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have sat still for it. Only in the relative obscurity and security of the B world could such a vision have found cinematic expression. A summary of the plot, excerpted from Newsweek's review, gives some indication of the film's nature: Frankie Rogers, born on the wrong side of [a small town's) railroad tracks ... and his classmates prepare for graduation day under the gentle direction of their beloved teacher, Miss Williams. In order to contribute his share to the graduation exercises, Frankie breaks into a hardware shop and steals a harmonica [and $8.70). And instead of high school, Frankie goes to a reformatory. Characterized by Wallace Ford with subtle intensity, the adult Frankie is first seen in a state penitentiary. With his release he determines to go straight, but the cards ... are stacked against him. [The rest depicts) Frankie's subsequent frustration-his innocent involvement in a holdup and murder, his break from a prison death house to return to [his hometown) and his class reunion for a last glimpse of his schoolmates before inevitable capture and death .... At 35 years' remove, it is possibly difficult to differentiate this narrative from dozens of other ostensibly similar ones that served as the basis for contemporary major and minor films. Yet, though they may not be readily apparent from a bare summary, the distinctions are real and significant. Countless films of the time utilized the plot device of the underprivileged kid started on a life of crime through no fault of his own. But it is Howard's sober view that gives Frankie-beyond his poor home environment, which is more than counterbalanced by a totally supportive one at school-little excuse for the theft of the harmonica and none at all for the additional theft at the same time of cash from the store's register. It is not, as it might have been in the Warners' "social protest" (read gangster) films of the period, his drunken father or a truly no-good friend whoreally steals the money, for which act the child is then blamed, causing his unjust imprisonment and his first step onto the treadmill of crime. Whatever has made Frankie what he is, he is guilty. As he says with unaffected and unpleading simplicity, "I took it." Nor does Howard allow Jimmy Lydon (who gives a remarkable performance as Frankie the boy) any of the stock emotional appeals that very often suffused the playing of children in similar films. As he does with all the actors, the director keeps Lydon under a restraint that is dignified, persuasive and occasionally eloquent. This is the "quietness" that Hartung found so "startling," and it is an approach that logically generates far more empathy for the child (and other characters) than the more usual Hollywood attitude toward such figures, which seems to have them alternately begging for or demanding sympathy. Another and allied feature of Howard's outlook apparent in the film's performances is its total lack of rancor. The truculence and resentment that inevitably accompany the stealing and the reformatory and prison stays of many similar characters played in their adult form, for example, by James Cagney have no part in Frankie's makeup. The boy is depicted from the outset as having a sad but mature understanding of the hardness of life, and his turn to crime and its subsequent punishment he sees simply as one more manifestation of the rigor of existence. Though the film is thoroughly sentimental, it does not calculatingly employ sentimentality as a device to win easy audience acceptance. Its creator is so convinced of the rightness of his sentimental/pessimistic life-view that he feels no need to make any special pleadings in its behalf or to trick or persuade his audience of its truth; it suffices for him simply to show it. This is a requisite of personal artistic expression much less likely to find its way through the labyrinth of the egotistical and commercial demands of big-budget films. Relatedly, Howard seems at various points in the film to evoke traditional cinematic conventions for the purpose of pointing up their falsities and rejecting them. Released from prison, Frankie takes two ex-con buddies back to his hometown, where he visits the only successful member of his grade-school class, the president of the local bank. Taking Frankie on a tour, the president ostentatiously and unwittingly discloses to him the secrets of the bank's safe and its radio-beam burglar alarm. Pointedly, Frankie asks him if the bank is insured, to which the president proudly responds that it is. Having no plot point whatever, the scene is clearly intended to raise the expectation-familiar from other films-of a bank stickup by the three ex-cons and the usual dramatic device by which a character like Frankie gets back at the town that sent him to jail. And when he steps outside, precisely on cue his buddies suggest that the bank would be an easy mark. Frankie, however, instantly quashes the idea. But the irony of his reason for abstaining-"This is my hometown"-is revealed by his response to a passing pedestrian's request for directions to the Chamber of Commerce: "I don't know. I'm a stranger here." Irony is a consistent feature of Back Door but it is never sardonic or-again to dispute Nugent-never
photos this page: Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive. easy. A sequence detailing the teacher's opening of gifts from her now-grown pupils, all of whom she believes are "successful", counterposes her description of their young talents with shots of their present real-life situations: the class speechmaker is shown as a struggling lawyer unable to pay his rent, the would-be violinist as a soda jerk, the budding artist as earning drinks by painting pinups over a bar, and the aspiring singer idly warbling the film's theme lament, "I Need a Friend," alone with only a pianist in a rundown cafe. Another song, "Hometown," catalogues the joys of smalltown living and impels Frankie to return to his birthplace; but it is sung in a city style in a city dive by one of Frankie's ex-con buddies, who is a city boy with the most obvious of urban faces and manners. The touch here, however, as it is throughout the film, is distinctively gentle and low-key. This sure restraint and control culminates and achieves a homely eloquence in a scene in which Frankie returns to his boyhood home. It is undoubtedly one of the places where Nugent felt Howard let his camera "freeze" (though four or five setups are utilized) and reduced his narrative "to a series of static dialogue frames." This type of setpiece, however, had always been the basic structural unit of Howard's visual style. Though his range of features includes all manner of camera and editing stylistics (The Trial of Vivienne Ware, for example, is a delightful cornucopia of every possible visual and editing device to invoke speed-an orchestration of swish pans, flash cuts, tilts and constantly varying angles), and though he was a confessed admirer of Murnau and could move his camera with skill and alacrity (especially, as William K. Everson has pointed out to me, when he had a cinematographer such as James Wong Howe who favored a mobile camera), he seemed to reserve for his important 7
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