Jimmy’s respectability is ruffled slightly by the arrival of his old lookout, Avery, now released from Sing Sing (into the same wintry cityscape Jimmy emerged into years before — it’s always snowy at Sing Sing). The reprobate urges him to recall the thrills of his earlier lifestyle, and he does, via vignette:
Ah, the excitement and romance of emerging from small windows, in a blue-tinted iris effect!
Other little flashbacks show the gang emptying a safe, lurking, and enjoying fine wines. It was a rare old life, indeed.
This larcenous nostalgia soon has Jimmy whipped into a frenzy of overplaying, interrupted by the arrival of the governor’s daughter. Jimmy’s recidivist caller strikes a pose, apparently making him invisible to her eyes. The eyes of a leading lady in 1915 respond only to movement, like the JURASSIC PARK tyrannosaur.
Ruth Shepley still has on the awful combo she sported two years ago, with the addition of a fox corpse over one shoulder. But her appearance breaks the spell, and Jimmy/Lee sends his former accomplice off with a letter of recommendation for a straight job in a factory.
More cuteness with dollies, and Detective Doyle (the false Robert Cummings) is back on the case. A police chief has written to Sing Sing about another job Jimmy is wanted for.
Things are now being set up for the big finish: the bank has a new vault, and a temporary combination; our heroine has turned up, bringing her little girl (future Cagney co-star Madge Evans); the stage is set.
Jimmy is revisited by recidivist Avery, who’s rejected factory work. Jimmy leaves him alone with a tray full of cash-wads, to prove to him he’s a better man than he thinks. Risky. Then we have some missing footage.
Poor Avery (Alec B. Francis)! His reformation lost to history.
Doyle is at the door — Jimmy still hopes to escape justice — one more episode should finish this thing —
Tourneur gets over the awkward break in his story, where protag Jimmy has been sentenced to a decade in Sing Sing, with a repeated shot of marching convicts, to convey the monotony of stir, and some non-repeated angles of prisoners, presumably to convey the rich variety of life in stir.
Now Jimmy is brought to the warden’s office. I like the map of Sing Sing, whose outlines have failed to register on camera, at least in this degraded copy, so that it appears “a perfect and absolute blank” as in The Hunting of the Snark. “A map we can all understand.”
A rarity — a speech so long it requires two title cards. But in between them, the leading lady exits the room, thus enabling the speaker to use the “H” word.
This whole sequence establishes that Jimmy is pretending he can’t crack safes, and must therefore be innocent of the charges he’s convicted on. The Governor (who speaks above) is somehow convinced by this. And so Jimmy is pardoned.
(This whole prison bit doesn’t appear in O. Henry’s source story, but it’s crucial to make sure that Jimmy’s safecracking ability is in question — if it’s proved he can open safes using touch alone, he can be jailed for previous crimes.)
PARDONED! Inspector Doyle threatens Jimmy with continual pursuit until he’s finally re-nicked.
OUT! Jimmy is pardoned and immediately partners up again with his former crony. Lovely iris-vignette shot of them marching off together into the wintry exterior landscape. Almost looks like an ending but really it’s just end of act one. Yes, this has been going on a while, hasn’t it? Talk about close analysis.
On his way to thank the governor for his pardon — nice of him — Jimmy is already being presented with his next crime. A little plan of the target building with “come in” written on the doorway. This map at least is visible. Star Robert Warwick displays his stage training by giving the maplet a little swat with the fingertips of his free hand. Document-smacking is very much a Shakespearian trope. Nobody in real life does it but possibly in the days when people were required to read from scrolls…? No, I don’t buy it. We didn’t do it with photocopies, newspapers, or letters. It’s pure rhetorical thesping.
Mysteriously, Tourneur brackets this sequence with shots of the heroine, Rose, and two children. They will be important later, but their inclusion here is a deliberate provocation of our curiosity, as they have no definite relationship with the ongoing story. SHE kind of does, as she’s both the governor’s daughter and a witness to Jimmy’s criminous activities, but she’s not engaged in anything furthering the plot at the moment.
