I’m watching James Cagney movies this winter and up this week is The Public Enemy (1931), which was moved up in my list because I could not find Angles with Dirty Faces streaming anywhere! I was very disappointed because I really wanted to see it. I am going to look for that and Man of Many Faces (which I also could not find streaming) on BluRay or DVD so I can watch them sometime in February.
The Public Enemy is a bit of somber movie, more so than the previous movies I watched.
It appears to be a life lesson for would-be hoodlums, based on the warning at the beginning and end of the movie. The producers wanted everyone to be sure to know they weren’t glorifying criminals by making this movie, but instead warning people of what happens when they become one.
I strive not to place spoilers in my posts about the movies I watch but I will say this movie indeed showed the rough life that criminals have, usually self-inflicted.
The movie starts when our main characters — Tommy Powers (Cagney) and his friend Matt Doyle (Edward Woods) — are young boys.
They’ve already started a life of crime by sneaking into the movies and stealing buckets of beer. They steal little items and become pickpockets, and as they grow, the crimes grow with them.
The two go from being a couple of stooges for various crime bosses to leading the way in some major criminal actions, including creating a monopoly on beer production.
This was Cagney’s fifth movie and is said by film buffs to have catapulted him into a string of gangster roles he later worked hard to get out of.
This movie included one of his most infamous scenes – shoving a grapefruit in the face of his girlfriend – to show how far he’d fallen and how unfeeling he’d become. More about that a little later.
Tommy Power is the second son in the family and lives in his older brother’s shadow.
He and his brother are raised by their mother. I don’t know if we are told what happens to his father, but his father does whip him in the beginning for stealing skates and says he doesn’t care if he goes to jail.
This movie is honestly just so well done. You really need to take your time to watch it and catch some of the subtleties in the scenes.
There is one scene where Tommy and Matt go to talk to Putty Nose, a gang leader who once convinced them to a do a job for him, promising nothing would go wrong.
I’m warning you now that there are spoilers ahead —
The job went wrong and Putty Nose disappeared. Tommy and Matt have been looking to get revenge on the guy for years and now they’re big shots in the crime world.
They track Putty Nose down and he starts begging for his life. Tommy and Matt are just standing there in nice dress clothes, fanc wool winter coats, and bowler hats, stone-faced for the most part, while Putty Nose begs the not to kill him. This is after Matt’s wedding, I should add.
The guy reminds them he knew them when they were kids and asks if they remember a song he used to play for them that they loved. He goes to the piano and starts playing, and Tommy has this friendly smile while he walks over to stand behind Putty Nose while he plays. Tommy keeps smiling and nodding and then slowly pulls a gun from the inside of his jacket while the camera pans away to Matt standing by the door.
There’s a gunshot and then —something I didn’t notice but my son did — you hear Putty Nose try to finish the song through a gurgling noise. Yikes. Then there is the sound of his body sliding across the piano keys and then to the floor.
It’s all off-camera, and it almost makes it more impactful because the camera is focused not Putty Nose dying but on how Matt’s expression changes from emotionless to ever-so-slightly dazed and horrified.
A few seconds after we hear the thud of the body hitting the floor, Tommy walks back into frame and says, “I’m going to go give Gwen a call. She’s probably home by now,” while he opens the door to leave.
He doesn’t look back, he doesn’t comment on what just happened. There is no remorse at all. It’s like he just stepped on a bug on the sidewalk while walking down the street, and he’s on to the rest of his life now.
Cagney pulls the scene off just brilliantly.
Like he pulls it off the whole movie. He makes the viewer both hate and love Tommy — feel sorry for him and not feel sorry for him at all.
Tommy makes his own bed, and he has to lie in it — literally at one point.
He is a man who wants it all and wants to be important, but, in the end, can’t hold on to anything that is important to him.
Jean Harlow is in this one as well, and I know she was supposed to be a big star back then, but my husband walked in and said, “She was so overrated,” and I based on this performance, I would have to agree.
I was not blown away by her, even though the scene with her was interesting because she sat on a settee, half on Cagney’s lap, while telling him what kind of man she thought he was and running her fingers along his neck and pressing his face into her cleavage. It was a very sensual scene for a movie made in the 1930s. From what I read, she wasn’t wearing bras under her dresses either.
According to an article written by Rob Nixon on TCM.com, Cagney once asked her, “How do you keep those things up?” in reference to her breasts.
“I ice them,” Harlow said, and then left to just what she’d said she did.
This was definitely a movie made before the strict film codes went into effect.
I was surprised to learn during my research that Cagney almost didn’t get the role of Tommy Power. Instead, he was initially cast as the quieter Matt Doyle, and Woods was cast as Tommy.
“But director William Wellman had seen Cagney’s tough performance in Doorway to Hell (1930),” Nixon wrote in his article. “And after three days of shooting – and much urging by screenwriters John Bright and Kubec Glasmon – he realized a big casting mistake had been made. Luckily, producer Darryl Zanuck allowed the two actors to switch roles, otherwise film audiences would have been robbed of one of the most ferocious and iconic performances of the decade, perhaps of all Hollywood history.”
This movie was not free of injuries for the actors.
One of the most famous scenes in the movie is where Tommy shoves a grapefruit in the face of his girlfriend when he’s mad at her. This was based on a real-life incident of a Chicago gangster named Earl Weiss who once slammed an omelet into his “jabbering” girlfriend’s face.
It was decided this was too messy, so it was suggested a grapefruit be used.
“What happened next depends on who tells the story,” Nixon wrote on TCM.com. “[Actress] Mae Clarke said Cagney was only supposed to yell at her in the scene and that the actor surprised her with his impulsive use of the breakfast food. Cagney claimed the grapefruit had been decided on beforehand but that it was supposed to brush past her at an angle that would only appear to be a bona fide attack. Whatever the truth, when the time came to get the shot, Cagney smashed the grapefruit directly (and painfully, the actress said) into her face, and Clarke’s very real look of horror and surprise was recorded for posterity.”
Cagney faced his own pain, though, when Donald Cook, who played his brother, hit him for real during one scene, knocking him across the room and causing Cagney to lose a tooth. Cagney theorized that Clarke had put him up to it as revenge but he never proved it and production moved on without any more incidents, despite the fact — I can’t even believe I’m reading this — that real bullets were used in some of the shooting scenes.
The movie was based on Bright and Glasmon’s novel Beer and Blood. Yes, I would love to find it! They were nominated for an Oscar for their screenplay for the movie.
There were some really great lines in the movie, one of them being when Tommy’s brother comes back from war and accuses Tommy of running a business of “blood and booze.”
Tommy shoots back: “Your hands ain’t so clean. You killed and liked it. You didn’t get them medals for holding hands with them Germans.”
Have you ever seen this movie? If so, what did you think of it?
Here is my revised list for the rest of the Winter of Cagney:
The Public Enemy
Love Me or Leave Me
White Heat
Man of A Thousand Faces
Angels With Dirty Faces
Bonus: The Seven Little Foys
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Public_Enemy
https://www.tcm.com/articles/31288/the-public-enemy
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