Though he directed two final films after a decade off, this uncommonly dark story of murder & redemption, something of a backwoods CRIME & PUNISHMENT, was Frank Borzage’s real swansong. (He was only 54.) Reaching back to the romantic visual stylist of his late silent prime at FOX (where F. W. Murnau’s work had infected everyone), Borzage revives much of his old form with a miasma of romantic fatalism he rarely showed in even his best sound films. You don’t expect ravishing studio artifice out of Republic Pictures, yet here it is. From a brutal walk-to-the-gallows opening, straight into two rhymed scenes showing the effect it’s had on the dead man’s son, now grown into a haunted Dane Clark, still defined by a stained past. He’ll kill a man over it, then go thru a series of denials & admissions, nearly losing his two best friends thru more violence (a backwoods Negro dog-handler wonderfully played by Rex Ingram and Harry Morgan’s trusting simpleton), as well as the woman he’s long loved, Gail Russell with her strange corrupted beauty. Sheriff Allyn Joslyn follows behind, holding off arrest in hopes of a volunteered confession. (He’s a small-town Inspector Porfiry straight out of Dostoevsky, and not the film’s best conception.) Loaded with painterly flair and studied compositions that don’t worry about calling attention to themself, you have to wonder if Borzage knew this film would effectively be his last.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: As Dane’s independent-minded/off-the-grid Grandmother, Ethel Barrymore gets the biggest billing for the smallest screen time in Hollywood history.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: With his compact frame, short fuse & low center-of-gravity stance, Dane Clark got about as close to the Jean Gabin romantic thugs of ‘30s French Poetic Realism as any Hollywood actor. At least, in this film.
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