The director Raoul Walsh infused this rowdy comedy, from 1933, with his memories of roughhouse New York of the Gay Nineties and inflated it with legends of earlier times. The stout, glad-handing Chuck Connors (Wallace Beery) runs the street’s gaudiest saloon but is outsmarted at every turn by the slim, suave gambler Steve Brodie (George Raft), who steals Connors’s thunder with the ultimate P.R. stunt—jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. The sentimental side involves a refined young woman (Fay Wray) who stumbles onto the road to ruin, and a ragamuffin (Jackie Cooper) whom Connors takes in and calls his own. But the casual and constant violence, the drunkenness and gambling, the punished and unkempt bodies, and the mercurial swings between gutter and glory lend Walsh’s raw, raunchy film a pungent authenticity. He caught the chewy, gimcrack accents, the grotesquely atavistic manners, and the ugly, unquestioned racism, which is repellently prominent from the film’s first shot onward. More on Wikipedia
Watch The Bowery (1933)
