A fun Hollywood melodrama
Only a semi-Western, being more
a gangster film set in gold-rush California than a proper oater, Barbary Coast is nevertheless a fun Hollywood melodrama with some
excellent performances, and is important as only the second Western (if Western
it be) of the great Joel McCrea.
Gold digger with piratical crime boss
Howard Hawks and his writers
Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur start us off in the fog on a large sailboat out
of New York approaching San Francisco. (At least we are assuming Hawks/Hecht/MacArthur
start us here; Hawks replaced William Wyler, and Edward Chodorov and Stephen
Longstreet also wrote some of the screenplay, uncredited.) An amusingly roguish
eye-patched Old Atrocity (Walter Brennan) rows the heroine, Mary (Miriam
Hopkins) to shore. Brennan was doing the cranky old-timer act he made his own, playing
an apparent septuagenarian (he was 41).
Old-timer, 41 (only 3rd in the appalling shirt contest)
Miriam soon meets and enters into an
overacting contest (which she wins on points) with Edward G Robinson. EGR, as
Luis Chamalis, looked (relatively) svelte still in the mid-1930s and here is
dashing in his ruffled shirt, silk vest and dangling single silver earring,
giving him a piratical air. He is boss of the Bella Donna saloon and, it soon
transpires, crime boss of San Francisco too.
Fog in Frisco
There are assorted other
characters. Colonel Cobb (Frank Craven) is a pioneering free-press journalist, a
favorite idea of Hawks’s. (I wonder if he was related to Henry Hull’s Major
Cobb in Jesse James; his brother,
perhaps). EGR soon smashes his type and any thoughts he might have of telling
the truth about gangsterism in Frisco. Then there’s Brian Donlevy as Louis
Chamalis’s chief thug and henchman Knuckles: he is a real tough egg and very
well played by Brian Donlevy. Donlevy was usually pretty poor in Westerns but
he was always good in a saloon, for some reason (see Destry, for example). Donald Meek (with an awful cod Scottish accent) is cheated in
Chamalis’s saloon and determined to get his revenge. Donald was, though vertically challenged,
usually less than Meek in films.
Curiously, the third-billed Joel
McCrea, very handsome at 29, doesn’t appear at all until 40 minutes in. He is
the romantic lead - romantic in all the senses, a Byronic Shelley-reading Easterner,
Jim Carmichael, who falls for Mary. Joel is a forty-niner digging for gold. Miriam, of course, plays another kind of gold-digger.
Byronic runner-up in the appalling shirt contest
McCrea, Brennan and Robinson
have clearly entered a competition to see who can feature the worst shirt ever worn
in a Western. Joel’s is a high-waisted Robinson Crusoe raglike effort, Brennan’s
a disgusting undershirt of quite repellent characteristics and Edgar, who wins
this round (also on points) sports a selection of ruffled monstrosities that no
one could ever have thought attractive, even in 1935 (or 1849). Sam Goldwyn's comment was probably "Fire the costume lady". We wouldn't say that nowadays.
We'd say costume person.
We'd say costume person.
Winner of the appalling shirt contest
The one who acts the socks off
the lot of them, though, is Harry Carey. From his stunning entrance onwards, in
frock coat and pants stuffed into his boots, looking as Sam Elliott must always
have dreamed of looking, in handlebars and wide-brimmed Stetson, ten feet tall, Carey, as Sheriff
Jed Slocum, is simply magnificent. He has more sinister intentions for establishing law ‘n’ order than mere arrests and he ain't no Sunday-School teacher.
The vigilante theme and the
Californian lynch mentality that is installed in the gold-town is grim and well-handled.
Noir
The exteriors are very well
shot by Ray June. Of course he was well-known for making those MGM pictures
look so glossy and big-budget, even if they were programmers. There’s loads of
atmospheric Frisco fog and waterfront murk. There’s something almost Dickensian
about the picture. It’s more than a little noir.
And there are not many movies which climax in a frantic fogbound rowboat chase. It
was the Bullitt of its day.
Dickensian
Spoiler alert (as if you care): rather surprisingly, everyone,
even the gold-digger, EGR and Brennan, does the decent thing at the end. Only
Knuckles dies hard.
Good stuff!
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