Word: cagney
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...Public Enemy, Smart Money or Blonde Crazy, you have some idea what to expect of Taxi. Authors Kubec Glasmon and John Bright are camera-minded writers and their stories, which usually deal in an offhand way with violent happenings, have speed, vigor and assurance. Fortunately for all concerned, James Cagney attracted Hollywood's attention at about the same time as Authors Bright and Glasmon. When he appears in one of their inventions the result is often brilliantly successful...
Blonde Crazy (Warner) shows a few of the tricks whereby an enterprising bellhop, equipped with light lingers and curly hair, can live handsomely on his wits. The bellhop (James Cagney) is so much interested in dishonesty that he keeps a scrapbook of variations of the badger game, methods of stealing diamond bracelets, false money transactions and likely methods of beating persons who think they can beat the races. By the practice of these wiles, he manages to keep luxurious quarters in the best hotels, preying mostly upon persons no more honest but less versatile than himself...
This conclusion serves the purposes of law & order. It is not in keeping with the rest of the picture, which is a chipper, hardboiled, amusing essay on petty thievery. In his first starring performance, James Cagney has a role in which he is more mischievous than wicked. He makes rascality seem both easy and attractive as he did in The Public Enemy and Smart Money, two previous works by Authors Kubec Glasmon and John Bright who wrote Blonde Crazy. Good shot: Cagney casting hungry glances at the female patrons of a nightclub...
...James Cagney was born over a saloon owned and run by his father in a Manhattan slum. By the time he reached high school he had started that series of heterogeneous occupations which occur painfully at the outset of many a cinematic career. He was a copy boy for the New York Sun; a department store bundle-wrapper; a librarian; a neophyte painter. He left Columbia University to be a chorus boy. From this traditionally effeminate occupation, he presently was graduated to vaudeville, musical comedy (Grand Street Follies)., legitimate plays (Women Go on Forever and Outside Looking In for which...
...says seem violently profane. In Smart Money he does again several of the things he did in Little Caesar but not so many that the role is repetitious. His pal, who dies after Nick has hit him for suggesting that his last bad blonde is a stoolpigeon, is James Cagney (Public Enemy...