Public Enemy: Cagney on Film

Programmed by: Tien-Tien L. Jong

Hoofer. Hoodlum. Hollywood icon. Stanley Kubrick and Marlon Brando both listed James Cagney as one of their favorite movie stars, and Orson Welles said he was “maybe the greatest actor to ever appear in front of a camera.” Will Rogers remarked, "Every time I see him work, it looks to me like a bunch of firecrackers going off all at once." Kenneth Tynan wrote, "Cagney, even with a submachine gun hot in hand and corpses piling at his ankles, can still persuade many people that it was not his fault." Cagney’s public image was of a Hollywood gangster who defined Warner Bros.' grit and made great, aggressive, dance-filled musical comedies at the same time.

As a performer, Cagney was more interested in the artistic possibilities of movement, as Patrick McGilligan argues in his book Cagney: The Actor as Auteur, noting, “Even when his pictures are not tightly edited, they seem paced at a blur, for Cagney is nearly always operating at an upper velocity, his movement swift and choppy, his words spilling out in a staccato rush.” Max Reinhardt also admired the way “every movement of his body, and his incredible hands” contributed to the reality of his characters. Cagney’s career very interestingly reflects (and surely even influenced) the trajectories of American history in the pivotal midcentury: its social consciousness in the wake of the Depression, its foreign wars, its paranoia, and its problematic patriotism. Otis Ferguson’s summation of Cagney was, “it is hard to say what our impression of the total American character would have been without him. He is all crust and speed and snap on the surface, a gutter-fighter with the grace of dancing. . . But underneath the fable: the quick generosity and hidden sweetness, the antifraud. . . In spite of writers, directors, and decency legions, you are going to see the world and what it does to its people through [Cagney's] subtle understanding of it.”