Word: cagneys
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...film opens with a frenetic scene from The Roaring Twenties (1939), depicting a nattily dressed James Cagney as the leader of a mob of despairing stockbrokers futilely trying to save their investments...
FRANKLIN Roosevelt and Cagney emerge as the two interpreters of the 1930s for the American people. Mora's attention to F.D.R. is reasonable, but his excessive treatment of Cagney is unconvincing. One of the cult heroes of the 1930s, Cagney reasserted the qualities of aggressiveness and independent thinking in Lady Killer (1934) and G-Men (1935), but this revival of ruggedly self-reliant attitudes was not as important as F.D.R.'s uniquely successful exorcism of fear and death during the New Deal...
Mora devotes equal footage to both Cagney and Roosevelt, but F.D.R. rightfully assumes a more important role in Mora's analysis of the Depression. Roosevelt is successfully depicted as the gentlemanly savior of the working classes, the voice of reason in the face of Republican conservatism and most of all, a great actor and showman, winning over huge blocks of votes by sheer charm. The film shows him at home playing with his grandchildren, and cruising in the Long Island Sound in his family yacht. But never is Roosevelt so effective as when he mimics his political antagonists. Mora records...
...swastika painted on its tail, floating peacefully between the skyscrapers of Manhattan; Los Angeles, dawdling about growing, still a transposed prairie town set down in the middle of an antic oasis. There are also, intercut with fact, many of the best and balmiest fictions of the time: James Cagney, ever brash and streetwise, pushing mugs around; King Kong poking his head up through the el tracks...
...edge of sanity, for instance, he kept running through his head a "private screening" of 13 Rue Madeleine, an interminable Jimmy Cagney spy movie. In his cell, he sang Don't Fence Me In, Mairzy Doats and the Marines' Hymn, and in every way used his dream of returning to America to keep his spirits up. There is an astonishing passage in the book describing how he began walking from one end of his cell to the other, counting each measured footstep as he imagined himself walk ing out of prison into the suburbs of Moscow, crossing into...