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..the many faces of
July 17th, 1899-- March 30, 1986 |
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It would have been O'Caigne
in the streets of Dublin but on New York City's East Side, the name
was Cagney, James Cagney, and it belonged to a cocky, Irish street kid
who could lick the daylights
out of any bully twice his size and often did. Even his older brothers
left all the fighting to Jimmy.
He was fast on his feet and quick with his fists, an agility that would
become very useful to him later
on. But young Cagney wasn't just fists and footwork. He was a complex
concoction unique to himself and, try as they might, his imitators could
never quite capture it. I call it the many faces of Jimmy Cagney.
There was the street kid who never forgot his
visit to the country where, for the first time, he saw
rolling fields and picket fences with morning glories climbing over
them ( morning glories remained
his favorite flower). He vowed he would live there someday. That same
lad, sitting atop a bar and
singing, as he tried desperately to get his happily drunk father back
home with at least some of the
week's wages. The tired face of a youth who worked 2 or 3 part time
jobs while going full time to
school and then turned over the unopened pay envelope to his mother
(this work ethic would follow him the rest of his life). And the young
man who gave up the more lucrative fight game and went into show business
because that's where his heart led him. Of course, his mother told him
that before he went into the fight game, his first round would have
to be with her! But the family wondered about the decision when Jimmy's
first part was in drag!
The family was a tight knit group , even tighter after Jimmy's father
died. Carolyn, the delightful
titian-haired mother of the brood, held them together. Harry, born a
year before Jim, and Eddie,
two years younger than him, were in medical school. Bill, born in 1904,
was to become Jimmy's
closest associate in the movie years. Little Jeanne, born in 1918 just
after the older Cagney died,
was beloved by her big brothers and later appeared in five films with
Jimmy.
The Broadway years were tough but they prepared him well for the film
career ahead. From the time he was a kid on the East Side, Jimmy watched
people...town characters, school chums and now, other actors. He would
go to auditions and stand in the back of the line so he could watch,
and later copy, the dance steps of those ahead of him. There were no
stock gestures or trite inflections of speech in Jimmy's repetoire.He
had learned Yiddish in his youth and used it in "Taxi!". Even
the much-
imitated trouser hitching, finger snapping Rocky in "Angels with
Dirty Faces" was garnered from a
pimp in his old neighborhood! In Jimmy's second show "Pitter Patter"
he met the love of his life,
Frances Willard Vernon, "Willie" to all her friends. They
were married on September 28, 1922, and
Willie moved in with the family.
Then, in 1930, Jimmy was paired for the second time with Joan Blondell
in "Penny Arcade". Al Jolson saw the show, liked
it, bought it and sold the rights to Warner Brothers to be retitled
"Sinner's Holiday". He also included Jim and Joan in the package.
So it was off to the film capital to do moving pictures. But Jimmy and
Willie never unpacked until after Jimmy was given the lead in "Public
Enemy" !
The movies came rushing along one quickly after another, hardly giving
Jimmy time to breathe.
When he got disgusted with the assembly-line production, he walked...but
never until the current
picture was finished. His dislike of studio procedure would later drive
him to work actively in setting up the Screen Actor's Guild.
In his essay "James Cagney and the American Hero" (Hound and Horn,
Apr.-June, 1932) Lincoln
Kirstein writes "every movie type has several faces" but "Cagney,
in a way, creates his own....He
is the first definitely metropolitan figure....the American tough guy".
Well, this so-called tough guy finally got his farm (In Stanfordville,
New York) and lived there for
the last years of his life raising Morgan horses and Scottish Highlander
cattle and writing poetry!
And , since I love this phrase that Jimmy stole from Jim Barton (who
stole it from an anonymous
drunk), I think I'll end it here and say "Thanks for the hall!"
To learn more about his movies, read Arabella's
Notes.
To learn more about the man who was James Cagney, his family and his
work, I suggest the
following books from your local library.....
"Cagney by Cagney"(1976) Doubleday & Co.
