Word: cagneys
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...instrument was his voice. His Chicago Cubs play-by-play gig honed his ability to deliver dialogue with speed, assurance and conversational authority. Warner was a studio of fast-talking actors, but most of the men either sounded straight off the sidewalks of New York City (Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Pat O'Brien) or had acquired a well-bred British accent (the Australian Flynn, the Irish Brent). Reagan could pitch the sassy patter, but in heartland-America tones. Warner realized this and custom-made his first movie, Love Is on the Air. Playing a crusading radio host...
...changed everything. Before ELIA KAZAN, movie and stage acting occupied a realm of easy glamour. Actors prized articulation; even street-bred stars like Cagney and Stanwyck spoke with a cutting efficiency. But with A Streetcar Named Desire, the Tennessee Williams play Kazan directed on Broadway in 1947 and filmed in 1951, pop culture was yanked into real life...
...Goodness had nothin' to do with it, dearie." That line, from West's 1932 Night After Night, embodied the saucy spirit of early talkies. Now that Hollywood could speak, it did so in the tart cadences of fast-talking men and faster women. This freedom created fresh stars (James Cagney, Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Harlow) and a sexual impudence that riled the burghers of propriety...
They were all dancers. James Cagney propelled himself through space like a bullet or a bull terrier, his torso a few seconds ahead of his legs; anyone without a dancer's equilibrium would have fallen on his face. Henry Fonda was just the opposite: a triumph of convex geometry, his thin body a question mark that ambled at Stepin Fetchit pace toward a girl or a cause. Katharine Hepburn seemed always on the ascendant, scaling the invisible ramp of her own confidence. But of all the Golden Age Hollywood stars it was Fred Astaire who defined screen movement...
...Beyond the dialogue - so ripe you could squeeze it in a rival's face, like Cagney with a grapefruit - "Sweet Smell" is exemplary for being the very smartest, least preachy expos? on the wages of spin. The film tells us that this, dear ignorant America, is how your entertainment dreams are made: by bartering and bribery. These are the folks to whom you entrust the anointing of the famous: slimes. But slimes with style - for the watchworks of malevolence have their own precision, their own seductive movement. "Sweet Smell" is as much in love as in judgment of the moral...