Review of The Doorway to Hell

I like Lew Ayres--he proved himself a versatile actor in everything from the Dr. Kildare series to "Johnny Belinda" to "Holiday" (which he steals from Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn) to his moving early work in "All Quiet on the Western Front." In this, a prototypical Warners gangster flick, at 21, he's a bit young to convincingly play a mob boss who lords it over a sea of bootleggers and other crooks; when he snarls, you're just not sure they'd cower in response. Plus, his right-hand man is being played by Cagney, and he crackles and grins and burns up the screen. That said, it's an interesting early talkie, happily pre-Code (Cagney has an affair with Ayres' wife, a calculating Dorothy Matthews, and the screenplay doesn't over-judge them for that), directed by Archie Mayo with some striking compositions and a slam-bag prison-breakout climax, and with some thoughtful work by Ayres. He's just not quite the commanding, charismatic protagonist you'd like him to be.