This was one of Tracy's final films for Fox before he left for MGM, where his talents were given a more respectful showcase. Now I'm not actually a big fan of Tracy but I confess to having a new appreciation for the actor thanks to those scrappy, bouncy Fox films of his early career. A lot of those scripts are undercooked (like this one) and the productions are sometime rushed but Tracy overflows with personality and the attitude of a guy who got wise knocking about on the streets. "I've had every trick in the trade kicked into me," Jim tells Pop. "Now it's my turn to kick back." He presents himself with a sense of calm and control, however, like a man who is cagy about letting the world see what's he's thinking or feeling, which makes quite a contrast to guys like Cagney and Lee Tracy and the rat-a-tat streetwise heroes of the Warner street movies. He's rapacious and ruthless as a businessman yet oddly likable thanks to his unqualified affection for and commitment to his family and his confidence in the business sector, calmly but firmly making deals and giving orders that will leave victims broken.
The film builds pulls out its most impressive spectacle for the end of the second act. First the newly-expanded Dante's Inferno funhouse--an epic chamber of horrors with stage flames, sideshow gimmicks, sexy showgirls and half-naked musclemen--collapses in a disaster sequence that director Harry Lachman showcases with camera angles that take in the vast scope of the set and disorient the viewer with startling perspectives. And that's just the warm-up. As Pop tries to pass on the lesson of Dante to Jim, the screen dissolves into the film's famous inferno sequence, the wordless tour of hell with great underworld imagery of tormented (and nearly naked) souls writhing in agony in the jagged caverns and fiery pits of Hades. A few of the shots have been appropriated from the 1924 Fox film of the same name but most of the sequence was created for the film by Lachman, who was a respected illustrator and painter before turning to filmmaking, and he takes inspiration from the Gustave Dore illustrations of the 19th century edition of The Divine Comedy. With jagged subterranean caverns suggested out of paper-mache stagecraft, blasts of flame and hard light, geysers of fog and smoke, forced perspective, miniatures, and nearly naked bodies obscured just enough to get through the censors, Lachman creates a mythic hell that mirrors the real-life disaster they've just experienced.
It would make a superb climax but, thanks to ill-advised script additions, Jim doesn't take the lesson to heart and the film goes on to a whole new chapter involving courtroom trial, a luxury liner turned into a gambling palace on the high seas, and another inferno, this one sending Jim back to the boiler room below deck. It's an attempt to bring the story full circle while offering yet another epic disaster, but this one is neither as visually astounding nor as dramatically satisfying, and the special effects aren't are convincing this time around.
Dante's Inferno is an impressive film for all that, thanks largely to Spencer Tracy's sharp performance as a hustler from the school of hard knocks. Tracy's Jim doesn't take pleasure in steamrolling or destroying his opponents, but he doesn't flinch from strong-arming anyone in his way either. Yet he's downright lovable when he's with his wife and his cute, doting son (Scotty Beckett) and even with Pop. Tracy and Lachman make Jim a more interesting character than the script suggests and Claire Trevor is quite good as the lively Betty, the devoted wife who becomes disillusioned with Jim when finally faced with the reality of his moral compromises. Henry B. Walthall, who starred as "the Little Colonel" in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), underplays the moral authority nicely as Pop. And the raven-haired dancer in the luxury liner floor show is none other than Rita Cansino, the 16-year-old starlet soon to be made over as Rita Hayworth.
Director Harry Lachman is a subject for further research. He was an American magazine illustrator and cover artist who went to Paris in 1911 and became a respected post-Impressionist painter (he received the Legion of Honor in 1922) before getting involved in moviemaking as a production manager for Rex Ingram, another American abroad. After making movies in France and England, Lachman headed for Hollywood and a career largely spent making B-movies for 20th Century Fox. Before he slipped into Charlie Chan movies, he directed Shirley Temple in Baby Take a Bow (1934), Laurel and Hardy in Our Relations (1936), and this big-budget production. From the evidence of the film, he lavished far more attention on visualizing both of the film's defining infernos--the midway attraction and the fantasy sequence--than on overcoming the clichés of the story and the awkward structure of the script, but at his best he offers a spectacle that rivals Cecil B. DeMille. He left Hollywood in the forties and took up painting again, and today his canvases hang in the Prado in Madrid, the Luxembourg Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
It's a good looking disc from 20th Century Fox Cinema Archive, not restored and a touch on the soft side but well preserved with little damage and good contrasts and presented in its correct squarish Academy ratio. While the fantasy sequence is purposely shot in soft focus with layers of stage fog reducing clarity even further, the destruction of the funhouse version is sharp and clear to give it the sting of realism. The sound is perfectly fine. There are no supplements.
by Sean Axmaker
