Run For Cover (Nicholas Ray, 1955)

[The following is a contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blog-A-Thon for Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder.]

Though not as wild as Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray's lesser-known follow-up, Run for Cover, likewise deconstructs the West as a place of mythical individualism. The former inverted gender roles, used vivid color to paint a surreal and demonic vision of the West and crafted an anti-McCarthy allegory that ate at the genre as much as the political realm in which Ray operated. The latter continues to eat at the romanticized lawlessness of the West, going so far as to begin with a dangerous misunderstanding that prompts mob violence without any shred of proof or rationality.

After meeting at a waterhole and engaging in a brief stand-off that soon turns friendly, Matt Dow (James Cagney) and studly young Davey Bishop (John Derek), set off together to the nearby town. When they stop to shoot at a hawk, the workers on a passing train, having just been held up, assume these two are more robbers and toss out a sack of money. Before Matt and Davey can return it, the workers reach the town and exaggerate the story to whip up a posse, leading to the shooting and permanent injury of Davey. When Cagney confronts the posse with the truth, their resolve freezes. Even when backed by numerical superiority, people will go to great lengths to make James Cagney less angry.

As a depiction of mob violence trumping civilized order, Run for Cover never reaches the operatic heights of Johnny Guitar's Trucolor conflagration, but Cagney's undiluted presence gives this more elegant film some of the bite one expects of a Ray film. Even so, this is not a film that plays on the explosive Cagney. Before I had heard of this film, I found myself thinking how great it would have been if Ray, that most passionate of directors, had collaborated with Cagney, that most passionate of actors. My delight at learning of their actual partnership soon turned to surprise as I saw the two craft something more elegiac than forceful.

The wounded Davey recuperates in the home of the Swensons, a Swedish emigré father and daughter who planned to head to California without realizing the scope of the country and ran out of money before reaching their destination. Their subplot is a dour one: they set up in the town to make enough money to get to California, but because they were broke they couldn't hire anyone to work the land. Because they have no one to work the land, they cannot make any money to realize their dream. The daughter, Helga, accepts this with resignation, and she looks at the arrival of Matt and Davey as a spark of life in her trapped existence. Matt begins to court her, and when she notes that, traditionally speaking, she shouldn't even be speaking alone with him, the coy, boyish smile that crosses Cagney's face takes 20 years off, until he's the same young buck who burst onto the screen in the early '30s.

Like the protagonists of several of Ray's films, Matt has to make his own family after the loss or alienation of his own. Imprisoned for six years on a false charge (hence explaining his hatred of mobs and their swift, directionless vengeance), Matt got out to a wife who had long since left him and a son who would be about Davey's age. Ergo, he uses his courtship of Helga and his surrogate fatherhood of Davey to fill the holes in his own life. Though 21 years her senior, Cagney's effervescence makes his wooing of Helga more lilting and charming than predatory, and he still asks the father—to whom he is far closer in age—for permission for her hand. (He does so in an amusing game of chess where he clearly lets the father win and the father jovially calls him out on it and admires the man's shrewdness in tacit flattery.)

Where Run for Cover's depiction of a chosen family differs drastically from, say, the makeshift nuclear unit in Rebel Without a Cause is in the reaction of Davey. Jaded and embittered by his wound, Davey looks for any excuse to give up, and despite a flash of initial enthusiasm, he recognizes Matt's gesture of making him deputy is just a patronizing way of giving the boy something to feel good about. Not only does Davey reject these attempts at indirect adoption, he undermines Matt's authority and ethos as sheriff, effectively rebelling against the father figure he never accepted in the first place. While Matt continues to uphold an idea of law as the new sheriff, Davey often lets things lapse in the elder's absence. When Matt returns with a robber he has assured will get a fair trial in his town, they ride up and see a dead man's feet swinging in the air and the sound of revelry coming from the mob in the saloon, celebrating their slaughter.

The final act, in which a robber who was Matt's cellmate recognizes him and causes the town to suspect him of being in cahoots with the criminals and a chase ends in arrow-ridden Comanche territory, dips into the realm of the excessively grandiose after the more graceful tone of what came before. Nevertheless, Ray finds the beauty and grim elegance of a forced double-cross and the lonely ride to a doomed scenario. Whether framing a disturbingly serene shot of Matt and Davey overlooking the massacred gang with "so it goes" finality or descending into a makeshift underworld for the climax, Ray always manages to make something memorable of even the most questionably plot turn.

