James Cagney Collection DVD | Movie Mail UK | DVDs and Blu-ray films direct

Star Review

James Cagney was one of Hollywood's great realists. He didn't particularly relish playing villains, but in the early 1930s, with the Depression biting hard and the Warner brothers being likely to slap a suspension on you if you so much as winced at the latest formulaic script, he (mostly) took what he was offered. There was no doubt, however, that his pugnacity suited him for the studio's gangster cycle. Moreover, he excelled at combining the cynical charm, cold calculation and hair-trigger unpredictability that made his mobsters so perilously compelling, as you were never sure when the affable rogue was going to snap into the vicious psychopath.
Raised in a tough New York neighbourhood and taught to sell a performance in vaudeville, Cagney had appeared unremarkably in a handful of pictures before he made William Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931). Legend has it that he became a star for pushing a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face. But what thrilled audiences familiar with the Prohibition crime scene was the jittery menace that Cagney brought to this brisk, ruthless portrait of a Chicago racketeer doing what it took to get to the top and stay there. The screenplay suggested that evil was the by-product of environment, but Cagney has Tom Powers revel in his villainy - right up to the moment he's deposited on his brother's doorstep to the strains of ‘I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles’.
He would play a similar character opposite Humphrey Bogart in Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939) and in White Heat (1949), although in the last he also added a dollop of Oedipal dementia to Cody Jarrett's psyche to make his homicidal hoodlum all the more dangerously deranged. But contrast the prison sequences in this criminous swansong with those in Michael Curtiz's Angels With Dirty Faces (1938). Who else could have carried off so triumphantly scenes as wildly melodramatic as the mess hall riot (on learning of Margaret Wycherley's death) and the dead man walk, in which he feigns fear to prevent the Dead End Kids from following in his footsteps? Such raw intensity made Cagney the king of the genre.

David Parkinson on 18th November 2006

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