Me and My Gal
Me and My Gal
Directed by Raoul Walsh At Film Forum July 26
Raoul Walsh’s 1932 Me and My Gal (screening July 26 as part of Film Forum’s Essential Pre-Code series) should be better-known, since it is one of those movies as authentically, recognizably American as the Declaration of Independence. New York beat cop Danny Dolan—among the characterizations that proved Spencer Tracy the signal American movie actor until Brando—represents authority while thumbing his nose at it. He’s a truly democratic hero—one of the people—who susses the bluff of street folk. This enables him to both look at petty crooks with a dare ("I’m about to hide my foot…") and fall in love with a gum-smacking waterfront diner cashier (Joan Bennett).
This is a street comedy like Hollywood doesn’t make anymore, although it was stock-in-trade during the pre-Code ’30s, when LaLa Land moviemakers simply could not ignore their origins or the Depression—different from the oddity of contemporary comic filmmakers who loll in baby-boomer privilege or critics disdaining Larry Crowne as if Tom Hanks had no business bringing up the current recession. They resent Hanks reminding viewers that what really matters is how they survive the recession together. Me and My Gal has an enthralling sense of social commonality. Walsh grasps class to revel in it, even breaking the fourth wall when Bennett’s father hosts a wedding and looks right at the audience—inviting us to a beer.
While the Hangover movies invite audiences to admire drunkards, Me and My Gal reminds moviegoers that their basic traits—laboring, loving, family and survival (including the unfairness of underclass criminal desperation)—are essentially human. Walsh looks upon the vivacity of folks interacting, helped by the enormously witty vulgate written by Philip Klein. Unlike today’s SNL-based comedies, Walsh got the spontaneous quality of improvisation. Me and My Gal is as colloquial and extemporaneous as Robert Altman’s ’70s masterpieces— especially California Split.
Although
30 years apart, these uniquely American films are distinguished by
their sense of what Italians call "verismo." There’s realistic truth in
the way Tracy’s Dolan banters with his detective buddy, or the
remarkable moments when lower bourgeois shop owners (a hat seller and a
radio salesman) deliver their spiels to our amusement and their
customers’ unhidden aggravation. (Judd Apatow and his ilk are so content
with their bourgie arriviste success that they never consider the
common annoyance of average workers and consumers.)
For these extraordinary reasons (and the plain enjoyable pithiness of the civilization-vs.-crime plotting), Me and My Gal is
very much worth recommending. Its one-time showing counters what’s
bothersome in Criterion DVD’s new box set of mid-20th-century films "The
Runaway Melodramas of Raffaello Matarazzo." These potboilers about
romance and fidelity were domestic successes for Italy’s post-World War
II film industry. They appealed to audiences’ common social and moral
codes. But they also exploited them. Matarazzo’s films exemplify why the
word "melodrama" has bad connotations. These films starring Yvonne
Sansone and Amedeo Nazzari manipulate heartfelt emotion, cheapening
democratic feelings about love, family and justice. Only in the era of
snark—when the "ironic" Douglas Sirk is valued above the more complex
Vincente Minnelli—would Matarazzo’s films be acclaimed for their
"narrative logic." The films wallow in mawkishness. They’re not the flip
side of Neorealism, but a violation of the realities that Visconti,
DeSica, Rossellini, Antonioni and Fellini depicted with great
intellectual and artistic effort.
Me and My Gal refutes
that with tremendous joviality. Matarazzo’s films are like opera
without the music. The extreme emotions of parents separated from
children, families rent asunder or lovers misunderstanding each other’s
trust need either humorous leavening or musicality to alleviate the
misery. Matarazzo deprives his audiences of both. (Although there’s a
nice moment in the 1949 Chains where stowaway emigrants sing a
song about the miserable costs exerted by the lure of America.) But
Walsh succeeds by steadily concentrating on the jokiness Americans use
to feign fearlessness or to communicate their acceptance of a less than
perfect, materially and spiritually impoverished world, seeking each
other’s succor. His surreal humor—slapstick that respects the mundanity
of life and yet is inspired by it—reveals the possibilities inherent in
working class energy and sarcasm. Badinage between Tracy and Bennett is
priceless. Its specific derision—deflating each other’s defenses and
pretensions—reveals an interest in examining social circumstances, the
linguistic aspects of human relations. Tough humor—a healthy response to
tough reality—is Walsh’s specialty. (Recall James Cagney giving a
kidnap victim some air in White Heat.) It’s what Altman revived,
as does the recent Tom Hanks film. Tracy and Bennett’s flirtation is not
sappy but charming, recognizable street bluster. When Walsh throws in a
verisimilitude detail such as a police-radio broadcast ("Calling car
3610. Woman beating her husband"), Me and My Gal justifies the loftiest standards of realism and entertainment.