As was demonstrated with Helga's story, the Wild West is not so free as it seems, and money controls the destinies of its inhabitants just as it does everywhere else. Money prompts the climactic betrayal and leads to a misunderstanding that plunges Matt into a guilt that Dean's Jim Stark could not even begin to fathom. If the horrid resolution to Rebel Without a Cause shows a disgusted falling-in-line with acceptable social parameters, Run for Cover's end is of a more senseless kind, a punishment on an almost cosmic scale for a man who may never escape the fate that was unfairly thrust upon him and now repeated in grisly terms. And just as the solidified union of Jim and Judy is tainted with trauma, so too is the peaceful dénouement of Run for Cover completely undone by the knowledge of what Matt and Helga won't have in their lives. He was capable of happy endings, but has a director ever inserted more unsettlingly ironic ones than Ray?

White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)

When I posted my review for The Public Enemy recently, I was lambasted by a Cagney fan for spoiling the movie, something I found amusing because A) it is 80 years old and B) as any fan of a Cagney gangster picture should know, the crux of the movie is always in his grisly demise, because nobody died like Jimmy Cagney. Even before the Hays Code took effect, Cagney turned his deaths into a form of reckoning, not moral so much as existential. Even at his most ignoble, Cagney makes such demises so compelling that he infuses the worst brute with tragedy.

Well, they don't get much more brutish than Cody Jarrett. The film opens with Cody carrying out a train heist with great timing but ruthless sloppiness. The other crooks dispatch two men on-board the train, but Cody's viciousness comes out in calmer moments, prompted solely by one of his subordinates using his name in front of the engineer and fireman. Compounding this horror is the release of steam when the fireman falls on a release, inadvertently maiming one of the robbers. In less than five minutes Raoul Walsh crafts a world of such violence and death that one could guess its outcome even without the legendary "Top of the world, Ma!" conflagration that ends the film.

Even by Cagney's standards, this is a furious performance: Cody is a man wracked by his madness, so explosive and all-consuming that he is occasionally torn apart by his rage in splitting migraines. Cagney's clipped, punchy delivery has never sounded more sinister, and Cagney plumbs new depths for the lows that follow these manic highs. Underneath Cody's mania is an emotionally stunted man-child, a boy who used to fake headaches to get his mother's attention then came to rely on her when those headaches became real. Indeed, "Ma" not only knows of her son's lifestyle but accompanies and supports him as he hides out in a mountain safehouse.

Walsh's film is so grisly and cynical it stands out even among other noirs. This is a film where the protagonist leaves a scalded man to die alone, and even sends in a conscience-ridden hood to kill the poor sap. This is a film where no one is safe, and everyone is always scheming. Unfortunately for Cody, everyone plots against him, from his two-timing wife (Virginia Mayo) to the undercover agent (Edmond O'Brien) posing as a cellmate when Cody sneakily surrenders himself for a lesser crime that occurred at the same time as the train robbery.

That's the sad truth of Cody, of so many Cagney gangsters: they spend so much time sure of their own smarts that they don't realize how small-time and clumsy they are. That train robbery seems so skillfully planned, but it falls apart so quickly even though it succeeds. But despite the four murders and the grandiose madness we see in Cody, it is not a cop nor an FBI agent but a mere Treasury investigator named Evans (John Archer). Cody thinks he's so clever for taking the rap for a lesser crime and doing a short sentence, but Evans is already one step ahead, and Verna and double-crossing right-hand man Ed are already plotting taking over the gang.

Cagney manages to play this omniscient awareness through a clueless Cody without breaking from the character to telegraph his fate. He plays Cody's reliance on his mother less as easy Oedipal love than outright infancy. When Cody retreats into the safehouse bedroom to have his migraine, Cagney pounds the bed like a petulant child as he wrestles with his pain. Walsh stages an unexpectedly wrenching moment in prison as he moves in a lateral track down a dining table as Cody asks a recent inmate his mother is, the camera tracking the passed-down whisper to the man and tracking back as the dire, one-word answer creeps back to Cody. When he receives the news, Cagney explodes in agony, his incoherent moans of sorrow echoing around the hall as guards try to subdue him but are punched out in succession. This is Cagney at his most epic even as he shows a man at his smallest, and the moment is as terrifying as his final standoff.

