Programme notes CH 02 — Noir After Dark
Born Reckless
A Lower East Side thief is sent to the war instead of to prison, and comes home to find the gang has kept his seat warm.
Caught after a jewel robbery, Louis Beretti is given a choice: prison, or the army in France. He comes home, opens a nightclub, and finds that a uniform does not pay off old friends. John Ford made it for Fox in the spring of 1930, with Dudley Nichols writing his dialogue in the year their partnership began; nine years later the two of them made Stagecoach. Edmund Lowe plays Louis as a man of real charm who never quite learns to stop being useful to the wrong people. Watch the first scene, a street at night, a jeweller's window and a clock: Ford sets the whole neighbourhood before anyone speaks.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- John Ford · Andrew Bennison
- With
- John Wayne · Randolph Scott · Wild Bill Elliott · Ilka Chase · Edmund Lowe · Ward Bond
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Two gang men of 1930 who try to walk away, one to a nightclub of his own, one to Florida and his memoirs. Neither film believes it can be done.