1928 crime, dir. Bryan Foy, Cullen Landis, Helene Costello;
IMDb /
allmovie. What do you do
when you find you're taking the fall for a bootlegger? Hope for a gun
from the shadows.
Now don't get the idea that I think this film is great; it really
isn't. But I do think it's a better contender for the title of "first
talkie" than The Jazz Singer was; there are no intertitles here, as
this was the first feature film to have speech all the way through.
And that newness often shows. Everyone acting here has experience in
the silents, but the new acting techniques are being invented as they
go. Microphones aren't on booms yet but have to be hidden among the
set dressing, which is one reason the players are relatively immobile
even by the era's standards of largely static filmmaking.
But for all the story is a bit corny, it feels far more real than the
rags-to-riches plot of The Jazz Singer. 1928 is, after all, the same
year in which Al Capone had some of his boys pick up Fats Waller after
a show and force him to play for Al's birthday party, three days
solid, but being tipped $100 a song; everybody in the original
audience knew what bootleggers were because they read the newspapers,
and there was no need to explain anything.
There's some fiddliness to the plot, too; Eddie the Good Boy and his
buddy Gene leave their dead-end small town and go to New York to find
their fortune (and Eddie's girl Kitty, who had the sense to get out
sooner). Eddie and Gene soon find their promised barber shop is just a
front for a speakeasy run by "Hawk" Miller, but they've paid to get
into the racket and can't get out before they've made that seed money
back. At one of Hawk's more "legitimate" clubs, Kitty is attracting
his attention, which doesn't leave his current girl Molly feeling
happy. And it seems that Hawk shot a cop, so the heat is coming down…
Yeah, it's all melodramatic tosh, but there's a feeling that the cast
are at least having some fun with it. (Hawk, Wheeler Oakman, in
particular is a fine melodramatic villain, whose delivery of "Take
him… for a ride" (about 40:45) really should be heard even if you
don't watch the rest of the film.) When the police come to bust up the
club, one of them goes straight to the secret panel where he clearly
knows the incriminating booze should be kept, and throws it open with
a flourish only to wilt from disappointment when it isn't there.
Meanwhile Eddie is a dumb sap by the standards of dumb saps. It really
takes a lot to get him to realise that Hawk might actually not be
his friend. In fact it's Kitty who does most of the work here; in
their happy ending, I picture Eddie drifting vaguely through life,
occasionally aware that Kitty sometimes gives him advice and he
prospers when he takes it.
There's no blackface to complain about—there is no suggestion here
that black people even exist—but there's more subtlety than I'd
expected. The cop who's happy to go after Eddie for Hawk's murder
makes it clear that he doesn't really need evidence, he needs someone
to take the fall so that he can tick off the case as "solved". When
Molly makes a tearful confession that she dunnit, clearly expecting to
go to jail at the least, her casual mention that Hawk was the cop
killer flips that same detective's attitude: well, there's a reward
for that guy, dead or alive. (Again in my fantasy, unsupported by
the film itself, Molly takes over Hawk's bootlegging operation and
runs it twice as well as he ever did, with more good times and less
violence and leching over the dancers.)
It's not a great film but it is very much an enjoyable film, and for
straightforward fun I'd recommend this over The Jazz Singer to
almost anyone.
Freely available via the Internet
Archive and on
YouTube.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.