James Cagney

Orson Welles thought James Cagney the most talented actor of the sound era. He based his opinion on the theory that though Cagney’s performances were “big” they were so focused and specific that they were the opposite of being hammy.  Cagney always seems to be walking a fine line, threatening to go over the top but never doing so, keeping the audience riveted with his golden rule: “never relax”.

He is best known as a gangster.  Breaking through in one of the key hoodlum parts of the early 1930s, “The Public Enemy”, Cagney rode the genre’s trends throughout the decade, switching sides to play an undercover cop in “G-Men” before giving his definitive early performances in “Angels with Dirty Faces” and “The Roaring Twenties”.  The climax of the former, as Cagney’s character feigns cowardice whilst being led to the electric chair, is one of golden era’s tour de force moments: a marvellous piece of controlled theatre that completely transcends the melodramatic premise.

A decade after “The Roaring Twenties” Cagney returned to the wrong side of the law in “White Heat”.  The part of Cody Jarrett is his most psychologically complex: a mother obsessed madman suffering from headaches and delusion of grandeur, as capable of crawling into his mummy’s lap and piggy backing his wife as suicidally blowing up a factory.

Cagney was also a hoofer.  His work as Broadway legend George M Cohan, a role that required him to age from a teenager to a man in his late 60s, won him an Oscar.  Just as memorable is “Footlight Parade”, with Cagney dancing atop a bar in a typically opulent Busby Berkeley production number.  It is perhaps the only performance to ever register dramatically in Berkeley’s rarefied world.

My favourite Cagney part is in “Mister Roberts”.  Stealing the film from under the noses of Henry Fonda, William Powell, and Jack Lennon, his dictatorial sea captain is a mass of insecurities and neuroses, full of rage and petty spite but never less than a credible and therefore pitiable human being.