Capsule Reviews: Other Men's Women, The Lovers on the Bridge, The Lady Eve, The Purchase Price

Other Men's Women (William A. Wellman, 1931)

Mary Astor herself called this picture a piece of cheese, but cheddar can be mighty sharp. Astor plays one of the men's women, the wife of a chirpy railroad engineer (Regis Toomey) who becomes entangled with his co-worker Bill (Grant Withers), a fall-down drunk who cleans up nicely. With only 69 minutes, Wellman doesn't have time to mess around, meaning Bill and Lily have to fall for each other with such passion they risk everything before most people can even ask what the other does for a living. Wellman's sturdy direction stands back to let the actors work, which isn't the best strategy given how unsalvageable some of the dialogue is but works best when the two men confront each other while working the same engine, the camera calmly letting the tension mount then somehow pulling back even more within the cramped space to capture their fierce, farcical fisticuffs. Things only get more darkly absurd from there, but then part of the charm of a good Pre-Code is the flamboyant yet gritty way things invariably go to hell. In the meantime, have extra fun with James Cagney literally dancing away with the show in a bit part and Joan Blondell as a diner waitress who is, except for Bill, strictly A.P.O.: ain't puttin' out. Grade: B+

The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931)

Nobody fit the Pre-Code era like James Cagney. With his handsome yet smushed face (like a dapper Cro-Magnon), Cagney captured the glamor and grime of the five-year period of big, bloody pictures like no one else. I'm mesmerized by Cagney, that compact face he always shrinks and contorts further into pure rage. Or the way he speaks lines with force and volume but always brings his victim up close for a lashing, a shotgun blast of verbal rage instead of a precise rifle shot. Some people, even admirers, say he was an overactor. I disagree; his acting is huge,but he knows exactly where to channel it at all times. I've yet to see Cagney get away from himself.

I've only seen a few Cagney pictures, but The Public Enemy shows off so much of his skill I feel as if I've tracked down every film in his corpus. One of the finest of all gangster pictures, The Public Enemy looks forward to Hays Code impositions of moral reckoning even as it subverts them. It offers up an utterly repulsive figure who is also strangely, inexplicably attractive and charming, as well as study of how crime is sometimes the only way for some to ever carve out a comfortable living. And even when the film suggests that, yes, crime doesn't pay, it does so in such a way that eschews any morally superior sermonizing.