WARNER ARCHIVE JAMES CAGNEY 4-FILM COLLECTION

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Blu-Ray review by Roy Frumkes

Smartly, as concerns the Golden and Noir ages, bundling several titles together often makes older collectibles more attractive…if the choices are shrewd. Because often these collections share a title or two, we are left to whittle down, according to your taste, which batch has the best non-overlappers, rather than having to buy them both and live with the duplicate(s).

Here’s a prime example: ULTIMATE GANGSTERS COLLECTION, featuring LITTLE CAESAR, THE PUBLIC ENEMY, THE PETRIFIED FOREST, and WHITE HEAT. We’ve got Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, plus more James Cagney, plus a feature doc about the era. That collection tries to spread out its goodies in the hope of casting a wider net. Probably it worked, but later batches, populated entirely by one star, the way Roger Corman pioneered horror genre double-bills for Saturday matinees, would probably have worked better.

I’m mixed on the multi-star approach. Not to mention that LITTLE CAESAR was made so close to early, clumsy sound that it got in the film’s way. And Bogart was dreadfully (and intentionally) stilted in the Hollywood remake of Broadway’s THE PETRIFIED FOREST. The winners in this bouquet were WHITE HEAT and THE PUBLIC ENEMY, both of which would make reappearances in the current Cagney Collection, clouding the issue of which to buy, or if you should buy them both and live with the double overlap.

The current Warner Archive James Cagney Collection gives us a sturdy range of titles that define the phenomenal actor/dancer’s persona. His first hit, director William Wellman’s THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931), shocked my Film Noir class with the raw cruelty of Cagney smacking a whiny moll in the face with a grapefruit. I followed it at the time with a scene from YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, with Cagney dancing up the side of a wall. The students expressed their utter bewilderment at this alteration in his character, then flew around the room like miniature blimps with all the air escaping. (Well…not quite, but you get the idea.)

Having won the Academy Award for YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, he starred in another film from both clusters, WHITE HEAT, by one of my favorite directors, Raoul Walsh. In its time it was widely perceived as profane. Not only does Cagney revel in the unabashed brutality of his character, but he even sits on his mother’s lap. I’m not sure what kind of malignant psychosis that represents, though I once showed the film to a gaggle of psychiatrists at a mental institution in White Plains, NY, and they gave his character a quasi-diagnosis of “hebephrenic schizophrenia,” insanity defined by childlike behavior. But the doctors were quick to add that Cagney had to have created the character out of his own imagination and not from reading medical journals.

Completing the foursome is ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, which stirs Cagney into a dose of the DEAD END KIDS, an odd mix of WB talent-pool graduates. But the studio owned them, so they found ways to use them. As an example of such outre casting from a fellow studio, think of Universal’s monster stable hatching FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN from their monster pool. They’re in the same genre, but still, at moments, the Dead End Kids feel like they’ve wandered across the lot and stumbled into the Cagney shoot quite by accident.

Anyway, this is the collection to own.