Nice shot of Jimmy, the outsider from polite society, lingering in the background as the jolly trio play a piano. The little boy then takes up a copy of Buster Brown comic. Comic book star Brown was named, it appears, after Buster Keaton, then a child star.
The little girl is Madge Evans, who will grow up to co-star with Jimmy Cagney in THE MAYOR OF HELL.
The tender way Jimmy looks at the boy is poignant — a sign that he’d like to raise a family but is locked into a DeNiro-in-HEAT lifestyle of zero attachments. An idea conveyed with zero dialogue or titles, just blocking, framing and Warwick’s expression and posture. Warwick then switches to jollity — signifying that he’s be GOOD in the paternal role — then back to a melancholic self-awareness.
Leading lady Ruth Shepley is encased in a shapeless velvety dress and jacket with fur trims with a huge cummerbund and some kind of loose necklace thing hanging to her crotch. Roll on the flapper era.
Great composition on the kids — the placement of the dolls showing humour as well as as elan. It isn’t correctly framed as a POV — it’s not from adult eye level — but it gains in cuteness by being taken from a child’s height.
Rejoining his confederate in a bar, Jimmy is despondent — he feels the lack of the respectable family life — and flies into a murderous rage when teased about “that dame.”
Nice composition in depth at the guv’s office. Ruth wearing a jacket that transforms into a short skirt with a long skirt underneath. Hard to convey the awfulness. The jacket has a centre front, as if it were a separate garment, but then the lower edge just disappears, joining onto the skirt partway round. It’s very odd.
The guv is firing a clerk. Hang onto that – it’s sure to be important later.
A basement flat. Red (Johnny Hines, a frequent Tourneur player in these days) is tinkering withhis toolkit when Johnny bursts in, announcing his retirement plans from this life of crime. He’s going to be a cashier and he’s dragging Red with him as night watchman.
Two years pass between now and the next scene so it seems like this lengthy account is
Among the things I MUST get done — a script I’m reading, one I’m writing, and blogging through THE GREAT DICTATOR and ALIAS JIMMY VALENTINE.
Last we saw, Jimmy, fleeing the law, quarrelled with his ungentlemanly confederate and threw him from a moving train. Now Detective Doyle interrogates the mangled miscreant who had landed in hospital (well, technically he landed on the railway tracks and was merely CONVEYED to the hospital). The fellow expires from his injuries — a fact conveyed beautifully by some small-scale HAND ACTING by Doyle (the first Robert Cummings).
But the dead man had in his possession a CLEW — so a brisk fade-out-and-up brings Doyle to a hotel lobby, questioning a bellhop who’s standing uncomfortably close.
Cut to one of Jimmy’s other hood pals, boldly asking two cops for a light. This one-shot scene has a walk-on by one of those random dogs who crop up exclusively in nineteen-teens movies. The days before the invention of the leash. This bold hound wanders right up to the action, forming an A composition with the featured players, then ambles off, content with his moment of fame. I expect that dog’s quite old now.
Doyle has found Jimmy’s hotel, and nabs him in a phone booth. A beautiful visual surprise when Jimmy moves to rush his arresting officer, and a bunch more cops materialise from the surrounding booths.
What we have to admire in filmmaking of this era is usually staging within a stationary shot. Maurice Tourneur is a master of it, delivering suspense and or surprise in ways you might not suspect to be even possible with such a limited toolkit. Calling this the tableau style is convenient, but tableaux are typically STATIC — and this is anything but. Only the camera is fixed.
This seems like a good place to stop for the day, even though we’ve only covered about three minutes of the film. But the location shots in Sing Sing include some humdingers — Tourneur, lover of shadows, had great fun with the RESTRICTED LIGHT of his location, which lends it reality and a genuine sense of being closed in…
shadowplay 