Dir. Lloyd Bacon USA 1933
"Play me for a sucker, huh? Tryin' to pull a fast one? Well I'm wise to your racket, so kick back my dough!"
I watched these over a week ago, but a long vacation derailed my blogging efforts. Hopefully I can get back on track.
I've always found the Bogart vs. Cagney arguement to be a futile one; they're similar enough to warrant comparison, but choosing one over the other is never something I've been able to do. Bogart had the more illustrious career and made a wider variety of films, but while back-to-backing these two films (released about six months apart in 1933, two of the five films Cagney made that year), I was quickly reminded that Cagney is generally more 'fun' than Bogart. By this I mean that Bogart, while certainly infusing most of his characters with a cynical sense of humor, was much more likely to dive headfirst into the dark depths of his characters. Cagney, even when playing a complete bastard, always had a spring in his step, delivering his dialogue (like the lines above, which manage to cram every stereotypical 30's gangster phrase into about 4 seconds of wordplay) at a machine gun pace, always winking and joshing with the other actors and the audience. Whereas watching Bogart is like standing in awe of an icon, watching Cagney is like having a drink with an old friend.
Both of these films clock in at a lean 75 minutes and both maintain the same snappy pace that was common to gangster films of the early thirties. The plots are relatively straight-forward. In Lady Killer, Cagney plays a low-rent conman named Dan Quigley who, after nearly being fleeced by a like-minded team of crooks lead by Mae Clark, falls in with them and finds himself on the run from the law. He ends up in Hollywood, where he scams his way into the acting business and becomes a leading man, with a famous actress played by Margaret Lindsey for a girlfriend. When his double-crossing former partners come calling, he finds his new life placed in jeopardy. In Picture Snatcher, Cagney is Danny Kean, a newly paroled gangster who decides to go straight and pursue his lifelong dream of being a newspaper reporter. Taking a job at a tabloid, the only place that will have him, he uses his criminal connections and skills to get photos and stories no one else can, while trying to woo the daughter of the police captain who sent him to jail in the first place.
Unlike now, where typecasting is seen as something actors want to avoid, the old Hollywood system found something an actor did well and kept them at it for as long as humanly possible. Cagney spent most of the 30's playing charming Irish gangsters with varying degrees of humanity, and in these two films he's combined that with the 'trying to go legit' character. Both films had dialogue written by Ben Markson, which explains the extreme similarity between the two characters as well as the light, fun-loving tone of both films. While Cagney's breakout role (1931's The Public Enemy) and his later, more popular gangster films (Angels With Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties and White Heat) would mix some fairly harrowing drama with the usual Cagney shennanigans, these films stay fairly comedic throughout, amidst the obligatory fistacuffs and shoot-outs. The reason, as far as I can tell, is a bit surprising.
With the rise of sound in films during the late 1920's, the extremely loose rules governing what you could and couldn't do on screen needed to be tightened. The Motion Picture Production Code (informally called the Hays Code after the dickhead who came up with it), officially signed into law in 1930, would eventually be responsible for the near complete lack of blood, swearing and sex in films of the era until it died along with the classic Hollywood system in the late 1960's. However, for the first few years following the implementation of the Code, no organized system of enforcing it existed (until the Catholic Church made their obligatory stink in 1934 and ruined things for everyone). This lead to a brief period from 1930 to 1934, now known by the some what erroneous title of "Pre-Code Hollywood", in which a great number of films were produced containing content and messages that, although seemingly tame by todays standards, were pretty racy when compared to films made after the code was heavily enforced. This is somewhat subtlely present in these two films, specifically in their light tone. You see, under the code, criminals, no matter how loveable, had to receive some kind of comeuppance at the end of the film, whether it be prison or death. Both Dan Quigley and Danny Kean enjoy fates much happier than what they would have experienced had they had their adventures several years later. There are also several other nice little moments that reflect this short-lived freedom: Lady Killer features several interactions between Cagney and Mae Clarke, including him lightly kissing her breast through her dress when she hugs him while he's sitting down, and him dragging her across a room by her hair after she double-crosses him (Cagney seems to have built his early career around abusing Mae Clarke; apparently the infamous Grapefruit Scene from Public Enemy was adlibbed by Cagney). Meanwhile, in Picture Snatcher, a running gag in which people keep coming to the newspaper office to shoot Cagney for various slights, results in him hiding in the ladies restroom, where he meets a sassy reporter played by Alice White. That the scene features a man in a woman's bathroom is racy enough for the time, but the fade out implying that they fuck in one of the stalls puts it completely over the top. The film also features a sequence in which Cagney is assigned to cover the execution of a woman who murdered her husband, and manages to sneak a photo of it by strapping the camera to his leg. Despite the inherent ghoulishness of the scene, it's all played as clever fun, something that would have never occurred under the production code.
Obviously I used this review as an excuse to lecture you about the Production Code, possibly as a way to cover up the fact that I watched these over a week ago and my memories weren't particularly sharp. That isn't to say of course, that I didn't enjoy the hell out of both of these films. The similar characters and plots actually went a long way toward complimenting the two films and and they made for a nice double feature. These two films are included in the third Warner Brothers Gangster set, any one of which is more than worth your while if you're looking to check out some older films. Additionally, each film in those sets comes with a feature called Warner Night At The Movies, which allows you to watch the trailer, newsreel, cartoon and musical short that you would have seen, had you gone to see the film in theatres when it came out. It's a great way to experience what life would have been like back then, especially if you're a giant history/film nerd like me.
Well, that's all for now. I'm not sure what I'll be reviewing next, could be a number of different things. Hopefully it'll be soon.
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