Word: cagneys
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...Lion Is in the Streets (William Cagney; Warner) follows the jaunty rise of Jimmy Cagney from a backwoods peddler of kitchenware to his near triumph as a statewide peddler of political buncombe...
Based on Adria Locke Langley's 1945 bestseller, the film is laid in an unspecified "cotton-growing state" that is readily identifiable as Huey Long's Louisiana. Demagogue Cagney, married to a Yankee schoolteacher (Barbara Hale) and deep in an affair on the side with a swamp siren (Anne Francis), mounts the first rung of the political ladder by accusing a wealthy cotton-ginner of short-weighting the local farmers. When one of his followers kills a deputy and is shot, in turn, while awaiting trial, Cagney grabs headlines by haling the dying man into court and insisting...
Raoul Walsh's direction keeps the film moving briskly and Cagney dominates the film in the grand manner of the 19305, when he was Hollywood's top tough-guy star. Though he looks and sounds far more Broadway than Deep South, he is thoroughly persuasive as a fast-talking politico equally able to bamboozle a backwoods crowd or to make a deal with big-city gangsters. Good shot: Cagney's shrewd mixture of friendliness and contempt as he joshes his neighbors into turning a broken-down house into a honeymoon cottage for himself and his bride...
...previous major attempts: Warner's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) with Mickey Rooney, Joe E. Brown and James Cagney; MGM's Romeo and Juliet (1936) with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer. Financially and artistically disastrous, these productions convinced Hollywood that Shakespeare was "boxoffice poison...
Jack Benny (Sun. 7:30 p.m., CBS). Guest: Jeanne Cagney...