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8/14/2019 The Bowery, Raoul Walsh
1/4
The Bowery
Raoul Walsh's Gangs of New York
They spit! They swear! They smoke in bed!
B Y R O B E R T K E S E R
Back in 1933, The Boweryscored a big hit, introducing Darryl Zanuck's new
independent venture called Twentieth Century Pictures, yet this nostalgic
comedy of boozing, bowler hats, and bathing beauties in the 1890s rarely
surfaces on television or video, let alone in big-screen revivals. One look at the
first shot and the film's disappearance is no wonder: the camera opens on a
saloon window emblazoned with "Nigger Joe's," and then proceeds to step on
every ethnic and racial sensitivity it can find.
From urchins throwing rocks at "chink" shop windows, to references to
"guineas" and "coons," to two Jewish rag merchants physically dragging an
unwilling customer into their shop, the script by Howard Estabrook (Hell's
Angels) provides a fiesta of equal opportunity offensiveness. A pair ofbrewery barons who gargle their "r"s like vaudeville Germans are less
disturbing, though, than a sequence of Chinese workers trapped in the flames
of a burning laundry and screaming for help while rival fire brigades brawl in
the street, ignoring their cries.
Scorsese's Gangs of New York
If this sounds familiar, it's because Gangs of New Yorkhas a similar
showdown between dueling volunteer fire brigades, in one of several bows
Martin Scorsese makes to Raoul Walsh's film. Where Scorsese's grim plot of
revenge is set in 1863, an entire generation earlier, Walsh's deals with two
historical celebrities whose exploits and rivalry filled tabloid headlines in the
Gay '90s, New York rogues Chuck Connors and Steve Brodie. Screenwriter
Estabrook pits them against each other in a series of challenges, the most
extravagant and well known being a dare to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge
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Jackie Cooper plants one on Wallace Beery
Although Beery was well established as a silent screen villain (memorably
menacing Louise Brooks in William Wellman's Beggars of Life), he only
achieved popular stardom in 1931 when he turned sentimental to play a dim
palooka in King Vidor's The Champ. When pug-faced Jackie Cooper
squeezed tears out of the big lug, Beery won a Best Actor Oscar1. As insuranceto nail down the success ofThe Bowery, Zanuck adds Cooper as "Swipes,"
the tough-but-lovable orphan, aka "the little squirt," whose sole plot function
is to soften Beery and reprise some of those Oscar-winning tearjerking
moments.
For romance, blonde Fay Wray (fresh from the fist of King Kong) shows up as
an innocent novelist. A beauty for Beery's beast? No, actually just a trophy tobe passed back and forth between the leading men (and showing the same
lack of chemistry as Scorsese's romantic leads). When Wray pulls on a flimsy
robe to cover her scanties to answer the door, gentleman caller Raft tries to
make a move on her. The way the battle of the sexes worked in 1933, when she
rebuffs him, he gains respect for her and proposes that they "get serious,"
missing a chance for pre-Code daring.
Wray maintains her dignity no mean feat in such boisterous company but she keeps a guarded quality, as if she had reason to distrust her director or
co-star. Actually, it's redheaded tart Pert Kelton, as an untalented but bawdy
showgirl, we want to see, even if she's singing "Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay." Wray
and Kelton, blonde and redhead, innocent and experienced, embody those
familiar ladies, the Madonna and the Whore. As critic Otis Ferguson
remarked elsewhere, we hope this tradition is "a diaper that we have put away
for good."
This backhanded salute to turn-of-
the-century New York was Darryl
Zanuck's choice to stake the success
of his foray into independent
production. Zanuck had parlayed
some scripts for dog star Rin Tin Tin
into a job as head of production at
Warner Bros., and then pushed the
studio into concentrating on its
torn-from-the-tabloids dramas,
showcasing proletarian stars like
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roughly the same as Jailhouse Rockrelates to the present.
Not many films today are so directly pitched to the lowest common
denominator, in cheerful celebration of ignorance. When Beery decides to join
the army at the start of the Spanish-American war, he is revealed as illiterate,
only able to sign an "X" on his enlistment papers. In fact, he has to ask,
"Who's we fightin'?" Playing along with the entertainment values here, RaoulWalsh actually knew better: as early as 1915, his still affecting Regeneration
gave a serious look at a social environment scarred by unemployment,
alcoholism, malnutrition, and child abuse that produced the criminal gangs.
