Last night I saw The Bloody Brood. A 1959 movie in which Peter Falk is a heroin dealer posing as a beatnik who discovers that killing people is the ultimate kick.
I saw this on a beatnik double feature at The Roxie. (The other movie was The Beatniks - though it was less beatnikish than The Bloody Brood.)
I watched The Public Enemy, where Jimmy Cagney invented modern acting. Everybody around him has those flat, weirdly intense faces of silent movies, and talks a little too slowly for reality, and there's Jimmy at a mile a minute, waggling his eyebrows and chattering away (in a New York accent, despite his character spending his whole life in Chicago). He's just the most magnetic thing, you can't help but adore him despite his being a crook and basically a sociopath.
Early Cagney is awesome to behold. He's one of those actors who shot to stardom pre-Code so a lot of folks really haven't seen the movies that made him an icon.
It was funny when Meadow Soprano ended up watching that one in her film class."Public Enemy", not the Falk dealer film.
I watched The Public Enemy,
Is that the one that ends with Cagney shouting "Top of the world, Ma!" just before the flaming fuel storage tank he's standing on explodes?
Seen that one. It was quite a performance.
No, that is
White Heat,
where he also plays a psycho, but a more flamboyant one with a Freudian complex. That was in the 50s, so about 20 years later.
The Public Enemy
is 1931, and has visual credits at the front of all the actors, and then a placard about how we shouldn't take the portrayal of gangsters as an endorsement thereof. In the short documentary on the DVD, I found out that Cagney was originally cast in the smaller role of Matt Doyle, and the casting was switched up because he clobbered a supporting role in abnother picture shortly before starting this one. They just realized he was too big a presence to play a secondary character, and that's how he stayed for a long time.
Angels With Dirty Faces
is still my favorite Cagney, though. The whole movie is buoyant and combative, so he fits into it so comfortably.
Actually, have not honestly seen it, but David Chase has, and Barry Levinson has so I feel that I have, too.(as Levinson goes, so goes my nation) God, I'm a Gen X stereotype, aren't I?
I am deeply shamed.
The Public Enemy
is the one where he smushes a grapefruit in Jean Harlow's face.
Not Jean Harlow. He doesn't meet her till after that scene. The woman he smooshes with the grapefruit has a hair color found in nature.
I have, of course, seen that clip. And heard that she got hurt doing that.
Angels With Dirty Faces is still my favorite Cagney, though.
I'll have to see that one. And now I'll have to check out Public Enemy, too. Love Cagney.
