The Strawberry Blonde

Raoul Walsh's The Strawberry Blonde is an urban idyll, a love story set in New York City at the turn of the 19th century.  Barbershop quartets comprised of real barbers harmonize sweetly while friends play lawn croquet or horseshoes without keeping score; bands stroll the boulevards serenading the townhomes in this quasi-mythical Manhattan.  Everyone is apt to burst into song.  Pug-ugly dogs pursue cats without much hope of catching them and boys bound by rigid codes of honor chase girls who make themselves sweetly, if teasingly, available.  Although not a musical strictly speaking, The Strawberry Blonde takes its cues from the musicals and is lavishly scored with turn-of-the-century Gibson girl tunes.  Two references help me make sense of this movie:  the first is paradoxical -- the film reminds me of the atmosphere of genteel poverty imbuing James Joyce's works:  everyone seems to drink to excess and people burst into arias to amuse one another and there is a sense that the folks in these immigrant communities live for casual pleasure:  the housewives all flirt and seem to offer themselves for adultery, the men promenade through the streets touring the bars where they sing and brawl -- sex, drinking, fighting and singing seem to be the character's principal passtimes.  (In an early scene, we see a bum, a tavern "swamper", carrying buckets of beer dangling from a long two-by-four -- the scene has the scrupulous realism and penurious fidelity to the meanness of lower middle class urban life that we see in Joyce's Dubliners or in Walsh's own very early silent film, the tawdry and brutal Regeneration.)  The other allusion that the movie inspires are the Bowery Boys films, mainstays of my own childhood.  The characters in The Strawberry Blonde are all sharply drawn, quick-thinking, multi-ethnic, wise-cracking boulevardiers -- the Bowery Boys needless to say inhabit a lower social milieu, but their self-assurance, arrogant wit, and confidence that their origin in the greatest City on Earth makes them equal to all circumstances is similar to the bravura displayed by the characters in Walsh's film.

The plot, slow to develop but brilliantly complex, involves a down-on-his-luck dentist played by James Cagney.  Cagney's carriage is comically erect and his dancer's buttocks protrude behind him like the tail feathers of fighting cock.  He spends most of the film in fisticuffs, bare-knuckle brawls that he invariably (and cheerfully) loses.  The story concerns rivalry between Cagney and a friend for the affections of two girls -- one of them a free-thinking suffragette and the other the flirtatious, teasing Strawberry Blonde played by Rita Hayworth.  The film deliberately misdirects the audience's expectation, suggesting that Biff is about to commit a terrible act as vengeance -- most of the movie is a protracted flashback.  Hayworth's "strawberry blonde" turns out to be a kind of whore of Babylon, a destroyer of men, and she is convincing in a self-confident feline way in that role.  The story darkens considerably in its last third, the part of the movie in which most of the narrative plot is compressed, but the movie is gracefully designed and, though rich in action in its last forty minutes, doesn't feel rushed.  Humiliated by blonde femme fatale, Cagney's Biff compensates by falling into a relationship with that woman's best friend, the up-to-date modern girl and suffragette played by Olivia de Havilland.  The strawberry blonde has her eyes on Biff, however, and seduces him into joining her husband's contracting business.   Biff is set up as a "fall guy" in a scandal involving shoddy materials that, in fact, results in the death of Biff's philandering and alcoholic father.  Sent to prison for five years, Biff becomes a dentist and, upon his release from jail, finds himself in a position in which he can revenge himself upon "the strawberry blonde's" loathsome contractor husband.  The darkness gathers and the film is persuasively dark for ten minutes before the sun appears again and all ends well.  (Modern audiences might well have difficulties with this film that don't bother me -- the movie is resolutely conventional and, even, oppressive in its view of gender roles; the norms that the film defends generally describe the world in which I grew up and, so, I accept them easily enough -- although with a few misgivings.  But I was born in 1954.)

It is difficult to claim profundity for a well-made studio film of this sort.  The movie's ethical stance is obvious and the virtues that the film espouses are the kind most people learn from their mothers before they are four years old.  And, yet, I assert that this kind of movie, by reason of its exquisite and ingenious plotting, has a certain kind of profundity -- it is as profound, perhaps, as an elaborately made piece of clockwork.  The movie's timing is close to perfect -- nothing lags and the emphasis and emotional effects are precisely calculated.  The actors shine like -- what do you call them? -- stars and everything is neatly tied-together.  Gestures, the wink of an eye, a picturesque phrase -- it all repeats with the exact clarity of a refrain in a popular song.  The characters speak from the heart and, despite the fact that they are stock figures, all seem to be authentic and truthful.  It would be hard, if not impossible, to improve on this film although its merits are so subtle and so intrinsic to its clever architecture that it is difficult to find the right terms with which to praise this kind of movie.