Word: cagney
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Shake Hands with the Devil (Pennebaker; United Artists) turns a heap of expensive ingredients-James Cagney, Don Murray, Michael Redgrave, Dame Sybil Thorndike, Dana Wynter, Glynis Johns-into an everyday Irish stew. Taken from a 1934 novel by Rearden Conner, the plot concerns a young American (Murray), a medical student in Dublin just after World War I, who finds himself innocently involved in "The Trouble." Pursued by the Black and Tans, he is spirited away by one of his professors (Cagney), who turns out to be a high officer in the Irish Republican Army. Grateful and idealistic, he joins...
...Hollywood sound stage, Fleet Admiral William F. ("Bull") Halsey, 76, peered through his thick-lensed glasses, did an approving doubletake. Object of his scrutiny: Cinemactor James Cagney, 54, his natural resemblance to Halsey startlingly enhanced by makeup, playing Bull Halsey in a movie titled The Gallant Hours, which will depict the Bull's role in winning the Battle of Guadalcanal. Said Cagney: "This film is a labor of love and gratitude to a man who, when the chips were down, performed...
...Capone (Burrows-Ackerman; Allied Artists) is amusing proof of the old saw that each generation rewrites history in its own image. In the lurid cinemythology of the '30s, Capone was glorified by Paul Muni (Scarface), Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar) and James Cagney (Public Enemy) as a snap-brim Satan. In the sober retrospect of the '503, he is reduced by Rod Steiger to a mere whitecollar, clean-desk psychopath-a sort of organization maniac...
Feiffer's childhood, which he describes as "monotonous," was colored by cocktail parties when he was twelve ("We were a sophisticated group of kids") and fantasies of becoming Jimmy Cagney, which he grew out of at fourteen, when he decided to become Humphrey Bogart. "After I got out of Monroe (James Monroe High School). I didn't do anything. I got drafted. I got out. I sat in my room and worried." And now, he admits, "I still don't know where it's going...
...Cagney is in fighting trim for his part, and the script by Charles Lederer, who also directed, gives him some fairly lively canvas to bounce around on. The songs are not much, but Cagney carries them off nicely in a hollered-out, newsboy alto that makes Shirley (Oklahoma!) Jones, the girl he doesn't get, sound like Renata Tebaldi. But not even the pleasure of catching Cagney at close to his best can entirely appease the sense that this is really an amoral little movie. Not even the greediest hands in labor's till have ever publicly demanded...