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THE CRIMINAL CODE (1984 review)

From Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1984 (Vol. 51, No.

609). This was published long after I left the MFB staff

in early 1977, and by this time, over seven years later,

the magazine had finally abandoned its highly dubious

practice of restricting all its reviews to single

paragraphs. –- J.R.

The Criminal Code

U.S.A.,1930 Director: Howard Hawks

Cert–A. dist—Filmfinders. p.c–Columbia. A Howard Hawks

production. p–Harry Cohn. sc–Seton I. Miller, Fred Niblo Jnr.

Based on the play by Martin Flavin. ph–Teddy Tezlaff, James

[Wong] Howe, (uncredited) William O’Connell. ed–Edward

Curtiss. a.d–Edward Jewell. m–(not credited). sd. rec–Glenn

Rominger. l.p–Walter Huston (Warden Martin Brady),

Phillips Holmes (Robert Graham), Constance Cummings

(Mary Brady), Mary Doran (Gertrude Williams), De Witt

Jennings (Gleason), John Sheehan (MacManus), Boris

Karloff (Galloway), Otto Hoffman (Jim Fales), Clark Marshall

(Runch), Ethel Wales (Katie), lohn St. Polis (Dr. Rincwulf),

Paul Porcassi (Spelvin), Hugh Walker (Lew), Andy Devine

(Prisoner), Jack Vance (Reporter), Arthur Hoyt (Nettleford),

Nicholas Soussanin, James Guilfoyle, Lee Phelps. 3,245 ft.

90 mins. (16 mm.) Original running time–97 mins.

Bob Graham, a twenty-year-old stockbroker’s clerk, is

celebrating his birthday with Gertrude Williams (whom he

has just met on the street), when a masher, Parker, makes

advances to Gertrude and Graham strikes him with a glass

pitcher. Parker dies, and district attorney Martin Brady,

after acknowledging Graham’s relative innocence in the

episode, argues to Graham’s employer Nettleford that the

criminal code dictates that he must pay for the crime anyway.

He is subsequently sentenced to ten years in prison. Six years

later: Graham agrees to join his cellmate Jim Fales in a prison

break, but Galloway, a third member of the cell serving a

twenty-year term, wants to stay in order to avenge himself

on the sadistic guard, Gleason, who lost him his parole by

reporting an infringement. Brady has meanwhile become the

new prison warden, and after Graham, shaken by his

mother’s death, suffers a nervous collapse in the jute mill, Dr.

Rinewulf urges Brady to give him an easier job. Three months

later, Graham is working as Brady’s chauffeur and attracting

the interest of his daughter Mary. He backs out of Fales’ escape

plan, which is thwarted due to an informer, Runch, and Fales

is killed. Runch is kept in Brady’s office for protection, but

Galloway, now working as a butler in the adjacent flat, contrives

to murder him. Brady puts Graham in solitary confinement to

force him to name the killer, until Mary tells her father that she

loves Graham and convinces him to become more lenient.

Galloway provokes a guard so that he is sent to solitary

confinement himself — in order to prevent Graham from

informing — and manages to grab a guard’s gun en route. After

Galloway confesses to Brady that he killed Runch and then kills

Gleason, order is restored and Graham and Mary are reunited.

The Criminal Code was one of three films made by Howard Hawks

in 1930 -– coming after The Dawn Patrol and, apparently, just

prior to Scarface (which was released two years later). It remains

one of his most neglected films, apart from the memorable

clip (Galloway’s stalking pursuit of Runch) seen on TV in Peter

Bogdanovich,s 1968 Targets. While it is far from the calibre of

Scarface, Hawks’ verve with actors and a sufficiently pungent

theme make it a good deal more than a curiosity piece, even if the

dreadfully choppy print under review often makes it difficult to

tell whether certain plot lacunae (such as the identity of the old

woman served tea by Galloway in the flat connected to Brady’s

office) should be ascribed to script deficiencies or missing

snippets of dialogue. Certainly the script often seems perfunctory

or laboured; most notably, Galloway’s labeling of Runch as a

“stool pigeon”, followed immediately by the abortive prison

break which proves his point, makes for an almost risible QED.

