MOVIE THEATER
Raoul Walsh, devoted until November 8 to the French Cinematheque in a retrospective in eighty films, is under contract with the Warner Bros studios during their period of prosperity, which allows him to make twenty films, including many masterpieces. Several actors, contractually linked to the studios, will thus become the filmmaker’s riding companions. Among them, James Cagney (1899-1986). The actor returns ten years to Walsh. For different reasons – Walsh is an upper class kid with an unbridled taste for adventure, Cagney, a short Irish proletarian full of gab and rage – the two New Yorkers meet on the dangerous virtues of the conquest. On their ability, as well, to be comfortable in all genres.
Under this American seal, four films bring them together: The Fantastic 20s (1939), The Raspberry Blonde (1941), hell is his (1949), A lion in the streets (1953). That is two gangster films, a social comedy and a political chronicle. Cagney cuts through them like an electric arc, imposing on his roles more than they impose on him. Worked tics, quick thinking, machine-gun flow, high-pitched and deliberately mocking voice, jumping gait, quivering shoulders, curled lips. Without pressure, an irresistible charm. A huge star from the 1930s, he formed a perfect couple with Walsh in their relationship with Warner Bros: the filmmaker played on flexibility, when the actor imposed a constant standoff, especially against the tyranny of contracts, which earned him the infamous title of“professional opponent” from producer Jack Warner.
In The Fantastic 20s, Cagney plays Eddie, a brave soldier during the First World War, who is discovered in a shell hole and who, in a way, will never come out. On his return, victim of the crisis, he turns thug during Prohibition. Raoul Walsh depicts there, in American civil society, the continuation of the war by other means. In The Raspberry Blonde, he is Biff Grimes, a quarrelsome dentist who has had his fiancée robbed by a high-flying crook, who also sends her to prison. He marries another out of spite and does not end up being so badly off. Sons of proles against corrupt upstarts, here is another touch of socialism that does not distract in this tasty comedy.
Criminal psychopathy
In hell is hisCagney portrays a migraine-ridden, childishly unbalanced gangster and sadistic killer, whipped by a neurotic maternal hold that enjoins him to become the king of the world (“Top of the world, my! »). Things will turn out differently. Here, it’s not just that Cagney surpasses his own savagery such as The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931) had crystallized it for a long time (half a grapefruit crushed on the face of his girlfriend), it is also that he relegates the Paul Muni from scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932), the Edward G. Robinson of Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931), the Raymond Burr of bully market (Anthony Mann, 1948) or the Richard Widmark of crossroads of death (Henry Hathaway, 1948) – all peaks in Hollywood’s expression of criminal psychopathy – to kindergarten antics.
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