Barbary Coast

Although ranked below Howard Hawks's best films (and his best are as best as movies get), this atmospheric melodrama set in lawless San Francisco in gold-rush days has always been warmly embraced by repertory audiences. Miriam Hopkins is top-billed as Mary Rutledge, newly arrived by ship in a picturesque fog, only to learn that the fiancé she came to join has been taken suddenly dead. In short order, demure Eastern girl Mary has transformed herself into Swan, toast of the Barbary Coast and mistress of its highest-rolling gambler: Edward G. Robinson doing a ringleted 19th-century variant of his trademark gangster role. Eventually Joel McCrea, as a prospector with scant luck but a poetic streak, completes the requisite romantic triangle as ordained by screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

Robinson was always a class act, and he brings a surprising, even moving, vulnerability to the role of a man with the power to have virtually anybody killed--but not to compel Swan to love him. The movie's other most memorable presence is Walter Brennan, stepping into character-actor stardom as a toothless wharf rat who tries--and hilariously fails--to live up to his own billing as "Old Atrocity." He'd have won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor if they gave such things in 1935. They started the following year and he was the first winner--for another Hawks picture, Come and Get It. --Richard T. Jameson