JAMES CAGNEY

Appreciations by Dan Callahan and David Cairns:

http://chiseler.org/post/11546825143/cagney

http://chiseler.org/post/11547262378/fresh-young-mutt

Cagney is still the greatest of all American male movie actors. His only real rival is Cary Grant, who did almost as much on-screen whinnying and nonsense noise-making as Cagney did, but in a much darker, resentful key. Grant is Post-Code to the max, screwball comedy incarnate, whereas Cagney is Pre-Code always, leaping on Joan Blondell or an opportunity for larceny with equal relish. He’s a totally cinematic tonic that insists crime does pay, money is great and sex is better, and wisecracks rise out of a decent common sense that needs to be discovered again in America.

still my favourite ever proper actual movie star.

and this was his finest moment imo:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U5do-ygai9A/S9efShEdskI/AAAAAAAADjs/9onOHhdX5Zo/s400/vlcsnap-523558.jpg

from the Cairns piece:

Anybody regarding him as a blunt instrument ought to consider the climax of Angels with Dirty Faces, where his terror at the electric chair is palpable: the subtlety lies in his refusal to offer any hint that he’s faking it. He trusts us to figure that out, and he’s not afraid it might be ambiguous. Study of other scenes of lying and play-acting in films of the period shows how unique that is.

aha yes exactly that. although i always thought you were meant to work it out from the final shot of him (above) but still.. yeah it's ambiguous. when my grandfather showed me White Heat aged about 11, i thought the scene where he shoots the guy in the trunk was the coldest thing i'd ever seen.

lemme give you a little air

To step away from the crime movies for a moment: I'm very fond of his performance in Love Me Or Leave Me.

maybe his 2nd-best musical after Footlight Parade.

i turned on the TV one night a few years back and caught him in the middle of this uproarious rapid-fire comedy routine which had me mesmerized at his timing and energy (the movie ended up being 'one, two, three', his last one until 'ragtime' if i'm not mistaken.)

yes, his loathing of Billy Wilder drove him into retirement.

anyhoo:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xjzpoy_footlight-parade-shanghai-lil-1933_music

born july 17, 1899

http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m089lc2FkY1qbu1qvo1_500.gif

http://i.imgur.com/4Td2nyt.gif

i saw this when i was probably about 10 and it was the darkest shit

http://37.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyhnf39RZU1ql6i08o1_500.gif

^^^ omfg this. his mom making his bed upstairs! awful!

loved moment where he's meeting with PADDY (sadly not the same scene as the one where paddy's delivering all his lines through scarfs of potato chips) and the smirking henchman who later gets killed by a horse enters unannounced; cagney stands up and quietly gets ready to hit him with a bottle, but the need doesn't arise and he sits down again.

i couldn't tell if the line that induced the grapefruit (you found someone you like better?) was supposed to refer to his eerily ray liottaish partner. actually there were a lot of lines like that. i may have just been on alert after the scene with the gay tailor relishing large numbers.

(said eerie partner is offscreen during the grapefruit scene, audibly fucking.) (well giggling.)

if the g-men pick you up, you act like you haven't seen me in months. ma, you do all the talking. verna, you cry a little. like you're sad.

saw the Oedipal western he did w/ Nick Ray, Run for Cover. Not bad; unfortunately the surrogate son is John Derek.

Saw what must be his last proper hood role, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (the year after White Heat, and I'm not counting the very good Doris Day musical). Better than its nearly nonexistent reputation, tho obviously feels like an anticlimax; still, he gets nasty when someone calls him "nuts" early on, and there's a nice supporting turn by Luther Adler as the mob lawyer he hooks up with (after escaping from a chain gang by coldcocking Fred Mertz) to shake down crooked police inspector Ward Bond. There are two entangled romantic interests, one with a rich girl that's juicily weird but doesn't make much sense, and one with a blond ingenue who acts pretty terribly.

this guy might be, along with cary grant, the most sheerly virtuosic male actor of the classic hollywood period.

anyone seen "shake hands with the devil"? the one where he plays an IRA commandant

i have been learning about Cagney's backstory & career via a superbly detailed podcast called The Secret History of Hollywood; the current "season"dovetails the story of the Warner brothers with the story of Cagney.

