Word: cagney
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...embodiment of big-city scrappiness, a mean-streets survivor who got ahead on a good grin, good moves and better hustle. To a generation of comic impressionists, Jimmy Cagney's mannerisms became part of the standard repertoire: the tough-guy, tommy-gun chatter, the feinted jab to convey affection (first aimed at Loretta Young in Taxi) and the square-shouldered bantam-cock strut. Public Enemy, White Heat and his other classic gangster movies traded on what he fondly called "my gutter quality." But in more than 60 films, the last of them a made-for-TV movie that aired...
...Cagney's widow Frances reportedly turned down an offer to hold the funeral in New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral. It would have been too grand for a former street kid. His last rites were held instead in a more modest setting, the church of St. Francis de Sales in Manhattan's Yorkville neighborhood, where he once served as an altar boy. His pallbearers were like a sampling of Cagney's many sides. They included Boxer Floyd Patterson, Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, Actor Ralph Bellamy and Director Milos Forman...
...Streets of San Francisco. In recent years, however, these hard-nosed cops have been replaced by a new band of lighthearted crime fighters, from Tom Selleck in Magnum, P.I., to Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote. Even the few "serious" police shows on TV, notably Hill Street Blues and Cagney & Lacey, are less about black hats vs. white hats than about ordinary folks coping with the stress of extraordinary jobs...
...every syllable of Sylvester's lisp or Pepe Le Pew's fetid French intensifies the viewer's ability to believe that these creatures are not only personalities but gifted movie stars. Bugs, even when dolled up in drag (a spectacle that always drives Elmer to embarrassments of lust), is Cagney plus Groucho. Pepe is a Charles Boyer with negative sex appeal. And whether in basic black or in period parts such as Robin Hood, Doorlock Holmes and the Scarlet Pumpernickel, Daffy is Everyman--well, Everyduck--on the worst day of his life. He is also the subtlest farceur in pictures...
...Twyla Tharp's brilliant Push Comes to Shove (1976), his flair for comedy burst out. In 1977 he became a Hollywood star, playing a famous dancer in The Turning Point. (Another film, White Nights, will be released at Christmas.) The lorn Petrouchka began to seem like a Slavic Jimmy Cagney...