Word: cagney
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...that The Public Enemy was not going to be anything like Little Caesar. In detail The Public Enemy is nothing like that most successful of gangster pictures, but its central idea is identical-dissection of the criminal mind by reconstruction of one criminal's career. You see James Cagney as a tough boy led into petty thieving. He moves higher, into the bigger business of robbing storage lofts. He rises to become an outstanding rumrunner and a journeyman of homicide until his bullet-spattered body is dumped in front of his mother's house. His more sentimental...
...Holiday has been compressed to 55 minutes. Concentration gives it pith; it tells its little story compactly and credibly. Although the action involves liquor-running and murder, it is less a picture of action than of character, made so by the skill of Lucille La Verne and James Cagney. She is the owner of a penny arcade, which she runs with an avarice only equaled by her devotion to bourgeois respectability and to her son, Cagney, a snivelling, dependent coward. Best shot-Evelyn Knapp getting pennies to be used by the arcade's customers...