Beggars Of Life

William A. Wellman

Sog.: Jim Tully. Scen.: Benjamin Glazer. F.: Henry W. Gerrard. M.: Alyson Shaffer. Mus.: Karl Hajos. Int.: Wallace Beery (Oklahoma Red), Richard Arlen (il Ragazzo), Louise Brooks (la Ragazza), Robert Perry (The Arkansas Snake), Roscoe Karns (Lame Hoppy), Edgar Washington (Black Mose). Prod.: Adolph Zukor, Jesse L. Lasky per Paramount Famous Lasky Corp. 35mm. 

info_outline
T. it.: Italian title. T. int.: International title. T. alt.: Alternative title. Sog.: Story. Scen.: Screenplay. F.: Cinematography. M.: Editing. Scgf.: Set Design. Mus.: Music. Int.: Cast. Prod.: Production Company. L.: Length. D.: Running Time. f/s: Frames per second. Bn.: Black e White. Col.: Color. Da: Print source

Film Notes

After Richard Arlen performed feats of flight for Oscar glory in Wings, Well-man thrust him into a starkly different landscape and he found himself playing a simple Boy, on the road, homeless and looking for food. His boy happens upon a house that looks promising but instead finds a Girl, a pre-Pandora’s Box Louise Brooks, standing next to a man she killed moments prior, her step-father, after he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Outfitted in men’s clothing, with her signature bob, the not-so-girly girl decides to join the boy. They wrap up the dead man’s breakfast and set off into the great (and not-so-great) unknown. For the opening of a film, it’s violent, jarring, and immediate, and, as would come to be the tendency in Wellman’s career, features characters with nothing to their names, especially not something to lose, who happen upon each other and decide to go forth together in hopes of survival and finding opportunity. Of course the opportunity they find is none other than the highest hobo of them all, Wallace Beery’s Oklahoma Red. He starts out a brute, but eventually his gargantuan grin comes to represent the true soul of the picture, which as this is a Wellman yarn, was of course never the young lovers, but the heartless hobo who redeems himself in the end. The train sequences, particularly the ones that feature Beery and come towards the end of the picture, are breathtaking and demonstrate Wellman’s connection to the ground, to the earth the railroad tracks lie on, a connection that would be overshadowed, especially after the spectacle of Wings, by his association with the air. The moving boxcars bristle with life and spark with speed. Their movement representing freedom and the darkness and confined spaces of their insides breaking down that representation. When Oklahoma, presiding over his tribunal of transients that will determine the life or death of the boy and girl, calls for “disorder in the court”, it’s a typical Wellman joke, harshly humorous, but it’s also the key to the film and much of his forthcoming career, as Manny Farber writes: “In any Bill Wellman operation, there are at least four directors – a sentimentalist, deep thinker, hooey vaudevillian, and an expedient short-cut artist whose special love is for mulish toughs expressing themselves in drop-kicking heads and somber standing around. Wellman is at his best in stiff, vulgar, low-pulp material. In that set-up, he has a low-budget ingenuity which creates flashes of ferocious brassiness, an authentic practical-joke violence […] and a brainless hell-raising”. 

Gina Telaroli

 

 

 

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