Word: cagneys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tough demeanor, Loesser was known to insult co-writers and directors and blow his top at rehearsals. He once got so mad at the way Isabel Bigley, Guys and Dolls' original Sister Sara, was mangling one of his songs that he socked her. Yet under the Cagney bully-bravado shone a big heart and the impulse to help other young composers. Among Loesser's proteges: Jerry Ross and Richard Adler, who did The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, Meredith Willson of Music Man fame and Hello, Dolly!s Jerry Herman...
...Emperor's Shadow covers some 30 years in the lives of two boys: a sturdy kid who will become the Emperor and his sensitive friend who will become the musician Gao Jianli ? think Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien in Angels With Dirty Faces. Both are suckled by Jianli's mother and raised as brothers. When they're 10, they're separated for pursue their different and colliding destinies. In maturity, the warlord (played with a bull-headed majesty by Jiang Wen, China's leading movie actor) hears than Jianli (Ge You, a stalwart of several Zhang Yimou films...
...their faces. You could put anybody on those paper mache mountains and say, "These are the guys who raised the flag." Who was to know? It wasn't like you see a movie with Gary Cooper or James Cagney standing there. It turned out they even had one wrong guy listed...
...James Cagney machine-gunned his way to stardom with The Public Enemy and other gangster movies in the early '30s. Immediately he agitated his studio, Warners, for more varied roles. Twice he took a voluntary suspension to make his point, returning each time for a higher salary and a tad more creative input. He left Warners again in 1936 and put himself on the open market. Though Cagney was a major star, the big studios stayed away from him, fearful that if one actor could dent the system, anarchy would ensue. He made one picture for tiny Grand National...
...Cagney embodied the sass and snarl of newly urbanized America, Bette Davis represented the assertive, neurotic ur-bitch. She came to Warners in 1931, making five to seven films a year and, like Cagney, campaigning for better parts. (She made her first big impression, in Of Human Bondage, on a loan-out to RKO.) When she turned down one role she was suspended and left for England, hoping to make pictures there, but Warners sued her for breach of contract...