James Cagney posts

Eastwood, looking starstruck, as James Cagney enters the room at AFI's Salute to James Cagney in 1974.

“He isn't at all like me. When I first started out as an actor, all the secretaries used to call me 'Coop' because they thought I resembled Gary Cooper—kind of a backward kid—quite a few years ago. But Cagney ... I always liked Cagney's style and energy. He was fearless. Most of those guys were, though: they were fearless. Going back to the most famous thing, sticking grapefruits in people's faces, they weren't afraid to do things that were outrageous. A lot of good actors get wrapped up in images.”

-- from “Clint Eastwood Only Considers Himself A 'Fan' Of One Specific Actor”

Hard boiled? Sure. Detective? Not so fast.

From a Screen Rant article on all the Spideys in the Spider-Verse:

Miles and the other Spider-people are joined by Spider-Man Noir, a version of Spidey from a black-and-white crime movie universe. He's a hard-boiled detective in the mold of Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney, and Nicolas Cage's vocal performance captures this noir antihero energy perfectly.

Bogart, sure, but Cagney never played a detective—hard-boiled or otherwise. He played a gangster about a dozen times, a reporter four times, a pilot four times even though he hated to fly. He played grifters throughout the pre-code era. He was a bandleader, a dentist, an insurance salesman, a railroad man, and the Coca-Cola rep in West Germany. In the Navy he started out as a riveter (“Here Comes the Navy”) and rose all the way to Fleet Admiral (“The Gallant Hours”). As a Fed he worked for the FBI (“G-Men”), the OSS (“13 Rue Madeleine”), and the Bureau of Weights & Measures (“Great Guy”). He played George M. Cohan twice and James Cagney once. But he was never a detective. 

This has been a public service message.

“You sent my brother Nicky to the big house.” 

Radar delivers the mail, including a package from Frederick's of Hollywood, to Hot Lips.

Radar: You know, I went through Hollywood on the way here. I think I saw James Cagney. [Imitation] Mmm, you sent my brother Nicky to the big house. Mmm. Cagney.

Hot Lips holds up lingerie, Radar whistles, she hides it.

Hot Lips (impatient): Is there anything else?

Radar: Uh, we're having a pool on the birth of a baby. Date, weight and sex, one dollar.

Hot Lips: I don't approve of gambling.

Radar: It's Col. Potter's grandchild.

Hot Lips: Six and a half pounds, the 25th, boy. Now scram!

Radar: Right. [By the door, he goes back to the Cagney impression] Mmmm. [She gives him a look, because he seems to be commenting on the lingerie, so he explains] Cagney. [Then he flees]

-- from “M*A*S*H,” S4, Ep14, “Mail Call, Again,” original air date Dec. 9, 1975, writers James Fritzell, Everett Greenbaum. I'm curious where the line comes from. It's not a Cagney line. He didn't have many brothers in the movies, and if he did they were usually straight-arrow ding-dings like Mike in “The Public Enemy.” 

“You gave that man oranges?”

While I was sick with Covid in New York, I tried to pass the time watching movies, but most of them didn't stick. I'd get five minutes in, then hit stop and try something else. I was miserable and not much helped. But for some reason I was able to watch the two Paul Newman detective movies, “Harper” from '66 and the sequel “The Drowning Pool” from '75. Was that the first sequel Newman had ever done? I think it might've been. “The Color of Money” might've been the second.

I'd love to see a deep dive comparing the two Lew Harper movies. The first was made at the tail end of the studio system when they still used green screens for driving scenes, the second during the heyday of gritty, auteurish Hollywood movies, before Spielberg and Lucas infantililzed us all.

One pleasant surprise in “Harper” is a scene with Robert Wagner. He plays Allan Taggart, a whimsical, handsome hanger-on at the Sampson estate who seems intrigued by the private detective game. He wants to try his hand. At one point, he and Harper are trying to get into someone's room and he hurts his shoulder trying to bust down a door that's actually open. That's the gag. Which is when Newman/Harper gives him a gun and asks if he knows how to use it. And Wagner/Taggart goes into an impression of James Cagney:

Oh, I prefer a Thompson, actually. But this will do in a pinch. You dirty rat, you gave that man oranges?

Is the Thompson line Cagney, or is it just the latter part? I like that the latter part is a mix of a line he never said and a line from “Mister Roberts,” which hardly fits the detective/crime situation they're in. I also never realized, or I'd forgotten, that it's the Cagney counterpart to Bogart's strawberries in “Caine Mutiny.” Both '30s Warner Bros. gangsters had a fruit fetish as crazy, WWII Navy captains. Most important, for “Harper” anyway, is that the imitation isn't just a throwaway. Taggart's ability to sound like others is key to the plot. 

