The Roaring 20's

Raoul Walsh made some terrific pictures, some of them in fact great.  You can make a good argument for High Sierra, Pursued, and White Heat, but even the movies that aren’t obvious masterworks are pretty damn rousing: They Died with Their Boots On, Gentleman Jim, Colorado Territory, The World in His Arms, The Revolt of Mamie Stover.  He made four features with Cagney, and probably only Wellman, in The Public Enemy, had more to do with shaping Cagney’s screen persona.  He made ten features with Flynn, and while it’s safe to say Michael Curtiz invented the dashing Flynn swashbuckler most of us think of - Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk - it’s Walsh who gets more out of Flynn the actor. 

Another thing about Walsh is that he sets up bits of business that reverberate well past their actual time on screen.  There’s a throwaway gag fairly early in The Roaring Twenties that’s not only one of the coolest things in Walsh, it turns out to be one of the coolest things in the history of the movies.  (Since it’s a visual joke, I can’t really do justice to it, but here goes.)  Cagney meets Priscilla Lane and falls head over heels.  He squires her home on the late train, from midtown Manhattan to someplace out in the sticks, maybe Yonkers. Cagney mutes the trademark Cagney wiseacre, and delivers enormous yearning and charm.  In the end, she’s fated to wind up with the straight-arrow DA instead of the roguish bootlegger, but in the immediate present, you can entertain the same hopes he does.  The moment is suspended, a single note hanging in the air, like the chime of a wineglass, the two of them completely taken up with each other, a private physical space for themselves alone, but keeping a delicate distance, hoping not to break the spell.  They get to the last stop, where she’s going to get off, and he gets off with her, to walk her home from the station – because he’s still not ready to leave the moment behind – and here’s the kicker.  Cagney and Priscilla Lane haven’t been shot in close-up, i.e., a shot of his face, a reverse of hers, an alternating visual dialogue; they’re shot together, over the back of the seat in front of them, so you don’t get the feeling they’re opposed: they’re in the same frame.  Walsh also frames the scene, at the beginning and the end, in a longer shot, that shows the whole carriage, with Cagney and Lane about two-thirds of the way back in the nearly empty car.  Not entirely empty.  Toward the front of the car, closest to the camera, is a passed-out drunk, with his hat over his face.  When the train pulls up, and Cagney and Lane get off, the camera waits behind for a beat, and the drunk startles awake, realizing it’s his stop, and stumbles out of the carriage.  Your laugh breaks the spell.

This scene on the train prefigures Garfield and Beatrice Pearson in the back of the cab in Polonsky’s Force of Evil, and the even more famous scene between Brando and Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront.  You can see its influence in the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, when the camera tracks along the bar, and bumps over the sleeping drunk, and then settles back down to surface level – instead of effectively dollying through him, because in the convention or conceit of movie-world, the camera takes no notice of such physical obstacles, a wall or a window, a speeding car, a piece of furniture.  The camera, first of all, is omniscient, and secondly, it doesn’t exist in the same physical space as an object or an actor.  It’s a ghost, it isn’t present.

Walsh doesn’t break the Fourth Wall, that’s not where I’m going.  And he doesn’t call attention to himself.  He’s not doing a Hitchcock, inviting you behind the curtain.  He’s very straightforward.  In fact, the story goes that he’d turn his back on a scene, and then turn around and ask his cameraman if it went right, as if he were embarrassed to be a grown man, doing something this stupid to make a living.  But look at the way he sets stuff up, the scaling, the intuitive balance between the epic and the intimate.  Ward Bond has an amazing cameo in Gentleman Jim as John L. Sullivan, the bare-knuckles heavyweight champ that Corbett knocks out in the ring.  He comes, literally hat in hand, to the door of the victory party, and when Corbett asks him in, Sullivan says no.  He’s the past, he tells him, an old punch-drunk palooka with cauliflower ears; Corbett’s the future, what the Irish can aspire to.  The most astonishing thing about it is that you can easily imagine this with Ward Bond, or maybe Victor McLaglen, in the hands of John Ford, and watch it get grossly oversold.  It’s sentimental, but Walsh has the sense not to play it for sentiment. 

Another example.  Custer leaves for the Little Big Horn, in They Died with Their Boots On.  (Even in sympathetic biographies, Custer comes across as a bully, if never a physical coward; Flynn, interestingly, plays him as ingratiating and thick-witted, exaggerating his own least likables.)  It’s the last time Libby Custer will see her husband alive.  (Libby devoted her widowhood to promoting the Custer legend, the golden-haired Achilles of the Plains; she was remarkably successful.  Olivia de Havilland is a sympathetic Libby, but the real woman had ice in her veins.)  The way Walsh shows it, Custer kisses her goodbye and steps away, out of the frame.  The camera draws back slightly, a medium shot, Libby in the lamplight.  She’s standing stiffly, as if posed for a daguerrotype, her eyes wide, her mouth barely parted, one hand resting on the dresser next to her, the other clutched to the front of her dress, and then she crumples, all of a piece.  I think there’s a sudden pulled focus, just as it happens, a quick trick of the lens, that underlines her abandonment, but I’m not quite sure.  It might be something my own eye added.

And the justly famous tracking shot in White Heat, in the prison mess hall, first from right to left - Cagney asking how his mom’s doing, passed down the line of cons to Edmond O’Brien – and then back from left to right – the word that she’s dead, all of it done in pantomime, and then Cagney, zero-to-sixty, batshit psycho in a tenth of a second.  Word is, the scene wasn’t shot as written, Cagney and Walsh set it up without warning the extras, and Cagney took it to the bank. 