Cagney's proved to be fascinating so far; he seems made of pure natural talent but so nonplussed about Hollywood/stardom; and his wife Bill was just as cool as he was, it seems.

Cagney was as talented as Chaplin and that's saying hell of a lot.

well he didn't write or direct...

Chaplin also composed music, but he wasn't as good at song or dance as Cagney. Different sets of talents, but each one multi-talented at a very high level.

I want to see more of this guy - I think the only thing I've seen straight through is One, Two, Three which was a hoot, and obviously rests almost wholly on his shoulders.

http://i.imgur.com/fRy6Aa4.gif

http://66.media.tumblr.com/11036364c764f495ec162df0ecd242de/tumblr_o1nc2b1WjI1rsp5vlo1_500.gif

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-682T9ymG1pI/VaiEQhuHOOI/AAAAAAABItY/VsoeUN3BB2o/s1600/tumblr_mjzl574epv1rfq33zo1_500.gif

my personal, unfulfilled idea of cagney gif material:

the smirking henchman who later gets killed by a horse enters unannounced; cagney stands up and quietly gets ready to hit him with a bottle, but the need doesn't arise and he sits down again.

I watched City for Conquest for the first time, which at its core is a corny boxing picture but throws in at least 3 other genres. Cagney is about 40 and hence a decade too old to play a Lower East Side truck driver who reluctantly pursues boxing glory to match the ambition of his dancer girlfriend Ann Sheridan. Jimmy's kid brother Arthur Kennedy is a pseudo-Gershwin prodigy (whose music is actually bombast king Max Steiner's); Ann's oily rapist dance partner is Anthony Quinn; and the gangster/nightlife impresario among Jim's friends is Elia Kazan. This is late-era soundstage New York "grit" from Warner Brothers that lays on the hoke a little too thickly, but JC is a joy to watch as always; there's no one like him. He moves like a bantam whether he's fighting in the ring or walking through the door.

Torrid Zone, with Cagney working for a fruit company in South America, feels like a Howard Hawks movie in all but name and puts the lie to hundreds of Good Neighbour propaganda flicks.

I grew up watching Cagney films - and 30s/40s films in general - and you never see them anymore. I'd say he was my favourite actor as a youngster, who wouldn't love him when you're 12?

Well, the films draw a big crowd whenever NYC MoMA shows them, and I'd say they're a fixture on TCM.

Tom D, does your TV package have TalkingPicturesTV? A safe haven for that kinda stuff.

Whenever I check that channel it's some awful creaky British film full of "It's perishing cold in here" and "Don't mind if I do, guvnor", though I'm told "Bedazzled" was on the other night.

(xp) I'm talking on terrestrial UK televison. Not sure what the age distribution is at NYC MoMA.

Talking Pictures does show the occasional American classic, but yes, it mostly specialises in vintage British cinema.

They also show 50s/60s British TV serials, like the one with Herbert Lom as a maverick psychoanalyst who doesn't follow the rules, who would have been struck off instantly irl.

Is there an existing thread for sharing reliable "backchannel" film sources? If not, should we start one (perhaps on the 77 Borad)?

born today 121 years ago

If anyone here has not seen Smart Money (1931), do so at your first opportunity. Then come back here so we can discuss Cagney's relationship with Edward G. Robinson.

Thanks for the prompt, I did watch it. There's way too much lavender in the air for that to be accidental, esp the way JC plays it.

Do any other Britisher/Irishers remember the Channel 4 James Cagney season one summer in the 1980s? I feel like I saw dozens of his films during that miraculous bit of television programming. All of the big hitters, plus things like The Strawberry Blonde and at least two films where he delivered the mail on small planes in the Caribbean (or maybe was being smuggled into the Caribbean? Anyway, it rained and everyone was sweating). That was one of the greatest summers of my life.

Somehow comforted to report that the ending of The Public Enemy can still spook an 11 year old in 2023.

pretty brutal ending. my dad used to say it was probably his choice for most heartbreaking scene in movie history.

weirdly I mis-remembered it as a being a Hays Code era film but it predated that by 3 years

Only saw Ragtime once when it came out, didn't care for it, but I've often thought about watching it again just for one line of Cagney's, where he's responding to some harebrained comment from Kenneth McMillan; he rolls his eyes and says something like, "That's a fine piece of thinking there, Willie."