Of course, Cagney and Wagner co-starred together in the ill-conceived remake of “What Price Glory?” Wagner was a newbie at the time, and apparently director John Ford bullied him on the set. Ford tried the same with Cagney on “Mister Roberts” and Cagney offered to punch his lights out. 

Another connection. In one of his books about Hollywood, screenwriter William Goldman praised Paul Newman for acting with Wagner for Wagner's closeups in a climactic scene in “Harper.” Many stars don't do that; they leave it to someone else on the set. But Newman did, and it helped Wagner out greatly, and added so much to the scene. And it's that exact thing that Shirley Jones praised Cagney for in “Never Steal Anything Small”: acting with her, reading lines with her, during her closeups.

Other movies with Cagney impressions:

• Dick Wesson in “Starlift” (1951)
• Jay Lawrence in “Stalag 17” (1953)
• Red Buttons in “One Two Three” (1961)

I've long been confused by the above shot, which is part of a series of publicity stills for “The Public Enemy” in 1931. It mirrors nothing in the film. I guess Cagney's hair dangles in front of him like so after his brother pops him one in the early going, but otherwise, no. I never quite got why they went with that look for a publicity shot.

The other day I was watching Tod Browning's 1920 gangster film “Outside the Law” (as one does), and near the end we get this shot of Lon Chaney:

Not exact but close. I'm sure Warners publicity dept. in 1931 wasn't trying to ape or homage Chaney—his was a quick shot in an 11-year-old movie in which he's third- or fourth-billed—but maybe it was stashed in the back of someone's brain, a photographer or publicity goon, or maybe it was just an early gangster staple look. “Now if you could just snarl for me. Yeah, and muss your hair so it falls over your forehead. That's it!”

Cagney would play Chaney a quarter-century later in the biopic “Man of a Thousand Faces” but by then he was all wrong for the role. 

GQ: You've got to do one more movie. ... Your hero James Cagney was retired forever and then came back to do Ragtime. Can't you do one more?

Hackman: [laughs] Well...

GQ: Why do you love Cagney so much? 

Hackman: There was a kind of energy about him, and he was totally different from anyone I'd ever seen in my life. Having been brought up in the Midwest, I didn't know those New York people. I thought he was terrific. Everything he did had a life to it. He was a bad guy in most of the films, and yet there was something lovable about him and creative.

-- from an interview between Gene Hackman and Michael Hainey, GQ magazine, June 1, 2011

I like this shot of the bad kids of 1930s cinema during the Eisenhower era.

It's from “These Wilder Years,” a forgettable 1956 flick from MGM starring James Cagney and Barbara Stanwyck, shot on a dime, and pairing them with up-and-comers who didn't pan out: Don Dubbins and Betty Lou Keim. It's not worth watching. But I like imagining the warped 1950s sitcom that could've been made from the above shot. Are they parents? Do they have kids? Teenagers? Maybe Betty Lou is pregnant again. Oh, that Betty Lou. Cue laughtrack.

This scene in “Taxi!” (1931), after James Cagney gets into a fight with George Raft at a dance contest, and his girlfriend Loretta Young berates him on the subway ride home, made me think of two things: Loretta Young looks dynamite but her tone is a bit hifalutin for the daughter of a cabbie (screenwriter John Bright was actually appalled by the casting); and Cagney's line at the end, “Give us a kiss, will ya?” seemed awfully familiar to me. 

Something about it: train ride, being berated, the cheeky comeback. Then it hit me: John Lennon says the exact same thing (sans the “will ya”) to the harumphing commuter who berates the Beatles in “A Hard Day's Night.” 

Anyone know of other moments in TV or movies where you get that dyanmic and then that line? Because surely it didn't stop there.

I found this in The New York Daily News, Nov. 8, 1925, pg. 44. The theater page.

Other news on the page:

• The longest-running Broadway play is “Abie's Irish Rose,” 1,478 performances in, which also makes it the long-running play in Broadway history up to that point. Its record (eventually more than 2,000 performances) will be usurped by “Tocacco Road” in the 1930s, which will be usurped by “Life with Father” in the '40s, which apparently won't be usurped until “Fiddler on the Roof” in the '70s. The Broadway touring show stars George Brent, who will co-star with Cagney in “The Fighting 69th” in 1940.
• Also playing is “Is Zat So?” starring James Gleason and Robert Armstrong. The latter will later star in “King Kong,” and play Cagney's truculent boss in “G-Men.” 
• A 1921 comedy by A.A. Milne, “The Dover Road,” is opening. The following year, Milne will publish a children's book about a bear and his friends that will be a mild hit. 
• Buster Keaton's comedy “Go West” is playing at Loew's State & Metropolitan Theater.
• An actress wearing trousers instead of a short skirt, in Ibsen's “The Master Builder,” gets prominent notice.

