Raoul Walsh and Joan Bennett.

Raoul Walsh was a hot ticket there for a while. He was canonized for directing The Roaring Twenties and White Heat  along with the silent What Price Glory or The Fairbanks Thief of Baghdad, to which you could add his early Regeneration - without undue consideration for the films that spaced these. His musicals didn't seem to exist - Artists and Models or Glory Alley anyone? There were attempts to fill the gaps. I remember a piece explaining the thought content of Jane Russell's The Revolt of Mamie Stover, complete with explanatory diagram - which struck me as desperation. 

 In the seventies, I caught retrospectives at Edinburgh and Marly-le-Roi outside Paris, where the U.N. conference stagiaires sharing the accommodation were invited to be guests at  the evening movies as a treat for all their serious work. I talked to one of them who was puzzled. He could see why Ida Lupino in The Man I Love and Robert Mitchum in Pursued were crowd pleasers but Band of Angels!  It was nice to get my own reaction reflected back from an uncontaminated source.

More recently, I managed to find disks on a couple of pacey programmers with Joan Bennett that are buried in Walsh's occasionally dispiriting filmography.

1932's Me and My Gal is a crude but still agreeable early-sound Walsh comedy-melodrama. Spencer Tracy and particularly a gum chewing, blonde Bennett manage to be endearing and the support is good, complete with Birth of  Nation's Little Colonel, Henry B. Walthall, doing a paralyzed ex-navy man who can only communicate by blinking in Morse code, like Herbert Marshall in Jack Smight's The Third Day.

 The film starts with a close up of Spence on the pier he’s patrolling, brushing his policeman hat. A destitute man is about to drown the dog Spence adopts. Soon our hero’s sassing cafe cashier Bennet “It’s very beautiful hair. Where did you get it?” Turns out that, though Bennett’s sister Marion Burns is marrying George Chandler, she is the old flame of gangster George Walsh. Mob leader Noel Madison wants her to provide the list of strong box numbers from her job at the bank.

At the wedding, dad J. Farrell McDonald is drunk enough to throw the radiogram out the second story window but, when Spence is called, he gets on with chatting Joan on the landing outside the beery celebration, where groom Chandler has passed out. 

Spence starts calling on Joan (“I hear flat feet”) and we even get a “Strange Interlude” voice over scene on the couch -  dissolves from the leads sparking to the gang working on Burns  or from the apartment stairs to those in the Prison Walsh escapes from strapped under a car, a nice piece of Gordon Wiles decor, with the sliding wire mesh gates.

The heavies intimidate the upstairs immigrant family with “a revolver” (actually an automatic) and cut through their floor into the safe deposit box vault. The dog signals the intruder hidden upstairs and Walthall has spotted Burns in the mirror, smuggling in the fugitive, but can only communicate by blinking. Spence figures the Morse Code angle but has to get Joan to transcribe the message on her order pad, this coming after he's been given the dead or alive briefing by Capt. Emmet Corrigan. 

Nice shoot out in the attic. Wedding happy ending, Spence in a top hat.

Walsh, Bennett & Tracy.

 Walsh's  weak comedy routines, inserted at regular intervals don’t get laughs & slow things down -  the hat jokes, the repeating of Tracy’s words by the sidekick detective told to model himself on Spence, the comics arguing about what kind of fish drunk Will Stanton hit them with. Rather better is the street language “I never knew how much I liked you till the other night when you gave me the air.” and the the grim Depression humor. “Bank robbery - who did they rob this time?”  Phillip Dunne and Charles Vidor are among those credited on the script.

The spitting bar fly is a recognisable Walsh character. McDonald stepping into close up to speak to the camera anticipates the opening of Gentleman Jim. There’s even a Bronx cheer.

George Lipschultz'  score is OK. Timing is generally good for the day and there are striking shots like the radio crashing to the  path, the mobster’s pistol edge of frame as Tracy comes up the attic stairs or the gang seen looking up through the hole they have cut in the bank ceiling. Wiles' studio built decors are particularly an asset - the working class tenement flats and the busy pier recalling Regeneration. 

Raoul Walsh was in his element with these undemanding street-smart pieces and it's a pity that Zanuck-era Fox let them go out of circulation, changing our perception of star and director. 

 

Separated from his long standing association with Fox, artificiality is creeping into the director's work by the time we get to Paramount's 1936 Big Brown Eyes. It's quite zippy for him at this period, working with his own script and having old Fox associate Bennett along, still a blonde. It's not clear who has the Big Brown Eyes referred to in the original story by Hondo's James Edward Grant.

The piece is framed by sessions in the crowded hotel barbershop where Bennett is a popular manicurist and mobsters come in for a spruce up or a pineapple soda, which Snowflake Tunes is quite willing to finish, when they get taken away to the station house. The chatter in the salon is about the jewel robberies where the gems seem to always end up back with owners like hotel resident Marjorie Gateson. She has eyes for both recovery specialist Walter Pidgeon and investigating cop Gary Grant, who is sparking Bennett. Joan takes a dim view of finding him coat removed (Gateson poodle’s spilled tea on it) in Gateson’s apartment. So much for the exposition.

Grant, Jewell & Bennett.

Joan, with an ear for the gossip, is hired on by Joe Sawyer (what happens to him?) as a news reporter and Walter proves to be the criminal mastermind who cleans up on the insurance pay-offs for jewellery recovery. While he’s negotiating with nasties Alan Baxter and Henry Brandon, Walter’s henchman Lloyd Nolan manages to shoot a baby in a pram. Hired-in gunman Francis McDonald, drawing attention to the pistol in his overcoat, intimidates witness Isabel Jewell, who goes to jelly at the line up. However reporter Joan uses a fake headline and a few rounds from Cary’s piece to psych hood Douglas Fowley, clean shaven here, into ratting out the mob - nice piece of acted jitters. The film is more focused on Nolan’s delight in getting off than bereaved mother Helen Brown’s grief.

Outraged, Cary quits the force. The film’s one style coup is a shift from knockabout to serious as it looks like Cary’s vigilante tactics have gone wrong.

It’s nice to see the leads together. Nearly all of their scenes are played in two shots so we can watch them react to one another. Grant has already found his character, though it's not an exact match for a police hero. His unfunny ventriloquist act is clearly dubbed. The film’s attempt at innovation in carrying the exposition in close-ups of the gossip in the barber shop doesn’t really play and the wise cracks in the script aren’t as clever as they clearly think “Somebody’s likely to find their hat floating in the river.” “He doesn’t deserve a chair. They should fry him standing up.”

Producer Walter Wanger has given this one a distracting, expensive finish to make it a vehicle for his wife Bennett. The film curiously anticipates more substantial work - Baxter and Brandon’s re-appearance foreshadows the one given Charles McGraw and William Conrad in The Killers and there’s a bit of Dirty Harry Callaghan in Grant’s disillusioned cop. However you have only to compare this one with His Girl Friday, which Big Brown Eyes intermittently resembles, to see the difference between serious film and schedule filling.

Barrie Pattison 2022