Incredibly brisk and modern looking seminal gangster film - you can almost see shades of The Godfather and The Sopranos in it. Jimmy Cagney is great as the amoral criminal but the supporting cast is good and not stagey - Edward Woods (his pal), Donald Cook (older brother), Leslie Fenton (fellow criminal), Beryl Mercer (Ma), Robert Emmett O'Connor (the organizer), Murray Kinnell. It was the youngest I'd seen Joan Blondell (24) though she was in two other Warner Bros. films I've seen that year - Night Nurse (also directed by Wellman) and Blonde Crazy (again with Cagney), one of her nine films released that year! And, 45 minutes in - Jean Harlow.
Blondell and Cagney were on stage together in 1929 in 'Penny Arcade'. Warners decided to film it (as Sinner's Holiday 1930) and cast them together.
The ending is amazingly powerful and downbeat.
'The Warner Bros Story' tells us that Mae Clarke had been assured Cagney wouldn't actually touch her face with the grapefruit - thus her look of shock when he shoves it in her face is genuine.
Kubec Glasmon, John Bright and Harvey Thew wrote it from Bright's original story, 'Beer and Blood'. Photographed by Dev Jennings, a silent cameraman from 1915 who shot some of Keaton's major films like The General.
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| Yeah - I don't quite know what to make of this. But thought it worth a mention |
Must watch Little Caesar next.
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