Whatever your opinion of early talkies, you’re in for a jolt when you see Law and Order (1932), recently released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber. It isn’t just the bravura camerawork or the arresting performances by Walter Huston and Harry Carey, or its unstated comparison to the Prohibition era in which it was made. Everything about this compact movie is impressive, climaxed by a lightning-paced shootout on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona. That sequence alone is worth the price of admission. I can’t imagine what audiences of 1932 thought of it. (It was reissued with a new title years later, yielding the garish poster shown above.)
I was introduced to this unheralded movie by William K. Everson, who naturally knew about it and showed it decades ago. (This is reaffirmed by another late, great proselytizer—and filmmaker—Bertrand Tavernier, in a welcome video interview on this disc.) The director is the all-but-unknown Edward L. Cahn, who followed his brother Phil into the world of film editing at Universal Pictures in the late 1920s. Apparently he had fresh ideas that found life in such films as The Last Performance, The Man Who Laughs, and All Quiet on the Western Front. He and his brother worked together as a team on Law and Order.
Cahn was given the opportunity to direct two other startling and original films in 1932-33: the bold, visually striking crime and corruption drama Afraid to Talk, shot by Germany’s outstanding visualist Karl Freund, and Laughter in Hell, an ambitious failure to bring the celebrated hobo author Jim Tully’s work to the screen.
Cahn’s partner in crime on Law and Order was pioneering cameraman Jackson Rose, whose knowledge of lenses and filters was second to none. He is best remembered today as the man who originated (and at first self-published) The American Cinematographer Manual. What a team they must have made, especially when Cahn and Rose got their hands on The Broadway Crane. Specially built for the 1928 musical Broadway, this gigantic contraption enabled the filmmakers to back up on a Western street and then soar to the second story window and take us right inside the room–all in one seamless take.
The crane sat on the Universal back lot, mostly forgotten. When I interviewed Hal Mohr some fifty years ago, he told me he felt wistful every time he noticed it, standing idle on the Universal property.
Naturally, a film benefits from good casting, and one couldn’t ask for a better actor than Walter Huston in the leading role of Wyatt Earp (here called Frame Johnson to get around the lawman’s litigious widow.) Huston is great, as always, and this film gave an important boost to his son John, who is credited with Adaptation and Dialogue, only his second Hollywood assignment. Screenplay credit goes to Hollywood veteran Tom Reed, with Richard Schayer listed as Scenario Editor. (Somewhere along the line there was a female character whose part was cut from the picture; she was played by silent star Lois Wilson.)
Huston and Carey make a formidable duo who travel the West in the company of like-minded fellows played by Russell Hopton, a capable actor who’s all but forgotten today, and Raymond Hatton, who starred for Cecil B. DeMille in the teens but by this time was settling into secondary and sidekick parts. Validating the film as a bona fide Hollywood western is Russell Simpson, whose career started in the silent era and continued into the 1950s.
Andy Devine has the most unusual role in the picture as a dimwit who takes pride in being the first man to be legally hanged in Tombstone. Devine’s real-life cohort Walter Brennan has more screen time but gets no billing. How ironic that four years later he would win the first of three Academy Awards. (The two actor pals must have befriended Universal’s casting director as they appear, briefly, in virtually every studio release of the period.)
Kino Lorber’s flawless disc includes a commentary track featuring my old friend Max Allan Collins, who chats with podcaster Heath Holland and discusses the work of author W.R. Burnett, whose extraordinary career ranged from Little Caesar to The Great Escape. He actually visited Tombstone, Arizona in 1928 and talked to old-timers before writing the novel Saint Johnson. One can presume that calling any character Saint would have been protested by industry censors and church-going customers. Being familiar with the lawlessness of the Prohibition era in Chicago it should come as no shock that the busy Burnett also worked on Howard Hughes’ production of Scarface. He later reunited with John Huston on two significant films, High Sierra and The Asphalt Jungle. What a career!
As for director Cahn, he somehow wound up directing Our Gang comedy shorts at MGM, then drifted into the world of B movies and spent the rest of his life making competent but unremarkable features at a dizzying pace. Among his many credits: Creature with the Atom Brain, Shake! Rattle and Rock!, Gunfighters of Abilene, and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. He never again had the opportunity to tackle material as provocative and inspiring as Law and Order. He worked until 1962 and died the following year at the age of 64. His nephew Dann Cahn made a career for himself as an editor and worked primarily in television, with a long hitch at Desilu.
As an extra treat, Kino Lorber has added another Harry Carey Western to the Blu-ray disc, a Library of Congress scan of a low-rent vehicle called Without Honor, also from 1932. It’s a minor endeavor, but an hour spent with Harry Carey is never an hour wasted. Toby Roan adds a fact-filled commentary.
