotel he sounds just like Walter Matthau, or did Matthau emulate Brown as a kid, catching films like TOP SPEED on matinees while anti-Semite bullies skulked the streets? Footage of the climactic boat race is ridiculously mismatched to Brown's rear projection drunkenness but Edward Arnold disparages the news his future son-in-law took a bribe, but in true financial savvy the pal just takes the money and screws his briber, bets it on himself via his stooge buddy Joe E. Brown, and then pockets the profit. Oh to be alive in an age where millionaires were made so effortlessly. Oh, but we'd have to get married first.