A lobby card from the film
Although the no-frills production shows only a soundstage New York, The
Bowerydoes trot out other colorful historical characters, including Carrie
Nation (who leads her "army" to wreck a saloon) and pugilist John L. Sullivan(played here by Walsh's brother, George). Almost a decade later, Walsh
revisited the period in two of his best entertainments, the noisyStrawberry
Blonde in 1941 and the livelyGentleman Jim in 1942, where Errol Flynn
also encountered John L. Sullivan, only played by Ward Bond. (Scorsese's film
also reproduces a big boxing match on a river barge, a stratagem to evade
land-based police that figures in both the Beery and Flynn pictures.)
If Scorsese's rival gangs strain for mythic grandeur as they brandish theirmeat cleavers, Walsh aims only for slapstick history, cartoonish violence with
the pace of a pinball machine. His males are braggarts whose emotions stay
on the surface: if they have interior lives, Walsh isn't interested in them. They
might be overgrown schoolyard bullies, grinning but with bottles in their fists,
except they've never been to school. Puffing out his chest like Foghorn
Leghorn, Beery might as well climb on a fence and cry "cock-a-doodle-doo."
The only crime in their world is cowardice, while the highest value is
enlightened fair play; thus, Raft refuses an offer of drugs, refuses to use brass
knuckles, and refuses to finger his pal to the police, yet has little compunction
about hoodwinking and slugging his rival. When he agrees to jump off the
Brooklyn Bridge for a bet, it is only because a dummy will be substituted at
the crucial moment. When the dummy gets stolen, Raft really has to jump. At
this point, with unintended irony, the filmmakers try to get away with
substituting a real dummy. It's not really Raft jumping, but then it's not really
the Brooklyn Bridge either, just a composite of stock shots.
With all the bluster and juvenile horseplay,
nobody on Walsh's mean streets seems to work
h ( d h i i h ' h
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exhilarating release from phony verbal fig leaves as TV viewers did later when
Archie Bunker let his prejudices hang out? In a contemporary review, New
York Times' critic Mordaunt Hall seemed unfazed by the language, and much
more interested in the costumes which he terms "often clownish conceptions
of those of the past."2
Any movie that features a running gag of exploding cigars was probably notintended as social commentary, yet it cannot escape history. Surely the heroes
ofThe Boweryserved as the seeds for the next generation's gangsters: when
Prohibition arrived, their connections and distribution base made them
naturals for making a killing as bootleggers (or politicians). However, Walsh
loves all his rambunctious males, portraying them warts and all, and never
pushes the viewer into judgments, even when his heroes are authentic
murderers, as in High Sierra andWhite Heat.
In interviews, Walsh often repeated Jack Pickford's wisecrack about him, that
"your idea of light comedy is to burn down a whorehouse." With no sting of
reality intended, The Boweryis best enjoyed in this spirit, straightforward
and untroubled by complexity, for its energy and sunny disposition. But even
as a pencil sketch of history, you can't help wondering, was it really necessary
to burn up those Chinese workers in the laundry too?
Notes
1. Officially, Beery tied with Fredric March (for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) for the Best
Actor Oscar of 1932, but more than one source claims this was a cheat. One version
says that "Louis B. Mayer was confident that Beery would win and was aghast when
Fredric March's name was announced. Mayer and his minions marched backstage to
check out the matter and learned that Wally had lost by one vote. Mayer influenced the
Academy that one vote was so minimal a win that a second Oscar should be bestowed.
Thus for the first time in the brief history of the Academy Awards, a tie was
announced." (James Robert Parish, with Gregory W. Mank, The Hollywood Reliables,Westport, CT: Arlington House Publishers, 1980: p. 61).
2. The New York Times, October 5, 1933, p. 24.
February 2003 | Issue 39
Copyright 2003 by Robert Keser
ACCESS: The Bowery is available on VHS from amazon.com, reel.com, and other such
venues, cheaper on occasion from ebay. That other film oh yeah, Gangs of New
York should be out shortly. For those who must have "Wallace Beery underwear," headto this accommodating website.
ALSO: More film reviews
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