"James Cagney: The Authorized Biography" by Doug Warren and
James Cagney (1983)
St. Martin's Press
Sinner's Holiday (1930)
Doorway to Hell (1930)
Other Men's Women (1931)
The Millionaire (1931)
The Public Enemy (1931)
Smart Money (1931)
Blonde Crazy (1931)
Taxi! (1932)
The Crowd Roars (1932)
Winner Take All (1932)
Hard to Handle (1933)
Picture Snatcher (1933)
The Mayor of Hell (1933)
Footlight Parade (1933)
Lady Killer (1933)
Jimmy the Gent (1934)
He Was Her Man (1934)
Here Comes The
navy (1934)
The St, Louis Kid (1934)
Devil Dogs of the Air (1935)
G-Men (1935)
The Irish In Us (1935)
A Midsummer's Night Dream (1935)
Frisco Kid (1935)
Ceiling Zero ( 1935)
Great Guy (1936)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Boy Meets Girl (1938)
Angels With
Dirty Faces (1938)
The Oklahoma Kid (1939)
Each Dawn I Die (1939)
The Roaring Twenties (1939)
The Fighting 69th
(1940)
Torrid Zone (1940)
City For Conquest (1940)
The Strawberry Blonde (1941)
The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941)
Captains of the Clouds (1942)
Yankee Doodle
Dandy (1942)
Johnny Come Lately (1943)
Blood on the Sun (1945)
13 Rue Madeleine (1946)
The Time of Your Life (1948)
White Heat (1949)
The West Point Story (1950)
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950)
Come Fill The Cup (1951)
Starlift (1951)
What Price Glory? (1952)
A Lion is in the Streets (1953)
Run for Cover (1955)
Love Me or Leave
Me (1955)
Mister Roberts (1955)
The Seven Little Foys (1955)
Tribute to a
Bad Man (1956)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Short Cut to Hell (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil ( 1959)
The Gallant Hours (1960)
One, Two, Three (1961)
Ragtime (1981)
For Television..
Terrible Joe Moran (1984)
Memorable Lines
On Screen......
“I’ve had hangovers before, but this time even my hair hurts”!.....Rock Hudson in “Pillow Talk”
“Men don’t get smarter
as they grow older...they just lose their hair”!..... Claudette
Colbert in
“The Palm Beach Story”
“Look at those little hands.
They wouldn’t make a cow halfway comfortable”!..... Nelson
Eddy in
“Naughty Marietta”
“We’ve become a race of peeping Toms!” ......Thelma Ritter in “Rear Window”
.....and off!
Marlene Dietrich to her companion
on seeing John Wayne.... “Oh, Daddy, get me that!”
Red Skelton, observing the crowds at the funeral of much-disliked studio head Harry Cohn...
“Well, it only proves what
they always say...give the public something they want to see and they
will come out for it!”
Sam Goldwyn, on the art of acting....
“The only important thing about acting is honesty. Once
you’ve learned to fake that, you’re in!”
Spencer Tracy on the same subject.... “Just know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture”
Mae West, fined $500 in 1927 for “sexy acting”....“When
I’m good, I’m very good but when I’m bad,
I’m better!”
...Actor Robert Cummings was
born Charles Clarence Robert Orville Cummings. But, to get an
acting job on Broadway, he faked a British accent and became Blake Stanhope.
Four years later, in Hollywood
under similar circumstances, he assumed a Southern accent and
became Texan Brice Hutchens. It wasn’t until he shortened his real
name first to Robert and then
to Bob, that he found his greatest success...on television.
...Joseph (Julius) Mandl, director and producer, married actress Mia May and became....Joe May!
...Olga Petrova, vamp star of
silent films, was billed as a Russian noblewoman from Warsaw.
She was actually just little Muriel Harding from jolly old England,
born there in 1886!
...Theda Bara was born Theodosia
Goodman. To enhance her image as an exotic femme fatale,
she was renamed Theda Bara, an anagram for “Arab Death”!
..........that the original Rin Tin
Tin, famous movie dog of Hollywood’s heyday, never appeared on
film?
On the first day at the studio, the dog bit Jack Warner on the backside
and was banned from the set.
It was his understudy who gained fame and fortune! Quite a comment on
the old adage, “Don’t
bite the hand that feeds you!”
....George Montgomery, Western
and action star and husband of Dinah Shore, attended the University
of Montana majoring in ....interior decorating? In fact, he made all
his own furniture!
....Before 1914, most movies
were made in New York? Except Westerns! For the sake of realism,
Westerns, complete with cowboys and Indians, were shot on location out
on the range...in the wilds
of New Jersey!
....Actress Hattie McDaniel was
the first black woman ever to sing on the radio in the USA? She was
also the first black performer to win an Oscar ...for Best Supporting
Actress in “Gone With The Wind”!
