Easy riders and raging farm boys: Robinson and Davis glow as adult lovers in Kid Galahad, Bogart broods beautifully in Invisible Stripes, now on DVD

Nicky Donati (Edward G. Robinson) handles fighters, a vocation that allows him to pull the puppet’s strings with one hand while collecting the take with the other. They pass through cities, living out of hotels, shrugging off the coming and going of small fortunes, Nicky and his partner Fluff (Bette Davis), while Nicky’s beloved mother (Soledad Jiménez) and sister Marie (Jane Bryan) are cloistered in the countryside and the convent respectively, away from the mugs, bon vivants and hangers-on. From Fluff, too. So at the heart of Kid Galahad (1937) is a man with a double life, a more forgiving existence if you need to seriously bend your ethics and still be able to look ma in the eye.

“Did you ever see a bellhop that didn’t want to become a fighter?” Nicky asks, but it’s a rhetorical question. He discovers Ward Guisenberry (Wayne Morris, remarkable in a tricky role) when the kid is sent up by the hotel management to fix drinks for a party that genuinely looks like a gas, with Fluff working the room in a very sexy low-cut dress and Nicky actually getting a haircut from a proper barber in a proper barber’s chair while still holding court, surrounded by mostly plastered guests. Ward is a good-natured hulk from the sticks with an involuntary smile that has the ladies fawning. He just wants to save up to buy a farm, he sheepishly confesses. Nicky sees a perfect mark. Fluff sees an innocent in need of an education, and maybe a little protection from his new mentor. Thereafter dubbed Kid Galahad, Ward will, against Nicky’s plans, become the biggest thing that ever happened to Nicky, punching his way to the championship. He’s also the catalyst that will usher Nicky’s well-ordered life into chaos.

Now on DVD from Warner, Kid Galahad is a truly wonderful picture, directed by Michael Curtiz in elegant traveling shots and a selective use of close-ups in only the most emotionally pointed scenes. The script is credited to Seton I. Miller, and offsets the fairly familiar plot with an intriguing milieu thick with exploitation—the press, the management—and with immensely textured, very adult characters experiencing different kinds of love. A budding romance between Ward and Marie drives the action, but what makes the film so rich are the increasingly desperate Nicky, whom Robinson makes a feast of—and there’s a terrific scene with ma, rolling along in babbling, un-subtitled Italian—and, most especially, Fluff. Davis’ inhabiting of this sort of kept woman, with her sad, helplessly easygoing smiles, is so tender and touching, so knowing. The scene where she tells Nicky it’s time for them to part is underplayed and quietly heart-wrenching. These unmarried, not young lovers have had a good ride, a long history of hustling, bustling and merriment that has finally reached its terminus.

I haven’t mentioned Humphrey Bogart, who plays Turkey, Robinson’s rival, and another in a long line of heavies. Better to emphasize his terrific supporting role in Invisible Stripes (39), also newly on disc from Warner and, while not nearly as good a film, features plenty of interesting elements. We first meet Cliff (George Raft) and Chuck (Bogart) while they share their final shower in Sing Sing. After walking through the prison gates—guarded by a saintly old guy named Peter—they board a train and exchange their plans for their newly emancipated lives. Chuck fantasizes about a gorgeous blonde and the high life, while Cliff says he’s going home to his family and the straight and narrow. Chuck just laughs at this, telling Cliff he’ll never get anywhere because of general prejudice against ex-cons, because he’ll always be wearing those invisible stripes. Cliff’s the hero of the movie, full of good intentions; Chuck’s a gentleman in his way but a cynic—yet, as we’ll eventually see, it’s his worldview the movie agrees with completely.

Through the characters of Cliff’s little brother Tim (William Holden, so young here I didn’t even recognize him, which is to say so young he isn't yet 'William Holden') and his girl Peggy (Bryan), the film emphasizes the self-loathing of the working class and the impossibility to rise above one’s station without the aid of dirty money. Raft was not a good actor, but you could rarely accuse him of overdoing it, and his overriding serenity can just as easily be read as mounting resignation here. With no breaks coming his way and the cops breathing down his neck, Cliff eventually falls back into crime with Chuck and his cohorts—among them a pleasingly sneering Marc Lawrence—telling his folks that he’s selling tractors instead of robbing banks. The movie’s best line comes when Tim meets Chuck, well-heeled and driving a fine car, and asks him if he sells tractors, too. The way Bogart just says “Yeah” in response is a thing of bone-dry comic beauty.

Invisible Stripes seems like its building to a conventional, tidy moral statement, yet, perhaps unintentionally, it finally emerges as an exercise in brute determinism. Indeed, the noblest and wisest character turns out to be Chuck, who may be crooked but at least knows the score, and who’ll finally risk everything to protect his one true friend, right up to the final shootout. And Bogart’s so confident and subtle, measured and cool, playing a character so carefully shaded he’s almost out of place. Surely someone with smarts saw this and realized which one of these tough guys was the real star. It would be only two more years before High Sierra (41) and The Maltese Falcon (41).