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
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
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.
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.
