So Far, So...

The Dancing Gangster

Hi Hello & Welcome to this week’s look at the movies and movie people that matter to me.

It’s Brando who gets most if not all the credit for revolutionising screen acting with his Stanley Kowalski in “actors’ director” Elia Kazan’s 1951 A Streetcar Named Desire, and I get that, totally. Well, not quite totally. Because just two years before Streetcar - and arguably many years before that starting with The Public Enemy (1931), this week’s movie person that matters to me laid claim to revolutionising the art of acting in film. In my opinion at least.

So it is this week I take a very quick look at one of the greatest film actors of his or any other generation, and the guy who could dance as well as he could gangster-it-up, the one the only the truly iconic

JAMES CAGNEY

The three films I’ve also chosen to take a very quick look at this week are THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931), ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES (1938), and WHITE HEAT (1949).

James Francis Cagney was born in 1899 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City to a bartending amateur boxer and an Irish mother, the second of seven (two of whom died within months of birth).

A sickly child at one stage he wasn’t expected to make it to his baptism, but unsurprisingly knowing what we know of him now the kid held out, toughed it out, and pulled through. Like so many of the great stars of that era he was born into abject poverty, and as a result ill health would dog him throughout his childhood. But the kid stayed in the picture.

He graduated High School in 1918 aged 19, attended Columbia College where he intended to major in Art but was forced to drop out after one semester and return home when his father died suddenly during the 1918 flu pandemic. After that it was numerous jobs to bring in the cash. Night door keeper, junior architect, copy boy at the New York Sun, custodian at the New York Library, bellhop, draughtsman - you name it, he did it, and all the money went to his Mom.

All the time however he preoccupied himself with two things: dancing and street fighting. He was nicknamed "Cellar-Door Cagney" after his habit of dancing on slanted cellar doors, and got so good defending his older brother Harry in fights he got involved in amateur boxing and was a runner-up for the New York state lightweight title. The flair to tap dance and the fury to fight - James Cagney was already at drama school.

He got a little involved in local amateur dramatics but in 1919, while Cagney was working at Wanamaker’s Dept. Store, a colleague saw him dance and told him about a role in an upcoming production. Only problem? Cagney knew only one dance step and he’d have to play a woman. He didn’t give one holy fuck however, auditioned, got a part in the chorus, and bagged $35 a week (a lot for him at the time). Cagney’s mother wanted him to get a ‘proper job’ however, and so whist working as a brokerage house runner he continued looking for other stage work and got himself a part in another musical, this time for $55 a week ($40 of which he sent straight home). The show was called Pitter Patter and began Cagney's 10-year association with vaudeville and Broadway - drama school part deux if you will.

After getting married in 1922 and schlepping all over touring, Cagney and his new wife Frances (a chorus girl) got on a train and made it to California. Things were a bit crappy for a few years. So crappy they moved back to New York for a while, he was cast in a production to play in London’s West End but was replaced at the last minute, and with only run-of-play Theatre contracts knocking around our boy was on the cusp of throwing it all in. But Cagney started teaching dancing whist hoofing it on stage at the same time and this kept food on the table and the wolf from the door. Street fighting & dancing still.

But. He was starting to get noticed. Kid could move. So when he and a then unknown Joan Blondell got raves in a critically panned production of ‘Penny Arcade’ it was the break he needed as none other than Al Jolson bought the movie rights, sold them to Warner Bros. and insisted they cast Cagney & Blondell in the film version. It was retitled Sinner’s Holiday (1930), our boy was put on a $500 3 week contract, and of course Jack Warner was adamant that Cagney and Blondell had no future whatsoever. Producers. Fuck me.

Despite a run-in with producers over a stupid line in the film and with his three-week contract up - Warner Bros. nevertheless liked him enough to give him first a three-week extension, then a full seven-year contract at $400 a week. Mom, you’re gonna be ok from here on in. A dutiful Son.

Warner Brothers had hit pay dirt with a succession of pre-code gangster flicks, including Little Caesar (1931) starring Edward G. Robinson (rampant anti-semitism forcing Menashe Goldenberg to change his birth name) and so it is we come to PUBLIC ENEMY (1931).

Initially Cagney was cast as nice-guy Matt Doyle can you believe, but after looking at early rushes the director William Wellman had the nouse & balls to have Cagney and Edwards Woods swap roles, thus securing our boy the iconic role of Tom Powers, a fantastic film and also film history as Cagney smashed seven bells out of the part.

As ever I’m all about you watching the film itself than reading me wax lyrical about the plot, but what I will say is that what we have here is Cagney’s character rise through the ranks to become a powerful and feared gangster in prohibition-era Chicago. No punch is pulled in this pre-code barnstormer, including Cagney’s character famously shoving a grapefruit in Mae Clark’s face (it was meant to be an omelette, but Cagney was having none of that and went breakfast fruit style), but even more dramatically in it’s action-packed, grim, rain-soaked finale.

PUBLIC ENEMY cost only $151,000 to make but became one of the first low-budget films to gross $1 million. The critics weren’t overly keen but the Public loved it. So much so that it helped bring about the Hays Code which acted as a moral arbiter (interferer) for the movies from 1934 until 1968.

Cagney was now an instant and bankable star. He’d go on to become one of Hollywood’s top ten moneymakers over the next decade, and as we know when it comes to Hollywood then and now, money talks and all else walks.

