The Bowery
Saturday, December 02, 2006
Watched a couple of Raoul Walsh pictures at the Film Forum today. Me and My Gal (1932) featured Spencer Tracy at his most appealing, playing a cop in love with a waitress. This was earlier in his career, when he wasn't just playing up his working class roots to seem like a better boss. He has a great chemistry with the lead, Joan Bennett, yet there was a metric ton of business with a drunk fisherman that padded out the movie in a tiresome way. Gal seemed a little limp to me overall--it handled the depression eye to eye but with a mask on. Here, the criminals were just bad guys. Tracey catches them, gets an award, a promotion, and then marries the girl. Sad.
But The Bowery, (1933) boy... A spectacle of beautiful violence as only Walsh could film it, centered on two upstanding citizens of the Bowery c. 1890, Wallace Beery and George Raft, destroying everything around them in a tit for tat of bareknuckled capitalistic one-upsmanship. "I got it on him in the wind, the speed and the noodle," says Steve Brodie (Raft) sometime after he's jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge in order to prove his fitness to run a saloon, but just before he's beaten almost to death by Chuck Connors (Beery) on a barge in the middle of the East River. Leaders of rival fire brigades, they riot upon meeting in front of a burning Chinatown tenement. Bricks are thrown (and so one shot shows the occupants screaming, on fire; the next fades into a shot of the smoking wreckage the next day. That's it, says the cut, no one survived. And the cut is played for laughs.) Connors finds his missing sap under a youthful Jackie Cooper's pillow, and his eyes swell with sparkling, patriarchal humidity: "aw sheez, I been looking all over fer dis." And the weird honesty in Connors's voice as he packs up his apartment after having lost his money and his position, to housekeeper Fay Wray: "Never tie yourself to a guy that's on the downgrade." There is never a moment's rest, and no middle class, just pure agonism: and the worse it gets, the funnier it gets. It's a great vision of the neoliberal world as it existed in the 1890's, when one differentiated less between Americans and American imperial subjects, who were both killed freely and joyously, and one just called the whole deal democracy.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:13 AM,
