In many ways, the first half of Alfred E. Green’s Smart Money can be seen as a stage-setter for John Dahl’s game-changing Rounders—that’s game-changing from a poker perspective, not a cinematic one, mind you, though I do love me some Rounders! Like Dahl’s 1998 film, Smart Money focuses on a small-time gambler with a hunger for more: Nick “The Barber” Venizelos (the always superb Edward G. Robinson), a barber with a knack for cards, dice, and other “games of chance.” The small-town Nick the Barber, a big winner and minor legend in tiny Irontown, is drawn to the biggest games in the big city, and initially finds himself hustled and overmatched across the board, both by poker shark Sleepy Sam (Ralf Harolde) and your average dame selling cigars at the hotel, who suckers him out of $100. Mental domination, it appears, isn’t quite as simple under the bright lights, where hustlers seem to fill every corner. But like Rounders’ Mike McDermott, Nick bounces back with a vengeance, eventually cleaning Sam out of $50,000 in a heads-up match (here, 5-card stud; in Rounders, no-limit holdem before the boom), before taking charge of the city’s gambling scene, much to the chagrin of the District Attorney, who’s up for re-election and intends to snuff out the illicit affairs by any means necessary.

As in so many American underworld pictures of the early 30′s, Smart Money has a dramatic rise-and-fall arc, but it’s silkily executed: Robinson’s tremendous performance, aided by strong supporting work from the omnipresent James Cagney as Nick’s right-hand man, bolsters his evolution from the small stage to the grandest. The pacing is far better than in Little Caesar, another Robinson vehicle released the same year. Nick learns from his mistakes (or most of them; his weakness for blondes eventually bites him in the end), and channels these lessons into his progression. It also helps that Nick is one of the more interesting protagonists I’ve seen from the ‘gangster era.’ While he’s plenty tough enough to reach the top, getting revenge on the men who conned him and the pretty lady who duped him, he’s also a generous spirit, often to his detriment. At its core, his heart is always good: there’s a bit of Robin Hood in him. And yet, like the anti-heroes in Badlands and Natural Born Killers, Nick also has an obsession with playing it up for the media: his final straightening of the tie and pose for a photos is just perfect. Smart Money’s substantive depth sets it apart from many of the good-but-not-great genre entries of the period, and I have a serious quibble with those who rank this as a middling effort hamstrung by mediocre direction.

76/100

A powerful story of wartime bonds and their staying power through the most adverse of circumstances, Raoul Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties follows the 30′s gangster films tradition of portraying the rise-and-fall of nobodies to the apex of the underworld—to quote another Walsh/James Cagney feature, the fantastic White Heat (1949): “I’m on top of the world, ma!”—before their time running their respective towns runs out. Eddie Bartlett (Cagney), George Hally (Humphrey Bogart), and Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn) are serving in the same unit near the conclusion of World War I, and share their dreams of peacetime livelihoods, only to be greeted by massive unemployment (and lack of a GI bill, which didn’t become law until after WWII) upon their returns to their respective worlds. Eddie, who’d expected his old job at a garage to be waiting for him, finds his position filled and options scarce: he’s about to give up until his buddy and roommate Danny Green (Frank McHugh) offers him an opportunity to make some money driving his taxi. After meeting the club owner Panama (Gladys George) on a trip, he’s introduced to the world of prohibition-era bootleg alcohol, and the starved-for-self-importance Bartlett finds an audience in the starved-for-alcohol general public. Along the way, he joins up with his old war pals, and hires the quiet-natured Hart as his lawyer while partnering up with the edgy, fiery Hally to expand his rapidly-growing business.

Of course, romance is in the air (when is it not?), and a rivalry between Eddie and Hart threatens their friendship, while a battle of egos challenges Eddie and George’s loyalty to each other. Under normal circumstances, they would have been at each other’s throats from early on, but Walsh deftly portrays how deeply their time in the trenches remained ingrained within them—Eddie in particular shows a restraint not often seen in this sort of picture. These undertones keep The Roaring Twenties from drifting into clichéd territory, as Eddie’s racket grows, then teeters, but his bonds with these men—as well as Jean (Priscilla Lane), the apple of his eye who inspires a matching sensitivity—remain nearly unbreakable under the most tenuous of circumstances until the very end. Cagney is magnificent here: while he’s more intensely dynamic in White Heat, his performance in The Roaring Twenties is extremely layered, ranging from down-in-the-dumps, to full of conceit, to stoically resolved. Bogart’s work as George is mostly par for the course: I wouldn’t say he’s on auto-pilot, but it’s not a difficult role for him to thrive in. The rest of the cast is unanimously effective. Walsh controls the pace very well, with none of the problems in character progression that plagued, say, Little Caesar. The Roaring Twenties never quite catapults itself to greatness, but it’s consistently strong in all facets with few, if any, glaring holes.

