Old Yorker

  • The Roaring Twenties

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Raoul Walsh (1939)

     This isn’t a long picture by modern standards but, at 104 minutes, it feels long – and seems turgid and schematic, at least in comparison with The Public Enemy.  Whereas that film has opening and closing legends that confirm its moral credentials, The Roaring Twenties has a voiceover (John Deering), which we hear at several points, performing the same service.  It starts with a flashback montage – from 1940 (the film opened in theatres a few weeks after the outbreak of the World War II in Europe) to 1918, with images of the big names in international politics during the twenty-two years in question.   The Public Enemy’s mission statement describes the gangster world as an evil which must be eradicated.  The Roaring Twenties majors on the political and social forces of the time and on how they shape human destinies.  The real action begins with three American soldiers in the trenches in November 1918, minutes (seconds!) before the armistice is declared.

    The soldiers are Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney), George Hally (Humphrey Bogart) and Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn).  The characterisation of at least one, and perhaps two, of the trio in this opening sequence contradicts the narration’s idea that their lives will be determined by something other than individual personality and motivation.   Lloyd, preparing to shoot a German soldier, puts down his gun.  When George asks why, Lloyd says, ‘He was a kid – only looked about fifteen’.  George takes aim and fires.  ‘He won’t see sixteen’, he announces with laconic satisfaction.  I say ‘at least one, and perhaps two’ because Jeffrey Lynn’s Lloyd is so colourless that blowing with the wind seems an essential part of his nature:  this makes it hard to tell whether this young lawyer is dominated by events or whether he’s a shrewd chameleon.  But nothing that Bogart’s cold-hearted George, a former saloon-keeper, does throughout the changing times that the story spans comes as any surprise.  (Although the title is decade-specific, the timescale of the action extends beyond the end of prohibition in 1933.)   The demonstration of how people fall prey to the corruptions of the particular time and place in which they live therefore has to focus on Cagney’s Eddie.  Before he went to fight in Europe, he was a New York cab-driver.  When he returns in 1919, someone else has got his job.   Eddie is determined to make the best of himself and builds up a fleet of cabs through delivering bootleg liquor.  He hires Lloyd as his lawyer and George subsequently becomes Eddie’s business partner, before they fall out.   After the Wall Street crash, Eddie falls on hard times.  George doesn’t.

    While he was soldiering in France , a young American girl became Eddie’s pen pal.  He visits the girl, Jean Sherman, on his return home and she becomes the love of his life; it’s meant to be one of Eddie’s tragedies that this love is never reciprocated.  You can certainly believe that Priscilla Lane , who plays Jean, wouldn’t go for a bloke like Cagney’s Eddie, socially beneath her but emotionally beyond her.  The mystery is why Eddie would be attracted to Jean, who has a weirdly spinsterly quality in her early scenes and then turns into a particular type of screen heroine which lasted through the thirties and forties and even beyond:  tiresomely ladylike in a smiley-virtuous, condescending way.   (I think of Teresa Wright as a prime exponent of this style.)  Priscilla Lane was the actress’s real name but its suggestion of prissy is almost improbably apt (one thing you can believe about the story is that Jean would end up marrying Lloyd).  For a while, I wondered if Eddie’s love for Jean increased as his way of life moved further away from that of the ‘ideal soldier’ to whom she had written in 1918 but I don’t expect this was the idea.  The Lane sisters were a popular singing trio of the 1920s and 1930s and it appears that Priscilla was the most individually successful of the three.  Jean wants to be a musical star and Priscilla Lane gets the opportunity to sings ‘My Melancholy Baby’ and ‘I’m Just Wild About Harry’.  She’s melodious but impersonal – again, I found it hard to tell whether that was how we were supposed to find Jean.

    The only relationship in The Roaring Twenties that amounts to much is the one between Eddie and Panama Smith, the speakeasy hostess who holds a torch for him as long as he holds one for Jean.  Although the role is hackneyed, Gladys George is excellent as Panama – her shopworn glamour and fragile resilience are very appealing, and there’s a chemistry between her and Cagney.   There’s also a connection between Cagney and Frank McHugh, who plays his old cab driver pal.  Cagney is very compelling (although less convincing here as a ringleader than as a sole agent).  Among the well-known names that appear on the credits is that of Robert Rossen, who shares the screenplay credit with Jerry Wald and Mark Hellinger (who wrote the source material).

