Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Sunday November 27, 2022
Robert Wagner Does Cagney
“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)