Word: cagney
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...thin Hollywood strains: the backstage musical and the plot that glorifies the U.S. Military Academy. The result is a little monster of a flag-waving, hip-wagging movie combining the misshapen features of both. In a fine burst of freakishness, the Warners have even stuffed overage (46) James Cagney into the uniform of a West Point plebe...
...Though Cagney settles down at the Academy as comfortably as if he were in stir, it takes some feverish scripting to get him there. A down-at-heel Broadway genius, he is hired by a producer ostensibly to stage the cadet corps' annual show, actually to lure the producer's singing nephew (Gordon MacRae) from an Army career to show business. Brass-baiting ex-G.I. Cagney rags the cadets so energetically that the corps makes him a plebe for a while to keep him on a leash-and, of course, to teach him to love West Point...
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (Warner) sends Hollywood's aging (46) tough guy James Cagney off on another gay whirl of crime. Cast as the same strutting, wisecracking thug he played so often in the '30s (now, in a fleeting nod to movie progress, labeled a paranoiac), Cagney kills six men, breaks out of a chain gang, pulls off a couple of daring heists, blackmails a bribe-taking cop (Ward Bond) and viciously swats a blonde moll (Barbara Payton) with a rolled-up towel...
...blonde, of course, melts under this treatment and adores Cagney; whenever he scores a coup against the law, she is as thrilled as a housewife whose husband has just gotten a raise. Then Cagney charms a flighty society heiress (Helena Carter) into eloping with him and, at her father's urging, plans to take charge of her $30 million. In a jealous swivet, the moll begins throwing things like coffee pots and Jeroboams of champagne, finally throws a couple of slugs into her wayward gunman. Long before that point, enough brutality, bravado and dime-novel sex have been ladled...
White Heat. James Cagney returns to crime in a violent gangster melodrama with psychiatric trimmings (TIME, Sept...