Edgar Allan Pooh . . . Ann Dvorak says to James Cagney after five minutes of THE CROWD ROARS. Warner Bros. feels that Ann's observation is so important that they have Cagney repeat it to his kid brother five minutes later for the benefit of theater late-comers. Was Warner cautioning ONLY contemporary audiences about "race" cars Snailing along at Today's Go-Kart pace with this line of dialog? Obviously not, since little if any effort is made toward Realism with THE CROWD ROARS' production. Depicting "Indy Cars" tooling around on a dirt half-mile horse track in blinding clouds of dust as their tires fray faster than Firestones in a desert surely was intended then (and now) to be taken as a metaphorical allegory by Warner Bros.' always prophetic Early Warning Providers. A few years following the release of THE CROWD ROARS, Warner's future Farm Team--MGM--rehashed the Racist Confederate Red Staters' perennial fascination with and hankering for Bloody Wrecks during the opening party scene of GONE WITH THE WIND. Because Southern Bigotry could not long survive without a Fellow Traveler, Warner itself dropped the other boot stomping America to death around the same time as MGM's yawner (the snooze-fest GWTW).Warner's CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY shows large subsets of the USA's Urban Population as they fall under the sway of Rich People Party Fascism. In THE CROWD ROARS, Cagney half-strangles his sister-in-law Joan Blondell and literally burns his employee "Spud" to death in front of Spud's family. The latter incident causes Cagney to complain about Air Pollution (anticipating the Real Life on-site Nazi Death Camp wive's lament a decade later), but Cagney doesn't give a thought to Spud's widow and child. This, of course, foreshadows the Deplorable Misogyny and Miserly Callousness later epitomized by America's Fascist President #45. THE CROWD ROARS' Irish-on-Irish violence takes GWTW's Racism to its ultimate extreme, as subtle clan and class distinctions cause Cagney to reject Blondell as being "beneath" his kid brother. Warner's implication is that only some sort of Incestual In-Breeding can satisfy these insular insecurities demanding a "Purer" Breed. Warner further warns us of the dangers of putting Trainwrecks on any ballot in America: The Confederate Nazis will rig the election for the Choo Choo Crash every time!

calvinnme ...instead it mainly confounds! Cagney did not like many of these early programmers that he got stuck in over at Warner Brothers. He felt them a waste. I would tend to disagree with him in most cases, but this time he was somewhat right.Cagney plays top line race car driver Joe Greer. He's sleeping with and really actually living with Lee Merrick (Anne Dvorak), plus he likes the booze. Cagney is taking a train to his home town and treats Lee like a tell-tale whiskey bottle. She has to be stowed away along with his booze or else his virginal green kid brother, Eddie, will somehow be corrupted by her. Nothing makes a girl feel like a tramp more than being treated like one. Plus, to add insult to insult, Joe thinks that any girl that is a friend of Lee's must be a tramp just because she's Lee's friend after all. What a jerk.During his trip home, Joe finds out Eddie (Eric Linden) has been trying his hand at racing himself, and in the end Joe decides to take Eddie under his wing and introduce him to professional racing. Well, this means that Lee can't travel around with Joe anymore, and he basically puts her in cold storage - seeming to continue to support her, but staying away. Lee convinces her friend, Anne (Joan Blondell) to break Eddie's heart and corrupt him so she can hurt Joe through Eddie.Well, life is what happens when you're making plans, and Anne and Eddie actually fall for each other, as in wanting to get married, something Joe never offered Lee. When Joe finds out that his kid brother has been corrupted by Anne, he tells her to lay off, but both Eddie and Anne tell Joe to kiss off. The topper is when Joe finds out that Lee arranged the whole thing and Joe promises revenge for all concerned out on the racetrack. These things never end well.A supporting character through this whole thing has been race car driver "Spud" (Frank McHugh). He's a nice guy, sober, everybody likes him, and he has an adoring wife and lovely kids. His baby's shoes are his good luck charm when he drives. So you just know in this rather obvious film you are waiting for two things - for Joe to wise up and eat a little humble pie and also for Spud to become mashed potatoes.I'll let you watch and see how this all turns out, but I think you'll see the ending from a mile away. The question I was left with was, what DOES Anne see in Eddie? He really projects no personality whatsoever, and though Eric Linden is actually just three years younger than Joan Blondell, the age difference between the characters seems much larger than that. It is not that Joan seems old, not at all. It's just that Eric Linden seems so two-dimensional. Even when Anne is trying to explain her love of Eddie to Lee, all she can ever say is "oh that kid".I'd recommend this one just to see that the success of some of Warner Brothers' precodes and early programmers lay in their talented cast, not in the script. This is a good example of that.

Robert J. Maxwell In most ways this is a typical Warner Brothers product from the 30s or 40s. Plenty of action, fast dialog, a slap across the cheek, a punch in the snot locker, a young woman heartbroken, professional male solidarity, conflict within the organization, characters with names like Joe and Eddie and Spud, racing cars skidding perilously around the turns on a race track, and final redemption.Howard Hawks was fond of racing cars at the time, and remained so, but there isn't much of the director's signature visible here. Well, maybe some emerging part of a pattern. When practicable, the camera stays at eye level. And Ann Dvorak is hooked up with Cagney, she frets over whether she's "good enough." It must have been one of Hawks' favorite phrases because he used it, or variations on it, often over the next thirty years. Cary Grant to Jean Arthur in "Only Angels Have Wings" (1939), "You'd better be good." John Wayne to pal Ward Bond in "Rio Bravo" (1959), "You're not good enough." Sometimes Hawks adds or substitutes another favorite phrase: "Good luck to ya." The 20 and especially the 30s seem to have been decades in which hordes of daredevils were competing for speed records in one vehicle or another. Aviators like Wiley Post and Howard Hughes and Charles Lindbergh became famous. If you disappeared in the wild blue yonder, like Amelia Earhardt, they named a brand of luggage after you. The same thing was happening in automobile races here on earth. Half a dozen famous racing car drivers play themselves in this script. The only one that I'd ever heard of was Wilbur Shaw, but I assume at the time they had an abundance of celebrity.If there's nothing much new about the plot, there is one unusual scene. Frank McHugh, a Warners stalwart, is a driver whose car bursts into flame and who burns to death on the track. The shot of McHugh holding his face and screaming amid the flames is startling. And the other drivers having to pass through the smoke and the odor of McHugh's burning body is more literal than anything Hawks was to do with violence later in his career.

Shane Crilly As suggested in another review there was probably stuff left on the cutting room floor that would have filled in some holes in the plot. Still I disagree that we don't get the gist of this gripping melodrama or that the racing scenes aren't great. Cagney is a hard-boiled champion Indy driver, who goes a little psycho when his younger brother wants to follow in his footsteps. Suddenly, the girlfriend who loves him isn't good enough and her friend is a tramp. Before you can say "You dirty rat!", the two brothers are alienated and the girl is broken-hearted. This sets up a great rivalry on the track and some heated racing scenes.I beg to differ with the fussy earlier reviewer who lamented that the racing scenes were over edited. I found these scenes riveting and brilliant. Moreover, they convey a strong taste of a brand of racing long past where death was not so rare. They also show us film of some of the great cars of bygone days in action. Nowadays we are jaded with television cameras on board most high level events. But this footage rivals the modern one for pace and context with the advantage of placing us in a wilder sport. The track is more dangerous, the cars more primitive and of course modern racing is much more civilized.However, the character Cagney plays is remarkably like many modern day racing greats living and dead due to their daring ways. maybe in their childhood they saw Cagney in this flick.