The Crowd Roars (1932)

Excellent but underrated film

Did you people see the same film I saw?

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Fans of auto racing should like this one. There is lots of footage of old racing showing various crash scenes, drivers careening around tracks in cars without roofs (going through clouds of dirt!), and occasional fires on the track. Billy Arnold, Fred Frame, and many other real race drivers appear in the film, and there are scenes from Indianapolis, which had been racing the 500 since 1911.There is also a love story, though this is a Cagney-Blondell film in which the two are adversaries. Cagney is a race car driver who doesn't want to marry his girlfriend with benefits (Ann Dvorak), Blondell's friend, taking her for granted. He has a younger brother (Eric Linden) who also wants to race cars, and he hypocritically wants to protect him from booze and "loose women" like Dvorak and Blondell. Things get complicated when his brother falls for Blondell, and tragic when he causes the death of a fellow driver.This is not great cinema or anything, but it does have Cagney/Blondell, and an interesting story line, and it's unique with all of the vintage auto racing.

I found it interesting that only one previous reviewer mentioned the poor matching of actual footage and rear projection of the racing scenes. For me they were a deal breaker. In virtually every switch the position of the cars changed. On the dirt track the announcer said the younger brother's car was in front while the footage showed it third. At Indy where the numbers 2 and 4 cars are shown way out front, the rear project shows them back in the field. These mistakes aren't rare, the are consistent. And when the cars run through the burning gas slick, it's obvious that after a few circuits someone poured more on the track. Come on guys! What could have been an exciting film just turned into head-shaker for me.On the other hand, the women in the film held it together with excellent acting. Ann Dvorak's opening scenes where she expresses her fears are especially noteworthy. Joan Blondell is fine as the love interest and no-nonsense wife. The men are just cardboard characters. A real misfire.

Here is a movie with a split personality; any scene with James Cagney in it is captivating: Cagney plays a generally unlikable race-car driver with his usual brand of fanatical intensity, and the wonderful tics that make Cagney Cagney: physically and psychologically manhandling the men and women around him, adjusting his tie and jacket with a formal roll of his shoulders, spitting out lines like a machine gun. Wonderful stuff! But when he is off screen, you may or may not care that much. The pace is fast, with classic Warner Brothers 1930's dialogue, but... Ann Dvorak gets tiresome with her endless weeping and paranoid, irrational devotion to a man (Cagney) who mistreats her so...and Eric Linden, as Cagney's little brother, is just plain not appealing, and his harsh New York City accent doesn't help. Joan Blondell is his girlfriend. It doesn't work, because she is a beautiful mature woman, and Linden looks to be about 14 years old.There are some interesting things to look for in this film. Frank McHugh, Cagney's best and most ubiquitous Warner's supporting actor, plays, unusually, a wise married man, rather than his normal unattached, not too bright hanger-on. He does still get to do famous high-pitched "ha...ha" laugh a couple of times.Being a pre-Code film, look for unmarried couples in the film living in sin! And as noted by other writers, the old racing films are quite fascinating, but the endless close-ups of Cagney, Linden and NcHugh pretending to drive in front of obviously fake projection screens are tiresome indeed.Cagney's work toward the end of the film, when he plays a contrite and humbled Joe Greer, is extremely appealing, probably the best scenes in the movie. There is something quietly awesome about this little man with a critical mass of energy, desperately hanging on to a last thread of self-respect and dignity. These are beautifully acted indeed. And the scene where his tightly-wound emotions finally bubble to the surface and he collapses in sobs is definitely a highlight moment, one that I can watch over and over again.Keep your eyes on Cagney, and you won't be disappointed. And in these little throwaway movies that Warner relentlessly pumped out in the 30's, does the plot even really matter? Just give me more Cagney!

James Cagney must have felt darned silly greasing up, donning goggles, climbing into a race car, and making dumb faces while a rear-projection Indy 500 played behind him. He's an ace driver, a daredevil on the track and a cocky alpha male, mistreating his unconditionally supportive girlfriend and attempting to steer his uninteresting younger brother away from a racing career. The script's practically a textbook of genre cliches, from the best buddy whose death-on-wheels gives our hero a guilt complex to the sibling rivalry that is mysteriously resolved, offscreen, in the last reel. Cagney's justifiably celebrated skill and charm can't make us care about this misogynistic, unlikeable blowhard, nor can it make his rapid descent into drink, vagrancy, and hunger (or equally rapid rise back to the Indy) credible. Howard Hawks was already making fast-paced, psychologically sound male-bonding flicks, but even he's flummoxed by the hoary melodramatics of this one. The ladies have little to do but play weepy-loyal (Ann Dvorak) and sarcastic-loyal (Joan Blondell), but they come off best.