Nevertheless, Studios are gonna Studio, and Cagney became known as ‘The Professional Againster’ as he fought the Studios for fairer pay, working conditions and more control over his career. Street fighters gonna fight. But our boy was a good ‘un as well as he regularly sent money and goods to his Mom and siblings as well as old friends from his neighbourhood (though typically he kept this under wraps as far as the public were concerned). He wanted the serious profits and wealth the Sudios generated via structures like the block booking system, spread. To him, his family, his old ‘hood. The hood made good, so why not some for as many others as possible. THIS was a STAR. No-one if at all possible left behind. Roots. They mattered to him.

Next up then comes a film that elicits a lot of love when I clip it on Twitter - the wonderful ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES (1938).

Cagney stars as Rocky Sullivan, a gangster fresh out of jail and looking for his former associate (Humphrey Bogart) who owes him money. While revisiting his old haunts, he runs into his old friend Jerry Connolly (Pat O'Brien), now a priest concerned about the Dead End Kid’s futures, particularly as they idolize Rocky.

In short, after a messy shootout, Rocky’s eventually captured by the police and sentenced to death in the electric chair, cue one of the most remarkable final scenes in movie history in this writers opinion. Suffice to say that even the film’s writers - John Wesley and Warren Duff - weren’t sure what Rocky’s reaction to his imminent death in the chair meant, and it’s this openness to interpretation that lends this incredible final scene the power it has on the audience all these years on let alone back in the late 30’s.

Fresh from The Adventures of Robin Hood earlier that year and with Casablanca to come four years later, Michael Curtiz helms beautifully, Bogart and O’Brien are wonderful of course, The Dead End Kid’s (a group of young actors Samuel Goldwyn brought from New York in 1935 after seeing them in a Broadway play called Dead End) are effervescent and energised, and Ann Sheridan lovely as ever.

ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES did very nicely at the box office taking in $1.7million and Cagney was especially hailed - and rightly so - for his brilliantly uncompromising and typically authentic portrayal of Rocky Sullivan.

If you’ve never seen a James Cagney film this is the one I’d probably direct you to first by way of introduction. There’s so many others of course, chief amongst them for some of you no doubt his Oscar Winning performance in the utter classic YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942), but your heart settles where it settles, so I’d say kick off with this pearler. My goodness I don’t think you’ll be after me for a refund put it that way.

And so finally l come to what I know for many of you is another classic Cagney, another classic Movie period - WHITE HEAT (1949)

After leaving Warner Brothers in 1942 to form his own production company with his business manager and brother, William, Cagney returned tail between his legs in 1949, for as he put it himself “I needed the money”. The intervening seven years working as an ‘independent’ had pretty much sucked him dry. The Time Of Your Life (1948) had lost him $500,000 alone ($6million in today’s money).

So back to the delightful Jack Warner it was. Cagney was now 49, and showing it. He’d worked like a fecker his whole life, for himself, his family, his pals and the neighbourhood. His acting and dancing styles were demanding, high energy, total commitment, complete authenticity and truth right the way down the line. Nothing by halves, and all from a sickly start. But the kid was still in the picture(s).

In short, Cagney plays the unhinged Cody Jarrett, a mid-level criminal mastermind who’s a big enough threat to have a fat F.B.I. record, but small and fallible enough to still depend on the psychological support of his devoted (oedipal figure of a) mother. The film opens with Jarrett executing a train heist with a small clan of pretty inept henchmen whose slovenly indifference to anything but the payoff results in a sloppy heist that only goes downhill from moment one. A two-bit holdup becomes a bloody, homicidal crime spree, forcing the clan to hole up in a remote cabin with no fire but plenty of sparks between Jarrett’s floozy wife (Virginia Mayo) and his flinty-featured Ma. At one point, Jarrett collapses in agony on the floor (he has chronic headaches that, one character later explains, were his only means of attracting his mother’s attention as a kid) and is hoisted upon Ma’s lap for a deeply sinister neck massage.

All of which leads us to a truly iconic and memorable scene with yet another phenomenal ending and a much loved and quoted line uttered by Cagney - “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”

Cagney is outstanding, truly. For some it’s his last great performance. Either way it’s a simply wonderful movie, with as many layers as you happen to require. If you haven’t yet, do - and if you have but maybe a while ago, go revisit.

In 1955 James Cagney retired to a 120 acre farm in Dutchess County, New York. Over the years he expanded the farm to 750 acres and such was his enthusiasm for agriculture and farming that his diligence and efforts were rewarded by an honorary degree from a college in Florida. Rather than just "turning up with Ava Gardner on my arm" to accept his honorary degree, Cagney turned the tables on the college's faculty by writing and submitting a paper on soil conservation instead. Always his authentic self, always all-in.

The great man died of heart attack on Easter Sunday, 1986, aged 86.

For me he’s one the greatest Actors of all time. Also one of the great Entertainers and popular Dancers too. I think those of us that have love for the guy have so for many many reasons, but I think one of them is that we know he’s being truthful with us. In performance, in person.

The Dancing Street Fighter never forgot where he came from, what he owed his family and his friends, the neighbour that made him, and what he owed us the audience. He was humble when he needed to be, a terrier when he needed to be, a total fucking pro all the time, and a guy who wrung out of life every goddam drop there was to be had.

His legacy is deep, lasting, secure. Our love and respect for Him the same.

Finally here’s two interviews of our boy. The first is in the garden of his home in 1931, the second also at home but at the other end of his life in 1980.

Good Night, Good Luck, and look after each other.

Michael