    11 July 2009

  • The River Wild

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Curtis Hanson (1994)

    Gail Hartman, a Boston teacher who in her youth was an expert white water rafter and a guide on the Salmon River, Idaho, takes her kids back there on an adventure holiday-birthday treat for her son Roarke.  Gail’s marriage to tensely unsmiling, workaholic architect Tom is in trouble.  When Tom, according to habit, defects from the holiday at the eleventh hour, Gail thinks their marriage may be at an end.  She says as much to her mother, who tells her daughter, kindly but firmly, that she doesn’t know what struggling to keep a difficult marriage together means:  Gail’s father is deaf and dumb (Gail teaches history to deaf students).  Just before Gail and Roarke set off on their river trip – the younger daughter Willa stays home with her grandparents – Tom turns up to join them but this hardly improves the family situation.   He arrives dressed in his work clothes and his lack of appetite for adventure ahead is as palpable as the tension between him and Gail – and between Tom and Roarke.  The latter is very taken by a relatively affable and exciting young man called Wade, who’s also about to set off down the river, with two companions.   It wouldn’t be quite right to say that Wade and his sidekick Terry (the other member of the trio soon disappears mysteriously) turn out to be not what they seem – because they seem like men with a guilty secret from the word go.  It turns out they’ve carried out an armed robbery, killing a man, and the rafting holiday – and Gail’s expertise and experience, to guide them through dangerous rapids – are their means of escape.   Before long, after a brief flirtation between Wade and Gail, the Hartmans have got very suspicious about their companions.  They soon find themselves, and their golden labrador Maggie, being held at gunpoint by Wade and Terry.

    The opening titles sequence, with Gail single-sculling in Boston , has a rather fascinating sense of foreboding (and implication of eventual survival) but there’s nothing comparably unusual in what follows.  Curtis Hanson keeps the action moderately exciting but the trouble with this kind of picture is that, once the family have become prisoners of the criminals, you don’t suspend disbelief so much as belief in any apparent gleam of hope that they may be about to escape.  You know how long the film has to run and that things aren’t going to be sorted out until the last five minutes.   And, by the point at which Wade and Terry reveal their true colours, The River Wild is no longer about anything except the Hartmans’ terrifying plight since Gail and Tom seem already (and very easily) to have resolved their marital problems.  Needless to say, I’d no idea how plausible or otherwise the Hartmans’ various strategies to escape their captors were but the script, by Denis O’Neill, seemed to be one of those where there’s hardly any detail that doesn’t serve a subsequent plot purpose:  Gail and Roarke find their ability to sign coming in handy at a crucial moment; Roarke’s birthday presents from his father (a Swiss army knife) and sister (a waterproof camera) do all that’s expected of them, and more.

    The longer The River Wild goes on, the more irrelevant the acting talents of the cast become. The character of Gail is no kind of stretch for Meryl Streep – I assume it’s because the physical requirements were a stretch that she signed up.  As tends to happen with her thinly-written roles, she’s evidently hungry for more; she keeps trying out different approaches as she goes along.   Still, some of these are highly effective – especially Gail’s moments of quiet hostility to Wade – and Streep’s enthusiastic embrace of an action heroine role is very likeable.  (According to Wikipedia, she did most of her own stunts and, nearing the end of one particularly exhausting day’s shooting, ‘ was swept off the raft into the river and was in danger of drowning, before she was rescued’.)   As Tom, David Strathairn is made to appear excessively wimpy:  he has to wear a pair of spectacles which might as well be a neon sign reading ‘not-a-man-of-action’.  (Perhaps the remarkable durability of the glasses – still in one piece after Tom’s been in fights, crashed into rivers and slid down sheer drops – is symbolic.)  Strathairn is a good actor, though, and he gives some depth to the character – as does John C Reilly as Terry:  he makes you feel the man has a past.  Kevin Bacon doesn’t; nor does he have the volatility needed to make Wade scary, although Bacon has a good connection with Streep.  Joseph Mazzello does well as Roarke – he’s more emotionally nuanced than might be expected in the role.  With Benjamin Bratt as an unlucky ranger, spectacular scenery photographed by Robert Elswit and a plush, over-explanatory score by Jerry Goldsmith.  The dog Maggie, zestfully wagging her tail and licking human faces, performs with terrific histrionic flair (especially when she has to act scared at the prospect of jumping from the mountainside down into the river).  Meryl Streep must have trained her.

    21 May 2010

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