William Wellman (1931)

You can see why the opening and closing legends, which assert the film’s moral purpose, were needed.  They tell us that syndicated crime is a vicious growth, thriving in the prohibition era and which must be rooted out, and stress there’s nothing appealing about gangsters.  The fact that James Cagney’s Tom Powers is such a potent and attractive character makes it less than easy to follow Warner Bros’ injunction.  Cagney’s physical versatility and relaxation are amazing:  are they a legacy of the decade he spent in vaudeville (including some time in non-musical theatre) before his Hollywood debut in 1930?  There’s no doubt that his movement often has a dancerly grace and definition but it always looks natural (his hands are also very expressive).  His characterisation of Tom Powers – a juvenile delinquent then a senior one (without ever seeming to grow up) – has great colour and real subtlety:  you experience the cruelty and the charm.

This trim, taut film is famous for making Cagney a star and for the scene in which Tom, at the breakfast table, plugs half a grapefruit into his girlfriend Kitty’s face.   The fact that Kitty (Mae Clarke) is a whinger and the clip is so well known doesn’t make it any less startling in the context of the film as a whole because the characters are so involving and the momentum of The Public Enemy is so strong.   Other sequences seem to anticipate what grew to be conventions of gangster pictures or tropes of Hollywood melodrama more generally.    When Tom shoots a man, William Wellman cuts from the man singing at the piano (he is worth shutting up) to Tom with the gun.  We see Tom shoot and the music stops but we don’t see the man receive the bullet.   At the end of the film, a phonograph record keeps going round on the turntable, the needle stuck in the groove, after the song (‘I’m Forever Blowin’ Bubbles’) has ended.  There are also some strong images which still feel individual – like Tom’s adoring mother’s plumping up a pillow as she makes up Tom’s bed in readiness for his final homecoming.  (He comes home as a corpse.)   Wellman uses newsreel footage of New York as a prologue to the opening scenes, set in 1909, and that prologue is followed by scenes of Tom and his lifelong sidekick Matt Doyle as kids.  These sequences are the weakest in the picture:  they seem both forced and tentative.  The young performers as a group aren’t much to write home about and Frank Coghlan Jr, who plays the boy Tom, has nothing that connects with Cagney.  The best of the bunch is Frankie Darro as the boy Matt – you can believe he’d grow up into either Cagney or Edward Woods, who plays the older Matt.

The adult performances are a pretty mixed bag too.  On the plus side there’s Jean Harlow and Joan Blondell.  It’s astonishing that Harlow was only nineteen when she made this:  you’d think she was in her mid-twenties (in fact she died when she was only 26) and an established star.  As the amusingly glamorous Gwen, she’s very funny in her first meeting with Tom (Cagney’s funny too) and affecting in her disappointment when he leaves for a criminal engagement and she realises what his priorities are.  As Matt’s girl Mamie, Joan Blondell is excellent – precise and charming but instinctively knowing her place in the cast hierarchy (it’s not surprising she had such a successful career in supporting roles).  Edwards Woods is good at getting across Matt’s lifelong, affable subservience to Tom.   Leslie Fenton has an amusing cheap suavity as a sharply-dressed mobster called Samuel ‘Nails’ Nathan and there’s a bellicose verve in Robert O’Connor’s portrait of the bootlegger Paddy Ryan.  On the debit side, Frank Cook is boringly melodramatic as Tom’s censorious elder brother, a shell-shocked war veteran, and Mia Marvin is pretty ropy as a squalid hostess.  Beryl Mercer, who plays Ma Powers, does the part in what seems an outdated, specifically theatrical style, although you can’t doubt her emotional engagement with the role.   There is a fine moment when she visits Tom in hospital, where’s he lying full of gunshot wounds, and she lays her head on the sheet cuff.  Cagney’s gesture in touching her hair is beautifully restrained and eloquent.  The screenplay is credited to Kubec Glasmon, John Bright and Harvey F Thew (from a novel by Bright called Beer and Blood).  The cinematographer is Devereaux Jennings.

8 July 2009