Word: cagney
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Each Dawn I Die (Warner Bros.-First National) winks at the Hays Code, which frowns on teaching cinemaddicts how to commit crimes, by illustrating a practically foolproof way to commit one. When Frank Ross (James Cagney), a fresh reporter, presses too close to the racketeers running his home town, the boys slug him, douse him with whiskey, prop him behind the steering wheel of a car and head it toward a crowded intersection. The result starts Jimmy off on a long term for manslaughter and gives Fellow Prisoner Hood Stacey (George Raft) his opportunity to meet "the first really square...
...addition to its crackling screen play (by Norman Reilly Raine and Warren Duff from Jerome Odium's novel), its sharp camera eye (Warners' Director William Keighley), Each Dawn I Die is made memorable by the easy mastery of its two principals. Cinemactors Cagney and Raft, the screen's two deadliest Ruffie MacTuffies, have been friends ever since they began their careers as vaudeville hoofers in Manhattan in the 205. Cagney was responsible for one of Raft's earliest cinema parts, a dancing bit in Cagney's Taxi. Their appropriate reunion, also celebrating their return...
...Gentlemen in attendance" signing this Dutch-treat invitation included such prime Hollywood good fellows as Robert Benchley, James Cagney, Charles Chaplin, Gary Grant, Mark Hellinger, Herbert Marshall, Frank Morgan, Robert Riskin, Edward G. Robinson, Randolph Scott, et al., to the number...
Warner Bros., which got the jump on the industry by introducing talkies in 1927, has since scored as a pacemaker in gangster films and biographies, is now the spearhead of Hollywood's biographical thrust. Some Warner projects: Paul Muni in The Life of Beethoven, James Cagney in The Story of John Paul Jones, biographies of Knute Rockne, John Dillinger, Hitler-baiting Pastor Martin Niemoller...
...recent surge of nationalism has turned Hollywood's attention back to a uniquely American type of hero, the hairy-chested Western badman. But the chest of "The Oklahoma Kid" is sparsely covered with hair. In fact, the whole production has little muscle, little mind, small sense, and less sensibility. Cagney is thrown into a weak part to satisfy the ambitions of the directors to produce an "epic drama". All they achieve is a lot of noise, no subtlety, no poignancy, no emotional strength. "The Oklahoma Kid" is no epic,--just a second feature misplaced...