THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE (78)

Directed by: Raoul Walsh (1941)

Starring: James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Rita Hayworth, Alan Hale

The Pitch: A young dentist in 1890s Brooklyn has a crush on the local beauty, but settles for her less glamorous friend.

Theo Sez: Conceived as nostalgia, re-visiting the 'old neighbourhood' of Cagney and Walsh's turn-of-the-century boyhoods ; still works on that level - double-distilled now, with 60 additional years to get nostalgic about - but works even better as character comedy, and best of all as a missive from the same generous, irresistible world Walsh created even more memorably in GENTLEMAN JIM a year later. It's a Fordian world in many ways, heady with the frontier spirit, fond of fisticuffs and lots of comic bluster (Alan Hale in the Victor McLaglen role), only without the underlying sentimentality about Honour and Duty - a rambunctious, wide-open world that rewards courage and persistence, where the only crime is cowardice and the highest virtue is compassion : as in GENTLEMAN JIM, the hero's apotheosis (and redemption) comes through being magnanimous in victory. Above all, it doesn't judge - the theme may be rather conservative (don't get ideas above your station, basically) but it emerges without diminishing the characters or taking away anyone's dignity (cf. something like BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY, which twists things so the Hugh Grant character comes begging for forgiveness ; Walsh would never do anything that crude), and the film positively relishes its hero's faults : playing a none-too-bright hothead with a good heart (and a semi-permanent shiner from fights started and lost), Cagney finds the vulnerability in his persona and brings out something even rarer in De Havilland's seldom-seen sense of mischief (it's a shame they make her conventional in the second half, but it also underscores that she's just like him, her feminist big-talk just a lot of bluster : they're soulmates, which is also why they're shown doing parallel things when he's in jail and she's waiting on the outside). They start off sneering at each other, end on a tender portrait of a happy marriage and share a wildly romantic park tryst in between, starry sky by James Wong Howe, scored to the strains of "When You Were Sweet Sixteen" (one of the loveliest melodies I know). Both yearning and high-spirited, recollecting the past in a haze of waltzes, catch-phrases ("That's the kind of a hairpin I am!"), youthful blunders, courtship rituals, wounded feelings, Walsh's camera looking on in amusement. Funny, laid-back, and wondrously touching.