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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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