Cagney's partner in red-haired thatchery, Charles Bickford, also carved out a successful career in the movies, with more than 100 credits on IMDb, and three Academy Award nominations for supporting actor: “The Song of Bernadette,” “The Farmer's Daughter,” “Johnny Belinda.” I don't think he ever acted with Cagney on screen.

From Cagney By Cagney:

But there was relief the following year, and it came because of my hair. Maxwell Anderson had written a play, Outside Looking in, based on the autobiography of writer-hobo Jim Tully. One of the leading characters was “Little Red,” and because there were virtually only two actors in New York with red hair, Alan Bunce and myself, there wasn’t much competition. I assume I got the part because my hair was redder than Alan’s. The show opened at the Greenwich Village Theatre on Seventh Avenue in September 1925. One of the producers was Eugene O’Neill, and he came backstage one night, looked at me, and said nothing. I suspect that was because he had nothing to say. In any case, the play got fine notices (Charles Bickford played the lead), and from the tiny 299-seat house in the Village we moved uptown to the capacious Thirty-ninth Street Theatre, where I had no trouble projecting my voice because of my ample vaudeville experience. After the first act in the new theatre, Maxwell Anderson came backstage and said, “Gather around, boys, gather around.” We gathered. “Now I want everybody here to speak twice as loud and twice as fast. You hear?” Then, seeing me, he said, “Everybody, that is, except you.”

The play ran awhile and got good notices. In Life magaine, drama critic Robert Benchley wrote: “Wherever Mr. MacGowan found two red-heads like Charles Bickford and James Cagney, who were evidently born to play Oklahoma Red and Little Red, he was guided by the Casting God. Mr. Bickford's characterization is the first most important one of the year ... while Mr. Cagney, in a less spectacular role, makes a ten-minute silence during his mock-trial scene something that many a more established actor might watch with profit.”

Another ad from the 1932/1933 trades:

I'm interested in the one at the bottom: “Bad Boy” starring James Cagney and Carole Lombard? Yes. It got made but not under that title and not with that co-star. It's “Hard to Handle,” in which Cagney plays a PR rep/grifter, with Mary Brian as his girl and Ruth Donnelly a standout as her mother. I recall liking Brian a lot, thinking she had a Christina Applegate thing about her. Her last movie was “Dragnet” in 1947 (Scotland Yard in NYC, not Jack Webb in LA), and her last TV series was “Meet Corliss Archer” in 1954. She lived until the day before New Year's Eve, 2002. 

From “A Lion Is in the Streets” (1953), Cagney's sloppy seconds on the Huey Long story:

No, but he used to be. He used to be a big shot.

From The New Yorker, 1956 or ‘57. 

Not sure when The New Yorker began doing film reviews but I doubt it was during Cagney’s heyday since there isn't much mention of him during those decades. Just a few Talk of the Towns and this.  

So my new favorite thing is the Internet Archive—which I found the other day during a random Google search—and, for the moment, particularly Motion Picture Herald, a trade pub aimed at movie theater exhibitors that began in 1931 and lasted until 1972. So in gangster-film terms, from “The Public Enemy” to “The Godfather.” 

A few Warner Bros. ads from 1931 tell the story of the former. The first is from April 4, 1931 about a new movie slated to open in New York on April 23:

Love the shot they use for Cagney. What a mug.

Marketing language is usually horribly incorrect/lies but they weren't off about this. Nothing like it, or Cagney, had ever hit the screen before. They were less correct on “...nothing ever will again!” Success breeds copycats like rabbits. Plus he made movies for another 30 years.

Five weeks later, May 9, the mug was a star, and got a two-page spread:

I love the look of these ads, as well as their oddities. “Nuts” gets quote marks but not Loco? And the hyphenation of “rec-ords”? 

Just a few weeks later, on May 23, as part of a 16-page advertisement trumpeting “35 Outstanding Stars” from Warners' 1931-32 schedule, the studio is already downplaying Cagney's breakout hit for his next picture. That's how fast things moved back then.

In the new one, Cagney will “have a more powerful role than in his ‘Public Enemy.’” He didn't but the movie wasn't bad. Except it wasn't called “Larceny Lane” (they changed it to “Larceny Lovers,” returned to “Larceny Lane,” then at the 11th hour switched it to “Blonde Crazy”) and Marian Marsh wasn't Cagney's co-star (Joan Blondell was). BTW: Someone at Warners must‘ve really liked Marsh, because she’s promo‘ed in two other movies in this ad: “The Mouthpiece” with Warren William, which she also wasn’t in; and “The Other Man” with William Powell, which I think became “The Road to Singapore.” At least she was in that one.

So what happens after a new star lights the firmament? Right, call the lawyers:

“Or in any other occupation whatsoever”? What sweethearts those Warners were.