Johnny Apollo
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List Price: $12.98
Features
• Black & White
• HiFi Sound
• NTSC
In Theaters : 12 April, 1940
Video Release : 05 May, 1993 |
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Johnny Apollo Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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Discipline and Punish
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It's a little farfetched that Robert Cain Junior, when forced by dire circumstance to find an alias for himself, can't think of anything but "Johnny Apollo." Talk about vain! I suppose in today's hiphop world he'd call himself "Li'l Apollo."
But there's nothing little about Tyrone Power, who makes his entrance into the movie wearing nothing but a tiny pair of swim trunks, the old fashioned drawstring kind that look like costumer designers molded wet, gray, supple canvas directly onto his amazing buttocks. He's part of a crew team celebrating a big college victory over Yale, so all the boys are roughhousing playfully with their hero, like pups in a blanket. No wonder the paparazzi want to snap his photo; however what he doesn't know is that his dad, Robert Cain Senior, has been playing close to the mark for years and he's now been caught in a complicated embezzlement scheme and he's about to be sent to prison. Henry Hathaway's mise en scene ensures that the audience is thoroughly aware, in a series of tableaux that anticipate, eerily enough, Foucauldian theories of discipline, that people are safer in prison than out on the streets, and Edward Arnold's character reminisces disgustedly about "friends," saying he has more "friends" in here than he ever did out there. What's that all about? It's one thing to hit the viewer over the head with the idea that the two societies, in prison and out, are mirrors of each other, but were 1941 audiences ready for this movie? Dorothy Lamour gets a wonderful part, for once, but for her pains she has to sing one of Tin Pan Alley's most irksome tunes, "This Is The Beginning Of The End," in which the syllable "this" is drawn out like the "O" in "Oklahoma," and then all the other words have to come rushing out in one beat. With a straight face she almost manages to sing this while looking soulfully at Tyrone Power's beat up face.
Within half an hour or so Lloyd Nolan, as the angry racketeer, is swinging both his fists into her face as she lies supine on a brocaded couch. You see his punches from the elbows only, and you don't hear the sounds of his fists connecting, but despite the restrictions of the Hays Code, it's pretty clear what's going on. It's domestic violence like Farrah in THE BURNING BED. Lloyd Nolan steals every scene that he's in with his affable grin and his mean, snakelike little eyes. You don't want to get within twenty feet of him and yet, he makes such a play for Johnny Apollo a guy could get his head turned big time. You just keep hoping that Tyrone Power's love will save Lloyd Nolan from his own excesses. The movie has an extraordinary emotional pull, and Dorothy Lamour has one amazing necklace of dangling fetishes that looks like something Iman would have worn in 1975. I want it! |
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