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Latest Updates - James Cagney
9th Jul 2024 2nd Jul 2024 Comments [+] added to movie by Magic Marmalade
Comment by Magic Marmalade: Notice also, how they have straight up lifted the portrait of Cagney on the cover of the Angels With Dirty Faces DVD for the cover of this DVD. Comment by Magic Marmalade: The best of the bunch.
This was the last Cagney movie in the box set I have, and not the most well known (to me at least), having no particular notoriety for iconic moments or lines like White Heat, Angels With Dirty Faces, or The Public Enemy, but for me, this one is by far the best, most well rounded movie of them all.
Mostly, I think, precisely because it is Cagney's most naturalistic, subtle, and nuanced character and performance - not relying on meme-able moments.
This is a complete, and very interesting character - basically a good guy who finds himself winding up in the bad guy business - the hero cast as the baddy.
Again, I see huge influence on The Godfather in this regard, but instead of the young innocent Michael Corleone becoming ever more corrupted and lost, Cagney's character slips away somewhat, but ultimately recovers and redeems himself (although the good guy never entirely goes away).
Set against the backdrop of the great events of the time, it's a more intimate portrait of a handful of characters as they seek to influence the times, just as they are influenced by them...
(setting a personal tale / tragedy against great historical events is always the key to giving it a sense of the epic, in scale, and poignancy in my view, and all the best epic / personal stories do this - acting as a frame for the more intimate story being told)
...From the trenches of the first world war, Eddie returns home to find his job gone, and the influx of returning soldiers and the hardship of the cost of living, he falls into the less than legal activities which are made possible by prohibition, the Wall Street Crash, and finally the repeal of Prohibition, against which, his fortunes rise and fall.
And what with the other characters and the shifting dynamics between them over time, there's much more in this movie than those others.
Cagney is brilliant here, Bogart is an excellent bad guy, and the story is excellently told.
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27th Jun 2024 Comment [+] added to movie by Magic Marmalade
Comment by Magic Marmalade: Having seen Angels With Dirty Faces, and been more impressed than I thought I would be by James Cagney, I found a DVD box-set of four of his films - this amongst them... And it's a curious one to summarise my feelings about really...
...Right away, having seen White Heat just before this, I now see the pattern, dare I say : Schtick that Cagney was about - repeated themes of the troubled archetypal gangster type, what with minor twists and variations on that theme, and also, as an actor, repeated patterns of some of the most over the top, hammy and cartoonish acting ever, among other moments of genuine excellence (subtlety etc.).
This whole movie seems to be the same: Moments, indeed whole sections and ideas that are truly inspired and brilliant, among some otherwise generally awful acting, directing, and storytelling.
I partly put the "ouch" factor down to the fact that this is in talkies a relatively early attempt at such subject matter, and so a lot of the road maps and practices that would develop later just weren't around at this time, so the movie makers were at once "winging it" in being daring and innovative, but still within the constraints of more traditional, conservative, and even clunky methods.
Half the cast here either can't act a bean, or simply were not actors at all... just thought they'd "have a stab at it" - The guy who plays Cagney's brother is mind-bendingly bad, mumbling his way through lines in some stifled monotone, which would suffer by contrast to any other actor, let alone one of the most unique actors ever...
(There's a great monologue in this where a woman says to Cagney's: Tom, how strange and unique he is... how different form other guys, and it says better than anyone else can all that needs be said about Cagney himself - in fact, you get the distinct feeling, while watching it, that she is actually talking to him, not his character)
...And James Cagney is certainly that, you may love him or hate him as an actor, or sometimes, as I am both at the same time! - but he most certainly is perhaps the most distinctive, and singular actors ever- presence, and some powerfully compelling quality to him, despite all the cartoonish-ness.
The fact that this brother is almost a ringer for Al Pacino in The Godfather can't be entirely an accident though...
(He is even a brother of a gangster who joins the marines, and is even called Michael!)
...And this was my prevailing feeling throughout this movie, that I could see so many later movies of this type echoing right through it, that this has clearly been an enormously influential movie, and doubtless is where Coppola (and whoever wrote the Godfather book) Scorcese and countless others have taken huge chunks of inspiration.
So because of those later movies, you've probably seen all this before, and better, but this seems to be one to watch to grasp it's cultural impact alone, in terms of sourcing the origins of so much more that came after.
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13th Apr 2024 Comment [+] added to movie by Magic Marmalade
Comment by Magic Marmalade: Thanks for the pointers Henry :)
There was a shelf of oldies in the local charity shop where I got this on a whim, so I'll go back and look a little closer at their selection, I'm sure one of those will be there somewhere.
(Got a small stack of DVDs: "to be watched" which I'm going to get a shift on with soon as I can)
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11th Apr 2024 Comment [+] added to movie by henry29
Comment by henry29: The next films you need to see MM, are White Heat, Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Strawberry Blonde. These have a steller cast. Comedy plus great songs In two of them. H.
| Comment [+] added to movie by Magic Marmalade
Comment by Magic Marmalade: Today I saw my first James Cagney film... and it was this... and it was good!
I'd always avoided him, as his somewhat cartoonish acting (from what I'd known or had seen in snippets) of the apparently ultra-ham style, always put me off.
But this was a revelation, in that I see his most overt moments in context of the story, the acting style of the time, his character, and what others in the movie were doing, but also, at last, getting to see his more subtle and nuanced acting, which is really quite great at times.
Unbelievably ambitious crane shot for the time, at the beginning, and a great story, of course, but one of those that in the first few minutes, I'd have rated about a 6 out of 10, but as it goes on, gathers an extra rating point here and there... probably would rate it higher after a couple more viewings, and certainly now intrigued to see more of Mr. Cagney's movies, now I am assured that there will be more to it than a cartoon icon at work.
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