But the overall shape and rhythm of the story is a good deal more

solid and thoughtful, based on a convincing parallel between the

criminal code as propounded separately by Brady and his

associate MacManus (”An eye for an eye–that’s the basis for the

criminal code — somebody’s got to pay”) and the equally

stringent code of ethics adopted by the prisoners, which takes the

same position on retribution but the opposite position on

informing.

Arguably closer to a film of social protest than any of Hawks’ other

work, The Criminal Code benefited from the collaboration of several

real convicts. According to one of the interviews in Joseph McBride’s

Hawks on Hawks, the director was dissatisfied with the script’s last

act. “… [so] I got twenty convicts, got ‘em a room, gave ‘em a lunch,

gave ‘em a drink. I sat down and said, ‘I’m going to tell you guys a

story, and I want you to decide how it ends. I’ll go off until you

decide. I went off, and they talked for about an hour, and I came in

and said, ‘Are you ready to talk?’ and they told me the whole ending,

the whole last act . . .” The result is a neat balance between Brady’s

patriarchal rectitude and the legitimate grievances of the prisoners

themselves — most particularly Graham, but also Fales and even the

sinister Galloway; only the informers Gleason (guard) and Runch

(convict) register as villains.

Stylistically, The Criminal Code comes across as both a rich exercise

in the registers of late silent film (including superimpositions and

an almost Langian handling of crowds) and a busy workshop in

which many of the director’s subsequent traits are being hammered

out. The overlapping dialogue of the opening scene, and the no less

characteristic running gag which derives from it (two policemen

arguing about their game of pinochle throughout the execution of

their routine duties), offer a neat introduction to the film’s acute

sense of moral relativity, in which everyone has his or her reasons.

(Even Brady, we’re often reminded, has political ambitions, hence

ulterior motives for his decisions.)

The use of sound, while less experimental than in Sternberg’s

Thunderbolt, still seems unusually bold for Hawks, particularly in

the obsessively mannerist, repetitive use of the word “yeah” to

punctuate practically every speech as well as provide the ground

bass for the two noisy prison revolts (actually protests of noise,

identified as “yammering” in the dialogue and precipitating the

two climactic confrontations between Brady and the convicts).

Set to this ‘music’, the stalking of Runch by Galloway is virtually

staged like a ballet, and establishes Karloff’s credentials for

playing Frankenstein’s monster with striking prescience. It also

sets Karloff’s hulking star persona in place as surely as Hawks’

Monkey Business and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes consolidate

the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe.

The dark humour and stark, cartoonish portraiture of Scarface

are deftly anticipated in such details as Brady being shaved by a

convict “sent up… for cuttin’ a guy’s throat”, while John Wayne

rolling cigarettes for Dean Martin in Rio Bravo might be sensed

in the gentle way Constance Cummings takes over Phillips Holmes’

to peel potatoes in their touching kitchen scene — which is merely

one gestural beauty among many. Indeed, while most of the

acting honours in the The Criminal Code have rightly gone to

Huston and Karloff, Holmes should be credited as well for a

relatively non-actorly performance which is nearly as

functional. His stooping shuffle and unvarnished innocence

are often oddly Bressonian in effect.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Review of Richard Schickel’s D. W. GRIFFITH

From Sight and Sound (Autumn 1984). –- J.R.

D.W. GRIFFITH: An American Life

by Richard Schickel

Pavilion, £15.00

Arriving on the heels of Donald Spoto’s Hitchcock and Richard Koszarski’s Stroheim, Richard Schickel’s massive biography of Griffith manages to steer a middle course between the compulsive narrative thrust of the former and the more scholarly negotiation of diverse hypotheses pursued by the latter. Grappling with a life and personality that surprisingly proves to be no less private and elusive than Hitchcock’s, Schickel confidently leads the reader through over six hundred pages of text without ever resorting to Spoto’s questionable tactic of baiting one’s interest with the promise of scandalous revelations. And if his scholarship in certain areas raises more questions than Koszarski’s -– see the helpful remarks of Griffith scholar Tom Gunning in the June American Film, particularly about the Biograph period -– he can still be credited with plausibly ploughing his way through an avalanche of contradictory and incomplete data.

