erik lundegaard

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Monday December 12, 2022

Cagney PSA

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.

Posted at 08:53 AM on Monday December 12, 2022 in category James Cagney