This winter I’m watching movies with James Cagney.
This week I was supposed to watch Man of Many Faces but, but unfortunately, I didn’t check to see if it was streaming anywhere before I decided to watch it (at my husband’s suggestion) and I couldn’t order a Blu-Ray, which seems to be the only format available to watch it on, before this week.
I am hoping to get a copy of it before the end of this feature so I can watch it and write about it.
What I ended up doing was just moving up my movies I had scheduled and placing Man of Many Faces at the end of the list.
Taxi was one of Cagney’s first breakout films, right after his actual breakout film, The Public Enemy.
This is the movie where he almost says the words everyone has always tried to say he said: “You dirty rat.”
What he actually says in the movie is, “”Come out and take it, you yellow-bellied rat! Or I’ll make you take it through the door!”
If you want to know why he said those words, you’ll have to watch the movie.
This is also the first time Cagney showed us he can dance as he participates in a dance competition during the movie.
According to TCM.com, “To play his competition on the dance floor, Cagney recommended his pal, fellow tough-guy-dancer George Raft. The scene culminates in Raft winning the contest and getting slugged by Cagney for his trouble. Within a year or so, Raft — uncredited here — would emerge as a Warner Bros. star in his own right.”
The story of this hour-and-nine-minute-long movie is pretty simple.
Cagney plays Matt Nolan, an employee of an independent cab company in New York City during a time when a large cab corporation was trying to push independent cab companies out of business.
Matt wants to date Sue Riley (Loretta Young), the daughter of his boss who gets sent to jail after he shoots the man who trashed his cab in the cab war.
Nolan is a complex man with a temper but also a deep love for those who mean the most to him. A lot of the movie is him courting Sue and her telling him that he needs to get his temper in check.
I spent a lot of the movie telling Matt to chill out and telling Sue to dump Matt.
I won’t go into too much detail about the plot, but something tragic does happen part way through the movie, which will make Matt have to decide if he will let his temper rule him or not. You’ll have to watch to see what happens.
This movie was made before the Hays Code came into play. What is the Hays Code, you may ask?
Let Wikipedia explain: “The Motion Picture Production Code was a set of industry guidelines for the self-censorship of content that was applied to most motion pictures released by major studios in the United States from 1934 to 1968. It is also popularly known as the Hays Code, after Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) from 1922 to 1945. Under Hays’s leadership, the MPPDA, later the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Motion Picture Association (MPA), adopted the Production Code in 1930 and began rigidly enforcing it in 1934. The Production Code spelled out acceptable and unacceptable content for motion pictures produced for a public audience in the United States.”
Loretta Young later confessed to having a crush on Cagney.
“I admired him so much, though I could never tell him so,” she revealed. “I remember having this romantic dream about him…in which I was drowning and he rescued me.”
She recalled that Cagney had “complete control over expressing the whole gamut of emotions with his eyes. He could accomplish with a glance what other actors need a whole bag of tricks to put over.”
I found this tidbit of information in the TCM article shocking: “As in The Public Enemy, several scenes in Taxi! involved the use of live machine-gun bullets. After a few of the slugs narrowly missed Cagney’s head, he outlawed the practice on future films.”
Have you ever seen this one?
What did you think of it?
If you would like to follow along with my Winter of Cagney and watch some of the movies yourself, here is my schedule for the winter:
Taxi
The Strawberry Blonde
Mister Roberts
Angels With Dirty Faces
Public Enemy
Love Me or Leave Me
White Heat
Man of A Thousand Faces
Bonus: The Seven Little Foys
If you want to find clips and thoughts about vintage movies and TV, you can visit me on Instagram on my Nostalgically Thinking Account (https://www.instagram.com/nostalgically_thinking/) or on my YouTube account Nostalgically and Bookishly Thinking here: https://www.youtube.com/@nostaglicandbookish
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