That standoff is justly famous, one last example of Cody's almost Stalinist grip over his gang, the members of whom have the option of shooting at surrounding cops until killed or being shot by Cody for attempting to surrender. The literally explosive end is your standard combustion, but as Cagney screams that now immortal line, his epic funeral pyre feels as nuclear as the glowing terror that brings Kiss Me Deadly to an abrupt close. White Heat is postwar noir not at its most nihilistic, but certainly its most directionless and agonized. The title gives it away: Cody's rage is not focused enough to be blue flame, but that aimless fury is blinding.

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.

William Wellman follows Tom Powers (Cagney) from a childhood of petty crime through a bootlegging adulthood. As a kid, Tom is already disrespectful and criminal, hardened by his poor upbringing and the financial hardships that come with it. The physical ones, too; when his father grabs the belt to beat his son, Tom defiantly asks, "How do ya want 'em this time, up or down?" referring to his pants. As a teenager, Tom's larceny has upgraded to bank robbery for local crime boss Paddy Ryan, a job he bungles, leading to the death of a friend and the murder of a police officer. When Paddy refuses to take the boys in for incurring the wrath of the cops, we see Cagney's rage for the first time, powerful but unfocused by youth.

Cagney perfectly paces his performance: that fleck of rage in his teen years gives a glimpse of his fury, but Tom checks it because he has enough composure to understand the repercussions of unchecked anger. But as he grows up to work the lucrative bootlegging game, that sense dissipates. Cagney blows through speakeasies like a whirlwind, seducing women who are more than willing even when he's already got a moll or two on the side. When he finds out bar owners aren't selling Paddy's beer, he threatens violence even though he knows these poor guys clearly already got threats from rival gangs.

Eventually, that rage follows him home in his dealings with both friends and lovers. The infamous grapefruit scene between Tom and his main squeeze, played by Mae Clarke. Put upon by Tom's anger issues and infidelity, Clarke finally snaps at him, and the look that passes Cagney's rat face in an instant is terrifying. The idea of someone getting a grapefruit shoved in her face is, on paper, so ludicrous it's funny, yet the uncontrollable wrath that momentarily warps Cagney into a German Expressionist silent villain saps all any humor from the scene, which is so draining in a flash it's tempting to cry with the poor woman.

Elsewhere, Tom comes into conflict with his brother, Mike (Donald Cook), who grew up a decent man following the straight-and-narrow path and has nothing to show for it, even before the Depression hits. The roar of the Roaring Twenties obscures the time period in our minds, making it seem a time of prosperity and parties, yet class disparity was massive. Mike, the shellshocked WWI veteran who works hard, gets only scraps for his work, while Tom stops in pompously to give blood money to his mother, the only person he respects. The commentary is clear: the only way the average Joe got ahead during the time was through seedy elements, while good, hardworking people got screwed.

Aesthetically stiff—it has all the hallmarks of early sound cinema and the inhibited soundproof camera—The Public Enemy makes up for its basic visual construction with a madcap world of overripe characters. Cagney is playing for the rafters, but he does not eclipse everyone; Mia Marvin, in the first of only three performances (all uncredited) plays an "older" woman (she wasn't even 30) who seduces, possibly even rapes, a drunken, incoherent Tom. Jean Harlow appears as a leggy blonde who captures Cagney's attention when he grows bored of Clarke, and neither her youth (she was only 19 at the time) nor the underwritten role she plays stop Harlow from announcing herself as a true presence. This is the film that catapulted Cagney, but Harlow makes a case for her own breakout; she'd be dead in six years, but she still managed to leave behind a sizable filmography.

Yet the aspect of the film I love most is the ending, which perverts the crime doesn't pay retribution to come. Instead of the police cracking down on the crime, a gang war springs up for dominion of the area. Later scenes crackle at the edges with paranoia, with sound used cleverly to make Tom and his lifelong friend Matt (Edward Woods) duck for cover, believing any rapid, mechanical noise to be gunfire. But at last that paranoia is proved justifiable, and an enraged Tom goes to get his revenge. His inevitable death is ingeniously shot, mostly elided yet occasionally graphic. Tom is denied an action-packed, Romantic death, instead silently kidnapped off-screen after killing a rival and dumped at the feet of the brother who was finally ready to forgive him. This isn't a matter of delayed justice finally acting on Tom; it's merely a visualization of the unstoppable cycle of violence in the criminal world, everyone always avenging someone else. It's like war in that respect, which is perhaps why Mike ultimately comes to understand his brother, only far, far too late.