Programme notes CH 02 — Noir After Dark
The Doorway to Hell
A young gang boss retires to Florida to write his memoirs, and the city he organised will not let him go.
This came out months before Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, and it is the gangster picture before the gangster picture had a form. Lew Ayres, fresh from All Quiet on the Western Front, plays Louie Ricarno as a boy who has carved up Chicago like a sales territory and wants out to play golf. James Cagney, in his second film, is Mileaway, his lieutenant, already moving like the star he will be next year. The picture is told like a newspaper: it opens on the presses and closes on a printed page that tells you how soon Louie is forgotten.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Archie Mayo
- Photographed by
- Barney McGill
- With
- James Cagney · Lew Ayres · Dwight Frye · Ward Bond · Leon Janney · Noel Madison
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.