....Two of Hollywood’s arch
villains, George Macready and Vincent Price became partners.... in an
art gallery?
The Three Brothers Warner...
...or the Studio That Crime Built!
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that these fine boys did anything unlawful. But you have to admit, they did haul in a load of loot, thanks to THE MOB! Now the way I heard it......
By 1930 Jack, Sam and Harry
already owned one fourth of all the country’s movie theaters, a
movie studio all their own and 51 subsidiary companies! That is a huge
slice of Hollywood pie. Now, granted, most of that was due to Al Jolson
who talked right out loud in “The Jazz Singer”. But now the
studio was feeling the crunch of the stock market crash, profits were
way down and something had to be done
fast..and cheap.
All the studios were feeling
the pinch except MGM, where opulent sets, lush musicals and large casts
kept rolling out top products. Warner had none of these luxuries and
only one guaranteed box office draw..a dog! Rin Tin Tin even had his
own script- writer, Darryl Zanuck! So the brothers put their heads together
and told Jack to come up a solution. Jack told Darryl to drop the dog
(even though he often
said “Rin Tin Tin was the only s.o.b. on the lot who was worth
anything”!) and write something that
would bring audiences back to the theaters. And so Darryl wouldn’t
get too lonesome for his canine client, Jack made him Head of Production.
Good old Jack, always thinking ahead! Darryl immediately... took the
afternoon off.
The next morning at breakfast,
while Darryl was eating his grapefruit, reading his newspaper and scratching
his head over the problem (he was ambidexterous), an idea hit him. There
it was right on the front page! Why not make a movie about crime? Now
crime wasn’t anything new to film or filmmakers. D.W. Griffith
had done a bang- up job with “The Musketeers of Pig Alley”
back in 1912. But then
people lost interest. Now it was big news. Darryl, armed with the latest
Reader’s Digest report ( 486 gangland killings in Chicago in just
one year), convinced Jack Warner that gangster movies would go over
big and they could be made fast...and cheap( the operative word here).
And that’s how THE MOB or ,as it was often called, “Murderers’ Row” was born. The audiences came in droves. Some of the box office busters were ”Doorway to Hell” with Lew Ayres (huh?) and James Cagney, “Little Caesar” with Edward G. Robinson, and “The Petrified Forest”with Humphrey Bogart. “The Public Enemy with Cagney, and “Each Dawn I Die “with Cagney and George Raft. “Castle on the Hudson” and “They Made Me a Criminal” with John Garfield.
From 1930 until 1941 gangsters held sway at the big WB backlot......until December 7th, 1941, when America found she had a new enemy to fight. The Axis!
Warner’s
Murderers’ Row
THE MOB
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James Cagney
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George Raft
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Humphrey Bogart
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John Garfield
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Edward G. Robinson |
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From Lea in
....Maybe you can answer a film question for me? As a kid I remember some teen-age "B" movies starring Donald O'Connor. I believe the studio was Universal. The leading ladies would change, one was Susanna Foster and another was Gloria Jean, but there was always Peggy Ryan as the comical sidekick. How many films did Donald and Peggy do together? Anywhere near the number he did with Francis the mule? As I remember, Peggy's future husband and later ex-husband, Ray McDonald, also a dancer, appeared in these films also.
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Well, let's see. My count shows "Francis" the loser by 7 pictures. Donald and Peggy did 13,together Donald and Francis did only 6. Here they are: "What"s Cookin"?"
(1942) Donald and Francis did: "Francis"(1950)*,
"Francis Goes to the Races" (1951)*, Also did you know Donald O'Connor writes beautiful concert music and has written at least one symphony?
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From Janet in Do you remember a movie called "Campus Rhythm" with Gale Storm ( my boyfriend's favorite classic star) and Johnny Downs? Well, we were wondering about the actress who played the "real Suzie". Wasn't she the same gal who played the switchboard operator in the old "Dr. Kildare" series? If so, is she still alive? |
The actress you refer to is
Marie Blake and she died in 1978. She was the telephone operator
in the first "Dr.Kildare" series. She was born Blossom
MacDonald, sister of Jeanette MacDonald who sang for her supper
at MGM with our favorite baritone. Much later, under her married
name, Blossom Rock, she played Granny in "The Addams Family"
television series. Some of her other films are "Love finds
Andy Hardy" (1938)*, "I Married a Witch" (1942)*,
and "The Second Time Around" (1961). The first two are
on video. |