![]() |
James Cagney owns the neighbourhood as Tom Powers The Public Enemy |
Director: William A Wellman
Cast: James Cagney (Tom Powers), Jean Harlow (Gwen Allen),
Edward Woods (Matt Doyle), Joan Blondell (Mamie), Donald Cook (Mike Powers),
Leslie Fenton (Nails Nathan), Beryl Mercer (Ma Powers), Robert Emmett O’Connor
(Paddy Ryan), Murray Kinnell (Putty Nose)
The gangster film has been popular as long as there have
been movies. And if there was an actor that first became synonymous with the
hair-trigger violence of the underclasses, it was James Cagney. The Public Enemy was Cagney’s big-break,
a career shift from the song-and-dance films that had been his bread-and-butter
before this. Cagney seizes the opportunity with relish – and helped set a
template that everyone from Tony Montana to Tommy Vito have followed ever
since.
Tom Powers (James Cagney) is an impulsive, violent,
ambitious small-time crook who gets more and more embroiled in the world of
crime, from his boyhood in the 1900s to the introduction of prohibition in the
1920s. Partnered with his lifetime-long best friend Matt Doyle (Edward Woods) –
and despite the disapproval of his straight-laced brother and war vet Donald
(Mike Powers) – Powers rakes in the crash as an enforcer for Paddy Ryan’s
(Robert Emmett O’Connor) liquer business. But when the gang war breaks out, the
dangerously impulsive Powers finds himself in the middle of a situation he can
no longer control.
Cagney amazingly wasn’t the first choice for Powers. In
fact, he started shooting the film playing the terminally dull nothing-part of
Matt Doyle, with Edward Woods playing Powers (the two child actors at the start
of the film playing their young versions, specially cast for their resemblance
to Cagney and Woods, remain noticeably the wrong way round). Cagney’s charisma
tore up the screen in the rushes – far overshadowing the bland Woods – and the
call came from the top: “Swop these guys round!” And so film history was born.
As silence turned to sound in the movies, so the style of
acting that the movies required grew and changed. Originally sound was the
preserve of the well-spoken, crystal clear, the mic needs to capture every
word, diction of the classically trained actor (half the cast in the film
continue to speak with cut-glass, Mid-Western clarity). Cagney was something
else. A little spitball of energy, who rushed through the lines, who threw in
his own accented casualness, who dropped letters from words, who felt real and
alive.
It’s astonishing watching this what a brilliantly modern
actor Cagney is: the little psychological touches that speak to Powers’ many
hang-ups and insecurities. The commitment to any bit of business required. The
method dedication to doing things for real (not least his insistence that at
one point Donald Cook punches him for real). His Powers is a brilliant portrait
of searing nervous energy – that lifetime of dance training paid off in spades
in Cagney’s mastery of physicality – and ruthless thoughtlessness, spiced with
a touch of smartness (“Your hands ain’t so clean. You killed and liked it. You
didn’t get them medals for holding hands with the Germans” he sneeringly tells
his brother). It’s a masterful performance of magnetism that holds so much
influence with films to come you’ll retrospectively see touches of Cagney in
nearly every dangerous psycho played by actors such as Pacino, De Niro and
Pesci.
Wellman’s film is also hugely influential, practically
laying the ground work for the structure of gangster morality tale – from those
first trivial involvements in crime, the getting deeper, those terrible
relationships (often with a girl with a pauncheon for dangerous men), the
isolation and the fall. Wellman shoots it with a brilliant eye for action –
there are majestic chases, gun fights and punch ups that still entertain today
(for all their slightly old fashioned look). As a piece of pulp story telling
this is damn high class.
But the other trick is that some of the best scenes are
those away from the action. Powers clashes with his brother are brilliantly
done. An early sequence in which as a boy Powers wordlessly takes the strap
from his strict father (a scene that is echoed years later in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, with Powers a clear
prototype for both Tommy and Henry in that film) is brilliant. Most famously of
all, the breakfast sequence when a bored and frustrated Powers shoves a
grapefruit in the face of the (legitimate) complaints of a girlfriend. Watching
it today it’s amazing to think how influential this scene was – audiences
hadn’t really seen anything like it.
And it works as a dance with the devil because Wellman and
Cagney both know that we might not want to spend time with Powers, but a part
of us wants to see this working-class grasper and charismatic fun-loving
criminal to succeed and get-ahead. You end up rooting a bit for him – even
though you know, with the Hays Code in place, that Powers won’t still be
standing by the end of the film. The executives were so worried about audiences
being a little too keen on Powers, they added a sanctimonious message about the
dangers of crime to the start of the film.
Fast-paced, pulpy, violent and full of excellent scenes with
a real eye for how America grew and changed over the first 25 years of so of
the 20th century, Wellman’s Public
Enemy is a masterclass of film-making – and about a zillion times more
influential than many of the prestige films released at the time. But it also
works so well because Cagney is one of the best there is, not just in the
gangster films, but films themselves. A performer you can’t tear your eyes away
from who turns a pulp character into a sea of complexity, he’s as much one for
the ages as the picture.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.