James cagney

James Cagney (1899-1986) was born and died in New York. Of humble condition and Irish roots, his entry into the show started on the lowest rung as a theater decorator. Jimmy said simply: “Where I come from, if you can make a dollar you don’t ask questions, you just go and do it.” In 1919, without any specific training, he made his debut on the scene. A musical show with Frances, his ‘forever’ wife – married 64 years, and two adopted children – made him popular. Warner proposed to take his ‘show’ Penny Arcade to the cinema. It was 1930 and the film, Sinner’s Holiday, began a long and turbulent relationship with the studio, which, like the Guadiana river, appeared and disappeared in its course. The draconian working conditions were legendary, and Cagney tried twice to free himself from the “embrace” of the studio, even creating a production company with his brother William.

Cagney’s name was inextricably linked to his gangster personas. His first hit was in 1931: William A. Wellman ‘s The Public Enemy . There he defined in a very personal way a hyperactive and cocky thug, something that grew in his violent outbursts. He turned to the gangster type, with his peculiar mime and his original way of adjusting his pants, in Angels with Dirty Faces ( Michael Curtiz , 1938), The Roaring Twenties ( Raoul Walsh , 1939) and Red Hot(id, 1949) in which when he reached “the top of the world” he would shout it like a child, seeking maternal applause. Co-founder of the Actors Union, he presided over it between 1942 and 1944. Curiously, he was targeted by the mafia, for not allowing his intrusion there; The thing did not go to majors due to the intercession of George Raft , linked to the underworld. He made 7 films with his friend Pat O’Brien , who became his nemesis on the other side of the law, one the aforementioned Angels… and their last film work, Ragtime ( Milos Forman , 1981), for Cagney a comeback after 20 years of absence.

But as Cagney said, “once you’re a singer and a dancer, you’re forever.” He did not forget his origins, and he wanted to shine in such a facet. He did it in Footlight Parade ( Lloyd Bacon , 1933), and as music hall artist George M. Cohan in Yankee Dandy (Curtiz, 1942), which gave him the Oscar. Cohan himself approved of Cagney because of his background. An idea of ​​his versatility is given by the Shakespearean A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), the westerns The Oklahoma Kid (1939) and The Law of the Gallows ( Robert Wise , 1956) and the comedies The Redhead (Walsh, 1941), where he was a crazy dentist, and One, two, three( Billy Wilder , 1961), critic of capitalism. She also played Lon Chaney in The Man with a Thousand Faces (1957). And he even directed the forgotten Short Cut to Hell in 1956 .

“It was curious to see how a golden rule of thumb in Hollywood worked: no one should ever kill a Gable or a Flynn or a Cooper or a Peck, but ‘killing’ a Cagney or a Bogart worked.” Walsh’s words confirm that ineffable quality of the actor, for which he delivered villains with charm. But he was never clones of himself. Peter Bogdanovich explained it when listing the ambiguity of his villains, “comic in Lay in Hawaii (1955), with an unsentimental ‘pathos’ in Love Me or Leave Me , or with a complicated and disturbing psychotic ambivalence in Red Hot .”