That was an excellent one.

best movie i've ever seen.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Fans of auto racing should like this one. There is lots of footage of old racing showing various crash scenes, drivers careening around tracks in cars without roofs (going through clouds of dirt!), and occasional fires on the track. Billy Arnold, Fred Frame, and many other real race drivers appear in the film, and there are scenes from Indianapolis, which had been racing the 500 since 1911.There is also a love story, though this is a Cagney-Blondell film in which the two are adversaries. Cagney is a race car driver who doesn't want to marry his girlfriend with benefits (Ann Dvorak), Blondell's friend, taking her for granted. He has a younger brother (Eric Linden) who also wants to race cars, and he hypocritically wants to protect him from booze and "loose women" like Dvorak and Blondell. Things get complicated when his brother falls for Blondell, and tragic when he causes the death of a fellow driver.This is not great cinema or anything, but it does have Cagney/Blondell, and an interesting story line, and it's unique with all of the vintage auto racing.

...instead it mainly confounds! Cagney did not like many of these early programmers that he got stuck in over at Warner Brothers. He felt them a waste. I would tend to disagree with him in most cases, but this time he was somewhat right.Cagney plays top line race car driver Joe Greer. He's sleeping with and really actually living with Lee Merrick (Anne Dvorak), plus he likes the booze. Cagney is taking a train to his home town and treats Lee like a tell-tale whiskey bottle. She has to be stowed away along with his booze or else his virginal green kid brother, Eddie, will somehow be corrupted by her. Nothing makes a girl feel like a tramp more than being treated like one. Plus, to add insult to insult, Joe thinks that any girl that is a friend of Lee's must be a tramp just because she's Lee's friend after all. What a jerk.During his trip home, Joe finds out Eddie (Eric Linden) has been trying his hand at racing himself, and in the end Joe decides to take Eddie under his wing and introduce him to professional racing. Well, this means that Lee can't travel around with Joe anymore, and he basically puts her in cold storage - seeming to continue to support her, but staying away. Lee convinces her friend, Anne (Joan Blondell) to break Eddie's heart and corrupt him so she can hurt Joe through Eddie.Well, life is what happens when you're making plans, and Anne and Eddie actually fall for each other, as in wanting to get married, something Joe never offered Lee. When Joe finds out that his kid brother has been corrupted by Anne, he tells her to lay off, but both Eddie and Anne tell Joe to kiss off. The topper is when Joe finds out that Lee arranged the whole thing and Joe promises revenge for all concerned out on the racetrack. These things never end well.A supporting character through this whole thing has been race car driver "Spud" (Frank McHugh). He's a nice guy, sober, everybody likes him, and he has an adoring wife and lovely kids. His baby's shoes are his good luck charm when he drives. So you just know in this rather obvious film you are waiting for two things - for Joe to wise up and eat a little humble pie and also for Spud to become mashed potatoes.I'll let you watch and see how this all turns out, but I think you'll see the ending from a mile away. The question I was left with was, what DOES Anne see in Eddie? He really projects no personality whatsoever, and though Eric Linden is actually just three years younger than Joan Blondell, the age difference between the characters seems much larger than that. It is not that Joan seems old, not at all. It's just that Eric Linden seems so two-dimensional. Even when Anne is trying to explain her love of Eddie to Lee, all she can ever say is "oh that kid".I'd recommend this one just to see that the success of some of Warner Brothers' precodes and early programmers lay in their talented cast, not in the script. This is a good example of that.

As suggested in another review there was probably stuff left on the cutting room floor that would have filled in some holes in the plot. Still I disagree that we don't get the gist of this gripping melodrama or that the racing scenes aren't great. Cagney is a hard-boiled champion Indy driver, who goes a little psycho when his younger brother wants to follow in his footsteps. Suddenly, the girlfriend who loves him isn't good enough and her friend is a tramp. Before you can say "You dirty rat!", the two brothers are alienated and the girl is broken-hearted. This sets up a great rivalry on the track and some heated racing scenes.I beg to differ with the fussy earlier reviewer who lamented that the racing scenes were over edited. I found these scenes riveting and brilliant. Moreover, they convey a strong taste of a brand of racing long past where death was not so rare. They also show us film of some of the great cars of bygone days in action. Nowadays we are jaded with television cameras on board most high level events. But this footage rivals the modern one for pace and context with the advantage of placing us in a wilder sport. The track is more dangerous, the cars more primitive and of course modern racing is much more civilized.However, the character Cagney plays is remarkably like many modern day racing greats living and dead due to their daring ways. maybe in their childhood they saw Cagney in this flick.

