D:
William K. Howard. P: Walter Wanger. W: Gene Towne, Graham Baker. Ph: Leon
Shamroy. M: Heinz Roemheld. St: Sylvia Sidney (Mary Burns), Melvyn Douglas
(Barton Powell), Alan Baxter (‘Babe’ Wilson), Pert Kelton (Goldie Gordon),
Wallace Ford (Harper)
Punctuated
by images of Lady Justice, this is a tough but ultimately compassionate melodrama
that takes a side-on view of issues prevalent in the gangster genre. What if
the story were to centre on the moll – better still, an innocent persecuted by
society – rather than the mobster?
There
are intimations of noir here, much like Fritz Lang’s better-known You Only Live Once (1937), in which Sidney
played opposite a fresh-faced Henry Fonda as a victimised husband and wife. The
script continually manoeuvres its guileless central character into dark
corners, her plight illustrated with expressionistic flourishes at significant
points.
Mary
is a sweet-natured girl who runs a coffee shop in the boonies. She has a
sharp-suited, smooth-talking beau. She knows little about his background but is
besotted with him. He visits her one night. He wants to whisk her away to
Canada to get married – forthwith. He’ll go without her if necessary. His
urgency is explained when the police show up – he and his partner are wanted for
robbery. The tranquillity of Mary’s world is shredded by gunfire. Babe shoots
his way out, killing his wounded comrade when he threatens to squeal. Mary is arrested
and charged with abetting a felon.
Browbeaten
in court, locked up in an imposing prison that would have graced a Langian dystopia
– long shadows splay across the walls and floors – she cuts a mournful figure. “I’ll
never get used to seeing women caged up like animals,” she says, addressing
society at large – another example from this period of a protagonist doubling
as a mouthpiece for the film-makers’ social agenda. Despairing at her 15-year
term, she begs to be taken along when her roommate, the cynical Goldie, divulges
an escape plan.
Their
breakout proceeds easily, but it is a ruse – Goldie is aiding federal agent
Harper, who thinks the best way of drawing out Babe is to use his unwitting
girlfriend as bait. Mary gets a job in a hospital (she uses an alias but this
remains an improbable development – as the frequent newspaper inserts remind
us, she is notorious nationwide), where she piques the interest of Barton
Powell, a waspish explorer being treated for snow blindness. A bond forms, and
the tone of the film relents – enough for badinage about coffee and Popeye.
Babe’s
shadow looms large, however. He sends his accomplice, Spike (terse,
pencil-moustached Brian Donlevy), to fetch Mary from her lodgings. Spike is
killed by G-men, in a tightly edited shootout on a narrow landing, the camera
tilted to dynamic effect. Mary bolts, but Babe tracks her down. An attempted
bust at a church goes sideways and Babe escapes again. Harper prepares one last
trap, at Powell’s isolated retreat…
Sidney’s
performance is pitched perfectly; her cherubic features and large, expressive
eyes betray the despair and bewilderment of an ingénue suddenly plunged into
peril, although she is not without spirit. The actress herself was familiar
with this milieu. In her early career she was often cast as a criminal’s acolyte
or love interest: squired by Gary Cooper’s hoodlum in City Streets (1931); the fiancée of Spencer Tracy’s lynch-mob
victim in Lang’s Fury (1936); a Dead
End Kid’s sister in Dead End (1937); the
inadvertent Bonnie to Fonda’s hapless Clyde in You Only Live Once. The casting here maximises the contrast between
her unaffected manner and the macho belligerence of her co-stars: Douglas as the
plainspoken adventurer whose sturdy shell yields to Mary’s charm; Ford as the
hard-nosed investigator receptive to her pleas of innocence; Baxter, icily calm
as the cold-blooded criminal whose obsession with the heroine proves his
undoing.
Howard
– soon to journey to England to team up with Alexander Korda – keeps up a
strident pace, with the aforementioned front-page inserts, a standby in crime
films of this vintage, aiding brevity. Most Thirties gangster films trumpeted
their topicality, their conscientiousness, and Howard steers this one in the
same direction. An early scene in which a newsman instructs a staff writer to
embroider the facts about Mary acknowledges the public’s thirst for sensationalism
while serving as a critique.
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