The Roaring Twenties was released in 1939, which was one hell of a year for pictures, and you can make a case that it caps the Warner Bros. gangster picture.  It hits all the marks, with plenty of vigor, but the movie’s a swan song for the genre. Cagney personifies this.  The Roaring Twenties is one of his most physical performances.  Mark Asch, in his essay for the Criterion DVD release, points out that he seems to think with his body, that he expresses all his energies and emotions with it, his hands, the balls of his feet, the way his eyes change.  He’s always restless, in motion, checking the threat environment. And as the picture winds down, he loses that intensity, that muscular purpose.  He turns into an old soak, living on memories.  His last gasp, when he comes out of hiding – from the promises he’s made himself – is like watching somebody try on a set of clothes that don’t fit anymore.  In the end, he lives up to his promises.

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The Roaring Twenties is out on a new DVD restoration from Criterion, although not available on the Criterion Channel to stream. There’s a halfway decent print on YouTube, even if the subtitles are strange.

Resetting the Clock

Today, on the Ides of March, I’d like to welcome Janice Law, SleuthSayers emerita, mystery writer and painter, to guest blog. Janice was nominated for an Edgar Award in 1977 for The Big Payoff, her first Anna Peters novel. And in 2013, she was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Mystery for Fires of London, the first in her Francis Bacon series. She won that award the following year for its sequel, The Prisoner of the Riviera. She writes frequently for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and many others. So, take it away, Janice.

—Paul

*~*~*~*

Resetting the Clock

by Janice Law

(Many thanks to Paul D. Marks for kindly giving me his column space this week.)

My family always insists that I don’t take advice. This is only partially true. I rarely take advice immediately, but that’s not to say that I reject good ideas entirely. Case in point: my new Francis Bacon trilogy, which debuts April 5 with the opening volume, Nights in Berlin.

And what is this good advice that I’ve taken? To revise a character’s age downward. I did not do this with my former detective, Anna Peters, who retired with her bad back in her early 50’s. But I have now reset Francis’ age, from forty-something in Moon over Tangier, back to seventeen.

I had a couple reasons for doing this.

By the time he’d reached his early forties, the historical Bacon was on the verge of being both rich and famous, and some of his less pleasant, and more destructive, habits were going to become prominent. More important, he had lost Jessie Lightfoot (Nan in the books) and she, along with a knowledge of painting, was crucial to my understanding of his personality.

Characters one invents are almost by definition comprehensible. They may or may not be the fascinating, successful creations we all hope for, but the chances are good we’ll feel we understand them. If we don’t, if the character doesn’t in some way “make sense” to us, he or she will surely wind up in the out-take file or scooped up and eliminated by the handy delete button.

Historical figures are another matter. They are known, sometimes to the general public, sometimes only to specialists, but either way there certain irrefutable facts and circumstances about their lives that must be respected. To be honest, some of these facts are awkward. I personally love country living and all animals. Not so Francis. Music is important to me; Francis was tone deaf. And then there is his sexual preference – promiscuous gay sadomasochism – and his affection for the bottle.

Clearly, if one is going to write about a character this far from one’s own tastes, interests, and experience, a character, moreover, whose biography is known and available, one must find a way into his personality. My entrance to Francis’ psyche were via Nan (my mom had emigrated as a nanny and I grew up on a big estate that employed one) and his art (I’m a keen semi-pro painter).

With those two anchors, I’ve been able to navigate my fictional character’s taste for city life and rough trade, not to mention his reckless genius. Still, by the time I finished Moon over Tangier, I felt that the character I had been following for a dozen fictional years was complete, and I was ready to end the series.

But some interesting facets of the man’s life remained, especially his decision to close a reasonably successful design business (one capable of supporting both himself and Nan) and to embark on the precarious path of serious painting. That decision could, I saw, be the finale of a new trilogy.

What about the 600 or so pages needed before I could get to that point? Here, the real Francis’personal history came to my rescue. As a teenager and young adult, he lived in three different cities, each at a crucial and fascinating time: Weimar Berlin, where he was taken by a peculiar uncle – my character Uncle Lastings is, aside from his sexual habits and the circumstances of the German trip, a total invention; Paris at the end of the Roaring Twenties; and London in the Thirties after the party stopped.

Berlin and Paris were extremely important for the real painter’s later development. Bacon never went to art school and what little formal instruction he had in oil painting was picked up from one of his lovers. But in Berlin, he saw the cutting edge European art of the moment, Bauhaus design, Expressionism, Dada, and the New Objectivity as German artists struggled with the machine age and the devastation of the world war. For a young gay man, it also didn’t hurt that Berlin was liberated sexually in ways undreamt of in England.

Paris, like Berlin had galleries and new art, most importantly for Bacon, the works of Picasso, as well as the great public museums. Surrealism was in the air, and writers and artists from around the world had come to work – or to live the artistic life – in the metropolis. As for London, the art scene was tame compared to the excitements of the Continent, but London was, first and foremost, where his heart was. All his artistic life Bacon had trouble working anywhere but in the city along the Thames: he was a London man first and foremost.

Of course, three novels, even short ones, about the making of a painter are not going to set mystery lovers’ hearts a-flutter. Fortunately, history as well as biography now comes to the rescue. Berlin had gangs both fascist and Red; an enormous vice industry, fueled by the collapse of the post-war economy, plus public and private violence and misery of every sort.


Paris had rich foreigners flinging money around and indulging their whims, while poor foreigners scraped for a living and struggled to recover from wars and revolutions further East. The underside of Parisian artistic creativity was imaginative larceny, including successful attempts to sell the Eiffel Tower. As for London, by the mid-Thirties, the city saw Hunger Marchers, waves of homeless, desperate immigrant Jews, British fascists like the Black Shirts, and ever-increasing fears of yet another war.

Who could let all this go to waste?

I declared Francis seventeen again and started Nights in Berlin.