Schickel’s task is, of course, more formidable than Spoto’s or Koszarski’s, encompassing some seventy-odd years and nearly five hundred films. Earlier efforts by Barnet Bravermann and Seymour Stern to compose a Griffith biography never reached completion (although Schickel has relied heavily on Bravermann’s material). While we already possess two invaluable first-hand accounts of Griffith’s early years as a filmmaker — When the Movies Were Young by Linda Arvidson, his first wife, and Adventures with D.W. Griffith by cameraman Karl Brown — the only real predecessor to Schickel’s book is Robert M. Henderson’s D.W. Griffith: His Life and, Work (1972), which is about half as long.

For starters, Schickel’s life of Griffith marks a clear advance over his previous biographies of Walt Disney (The Disney Version) and Douglas Fairbanks (His Picture in the Papers), interesting if limited sociological forays which manage to avoid most of the hard aesthetic questions surrounding both figures, mainly using their work and careers as ‘cases’ to prop up a social thesis. Considering the dimensions of Griffith, one is surely better off without any single overriding theme or emphasis, and happily Schickel has followed this wisdom; his subtitle, appropriately, is as non-committal and open-ended as possible. On the other hand, aesthetic judgments are a good deal more plentiful, and whether or not one agrees with them, one can certainly sympathize with Schickel’s efforts to differentiate between the masterpjeces, the potboilers and everything in between.

Perhaps the two most durable achievements in the book are the dissection of Griffith’s racial attitudes and their immediate consequences (particularly in relation to The Birth of a Nation) and a thoroughgoing breakdown of his financial affairs — two complex, labyrinthine matters which have all but defeated most previous commentators. In both cases, Schickel has done his homework by combing through numerous publications and company records, and has come up with many intriguing period tidbits. On the former subject, we learn that men in Ku Klux Klan robes on horses were dispatched in the New York area to promote The Birth of a Nation in 1915, and that the National Board of Censorship (which became the National Board of Review) refused to allow any black members of the NAACP to attend an advance screening after the organization mounted an elaborate protest against the film. A decade later, Griffith’s fall from fashion is memorably encapsulated by a quote from the New Yorker during its first year of publication: ‘Mr David Wark Griffith, saintly showman . . . is indisputably the grand master of moralistic-melodramatic balderdash. He has the corner on treacle, mush and trash and automatically is out of our set.’

If any serious objections to Schickel’s overall approach persist, these basically concern his and Griffith’s respective relationships to Hollywood. History, we know, is invariably written by the victors, and Hollywood has succeeded in imposing many of its norms on our general thinking about film, giving some of them the (dubious) status of natural laws. But it is important to remember that Griffith was never a Hollywood director in any normal sense of that term, even if he tried to become one, belatedly, in order to continue making films. Schickel understands this, of course; but by repeatedly casting himself in the role of Hollywood apologist, he winds up explaining away the latter part of Griffith’s career much too neatly for comfort. ‘Hollywood had yet to conceive of itself as a cultural institution,’ he notes while discussing Griffith’s virtual lack of employment during the last seventeen years of his life. ‘It still defined itself by the industrial ideal.’ As if to imply that the Hollywood of today has moved on to higher matters.

More subtly, Schickel seems infected by the Hollywood-derived notion that it is possible to know, with immediate and supreme confidence, precisely what’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about every film released. This recipe notion of aesthetics, which Schickel shares with many of his New York colleagues as a weekly reviewer, rests on the expedient myth that in a business where enormous risks are taken, one can actually determine ’scientifically’, after the fact, why certain films and careers founder. Schickel is continually alerting us to when Griffith was making the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ creative decisions, like an agent or manager with the benefit of hindsight. Quite apart from whether one agrees with him or not (his harsh treatment of Griffith’s protracted use of Carol Dempster as a lead actress seems particularly merciless), the cumulative effect of this sort of balance-sheet analysis can only be cripplingly reductive.

A separate but perhaps not wholly unrelated problem concerns Schickel’s ungenerous and cursory treatment of the late Seymour Stern, Griffith’s official biographer for over two decades, as a ‘half-mad acolyte’. Having been acquainted with Stern in the late 60s, I can attest to the depth and passionate intelligence of his insights into Griffith, which had little to do with Schickel’s pro-industry biases. For skeptics who believe that Stern’s heated and iconoclastic polemics invalidate his work, I would recommend his exciting study of Intolerance in the Anthology Film Archives collection The Essential Cinema — an item which is regrettably absent from Schickel’s bibliography.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM