The Public Enemy (Warner). Director at an executive meeting: "I've got an inspiration. Well make an African picture. Something new. Go right into the interior and use natives for actors. Nothing like Trader Horn. This one's going to be different. Now what will we call it. Trader what?"
With that anecdote current last week in the film industry, critics wondered if an executive had asserted that The Public Enemy was not going to be anything like Little Caesar. In detail The Public Enemy is nothing like that most successful of gangster pictures, but its central idea is identical—dissection of the criminal mind by reconstruction of one criminal's career. You see James Cagney as a tough boy led into petty thieving. He moves higher, into the bigger business of robbing storage lofts. He rises to become an outstanding rumrunner and a journeyman of homicide until his bullet-spattered body is dumped in front of his mother's house. His more sentimental pal, Edward Woods, provides a milder development of the same theme. The Public Enemy is well-told and its intensity is relieved by scenes of the central characters slugging bartenders and slapping their women across the face. U. S. audiences, long trained by the Press to glorify thugs, last week laughed loudly at such comedy and sat spellbound through the serious parts. Unlike City Streets (TIME, April 27), this is not a Hugoesque fable of gangsters fighting among themselves, but a documentary drama of the bandit standing against society. It carries to its ultimate absurdity the fashion for romanticizing gangsters, for even in defeat the public enemy is endowed with grandeur. Best shot: two young gangsters scared to death on their first "job."
Dude Ranch (Paramount). Jack Oakie, Eugene Pallette, Stuart Erwin and Mitzi Green have an hour of good fun in a comedy which is partly a satire on westerns, partly a melodrama in its own right. The idea is one of those really comic inspirations whose single disadvantage is that they can never be made quite as funny as their intention. Bored guests, feeling that frontier atmosphere has become effete, are about to leave the dude ranch when the proprietor hires a troupe of vagrant actors to provide glimpses of primitive life. They stage a melodrama in the lobby in which the business of "unhand that woman" and "the viper beats my mother" is used with proper gusto. Genuine bank-robbers bring excitement to the closing sequences, in which Oakie proves that his heroism is more than histrionic. Typical shot: Pallette, as a pseudo-Sioux chief, trying to understand why, if a girl is Sue (Sioux) her father is not Sioux also.