69/100

To say that Meek’s Cutoff brings up the rear when ranking Kelly Reichardt’s three movies is hardly an indictment, given how I love Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008). Though it has some kinks, Meek’s Cutoff is an admirable entry into the Western genre, one that I prefer to the Coen’s True Grit (2010) as recent attempts go. The year is 1845, and in Oregon’s desolate Cascade Mountains, soon after the Oregon Trail was born, a small group of emigrant families have hired the supposed mountain expert Steven Meek (Bruce Greenwood) to lead them through. The families, particularly the women, quickly realize that Meek is in over his head, and as they trudge deeper into nowhere, supplies and morale low, they begin to bicker about whether to rely on Meek’s questionable judgment any longer. A surprise encounter with a Native American straggler, whom they’ve been bred to distrust and disdain, throws the group into further flux, as they dig deep inside themselves to sort out who to trust and who to detach themselves from. Minimalistic, genre-bending interpretations of the Western have been around for awhile, with films like Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome (1959) and Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) eschewing shootouts and saloons for atmosphere and interaction, and Meek’s Cutoff can loosely be classified in this category…but in some ways, it goes even further. This isn’t the Wild West of lore, even in its most basic setting.

Reichardt chooses to predominantly tell her tale from the vantage point of the women, particularly Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams): Meek is mostly viewed through the appropriate lens of the outsider that he is. Meek’s Cutoff is clearly a work of passion for Reichardt, who supposedly spent countless hours sifting through old documents to make sure that the smallest details were historically accurate. On this front, Meek’s Cutoff certainly feels like an unmitigated success: the costumes, set design and terrain all feel exceptionally naturalistic, like the mountains in Old Joy, without a drop of Little House on the Prairie cheesiness. It’s more of a mixed bag from a narrative perspective, though. While it’s terrific to see Reichardt continue to channel her inner Nicholas Ray (Wendy from Wendy and Lucy and Emily Tetherow evoke Ray’s penchant for strong female protagonists), Meek’s Cutoff doesn’t really warrant being 20 minutes longer than her previous films. There are basically only eight people in the entire picture—the three families, Meek, and the unnamed Native American—and the extreme restrained approach sometimes works beautifully (a standoff between Emily and Meek; a testy vote about their ultimate fate), and sometimes feels unnecessarily stretched out; the sequences with the Native American front-and-center are Meek’s Cutoff weakest links. Ultimately, though, there’s more to admire than quibble with, especially the cinematography—where Reichardt’s use of a 1.33:1 aspect ratio mirrors the enclosed world the era’s women found themselves trapped in, and long shots capture the vast emptiness of the mountains—and the cast, a uniformly strong bunch led by Williams, Greenwood and Paul Dano of There Will Be Blood fame. Meek’s Cutoff may not match Reichardt’s previous two works in emotional heft, but it continues to cement her as a strong director to watch closely.

68/100

In the spirit of Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), here we have another strong, if lesser-known, depiction of the ruthless, cutthroat newspaper industry. In tone, it’s closer to  Kane than the more satiric Friday, though it should be noted from the start that Park Row, while chock-full of strong attributes, isn’t in the same class as Welles’s über-masterpiece. Still, these comparisons are far from exact, for Park Row, thanks to the always-fascinating Fuller, has its own identity, a nervous energy that mirrors the mercurial director’s style and apparent personality. It takes place on the title street, a Wall Street-for-newspapers in the 1880′s where all the journalistic titans  jostle for position, readers, and the latest hot scoop. Convinced that his employer Charity Hackett (Mary Welch), the owner-through-inheritance of the biggest of big guns (The Star), is selling out the industry’s integrity for a few extra bucks, headstrong Phineas “Mitch” Mitchell (an excellent Gene Evans) rebels along with a bunch of other upstanding employees and finds himself axed before he knows it. While spewing his vision of the upstanding, noble things he’d do if he owned his own paper—over a substantial amount of drinks, it should be noted—an eccentric-and-wealthy-as-hell, elderly gentleman who’s heard versions of Mitch’s rant before decides he’ll back the vision this time…and poof! The Globe is born! And from its birth spawns an all-out war on Park Row, as Hackett’s capitalistic approach battles Mitch’s predominantly ideologically pure vision (a hint of taint accompanied his ride to power) for street, and breaking news, supremacy…all while a touch of admiration-and-loathing-driven-love (we all know the type) lingers in the air over every screaming match and underhanded act.

Fuller nails the various manners in which one can run a company here: Hackett, a businesswoman with no particular affection for the intricacies of the newspaper industry or the passion it breeds in its true fighters, cares only in profit margins and crushing the competition. She views Mitch’s quest for getting out the news first and regularly as petty: if their goals are aligned, it’s by chance only, as their priorities couldn’t be more different, with Mitch thirsting to get out four editions a day so New Yorkers are up-to-the-minute with their scoops (as the film progresses, there’s a certain blurring of this difference). Park Row‘s portrayal of this fiery world feels right on point, and Fuller’s history as a reporter and burning passion for the topic matter—he nearly bankrupted himself in order to make Park Row, a film that generated very little interest from the studios at the time—pay dividends in the authentic set designs and snappy banter. There’s nowhere near the emotional resonance or layered substance of Citizen Kane, but Fuller’s nonstop intensity and strong performances all around keep things consistently engaging and provocative, and certain sequences practically smolder with energy. Serious film buffs are well aware of Park Row‘s existence and excellence, but more casual, exploratory viewers are advised to seek it out as well.

73/100