This race-car drama, directed by Howard Hawks, was a personal project of his: Hawks had a lifelong passion for stock-car racing, and he persuaded several top racers to appear in this film as themselves (although demonstrating very little screen presence). I was expecting 'The Crowd Roars' to be quintessential Hawks: a two-fisted he-man drama, with the girly stuff kept to a minimum. In the event, I was surprised at how much 'chick-flick' material is in here, and pleasantly surprised at how well it works. A substantial amount of this movie is emotional drama between the four leads, in the implausibly spacious apartments occupied by the characters played by Ann Dvorak and Joan Blondell.James Cagney stars as Joe Greer, a stock-car driver at the top of the game: he's just won the Indy 500, and his hero-worshipping kid brother Eddie is eager to follow in his skid marks. Eddie is played by obscure actor Eric Linden, whose Noo Yawk accent blends well with Cagney's, but who otherwise failed to convince me that they were brothers. Annoyingly, Cagney attempts to dissuade Linden with that cliché "It's not for you" dialogue that I've heard in a dozen other movies: the one where the guy who's hugely successful in his profession attempts to convince someone else to stay out of that same profession. Guy Kibbee, in a tiny role as the Greer brothers' father, is excellent and absolutely convincing as the proud dad.Cagney has a poorly-defined romance with Dvorak, who spends all of her screen time in monotone mode ... except for one emotional monologue in which she turns on the waterworks and is surprisingly effective. Dvorak's friend is played by Joan Blondell, so I expected this role to be played in Blondell's usual 'weary dearie' mode. Again, I was pleasantly surprised. Elsewhere, I've mentioned that I always find Blondell coarse and common on screen. Here, she's amazingly good: she wears a tasteful outfit that shows off a couple of shapely gams. (When did they turn into hams?) This is the only movie in which I've seen Blondell play a realistic human being instead of a bundle of clichés. But we still get some of the standard Warners thick-ear dialogue: 'Ya can't grow wings on that guy.'The racing scenes, necessarily, involve editing these actors into authentic stock-racing footage, so there's unavoidably some very bad shot matching. What's less pardonable (because it was more avoidable) is some very bad audio matching on the soundtrack. We *see* thousands of people in the stands, all reacting as a race car bursts into flames ... but we *hear* what sounds like maybe six women squealing. Almost as if to make up for this lapse, during the chick-flick scenes there is some very scrupulous shot matching. I was especially impressed by a two-camera set-up in a dialogue scene between Dvorak and Frank McHugh. He holds a lighted cigarette in his hand throughout the scene, and the smoke in Dvorak's set-up matches the smoke in McHugh's set-up. Also, McHugh's cigarette is burnt down to the same length in both set-ups. Most movies aren't this careful!Obscure actress Charlotte Merriam, as McHugh's wife, has one powerful scene in which she rushes onto the track during an auto race, like a suffragette at the Grand National. (The undercranking here is obvious.) It's a shame that this scene did nothing for Merriam's career. Character actor Edward McWade has one excellent sequence.This movie is more confusing than it needs to be. There are two different characters cried Red, and two named Spud. Cagney and Linden spend most of the movie as rivals, but there's a last-minute reconciliation that seems to have been left on the cutting-room floor: it certainly isn't in the movie.SPOILERS COMING. The last scene in the movie finds Cagney and Linden in an ambulance, bound for hospital, with two rival drivers bound for the same hospital in another ambulance. With one of those would-be 'cute' Hollywood touches, the two sets of passengers urge the ambulance drivers to race each other through the streets. I really despise the cult of speed for the sake of speed: every year, a few innocent people get killed because of idiots who think that a public highway is their personal dragstrip. Race-car driving doesn't work very well as a vehicle for macho movie heroes, since it relies so heavily on stunt doubles, stock footage and (in this case, very badly done) rear projection. The romantic scenes in 'The Crowd Roars' actually work better than the macho gearshift stuff, and I'll rate this movie just 5 out of 10.