Word: cagneys
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Strawberry Blonde (Warner Bros.) answers James Cagney's constant prayer. It keeps him out of crime pictures. It puts him into a fragrant, funny picture of Manhattan of the '90s, when birch beer was a dandy drink and if you had a black eye you went to a barber shop and got a leech...
Mostly one long flashback, the picture begins with Cagney bawling out a noisy party in the next yard, whereupon a turtlenecked Yale man of the Bum McClung era, with a Y as wide as his chest, rears above the garden wall and shouts: "I'd like to give him a taste of the good old flying wedge!" Whereupon a street band blares into The Band Played On, which plumps Cagney into such a mood of reminiscence that it is a full hour until he returns to test, and best, the good old flying wedge...
...liveliest cinema flashbacks on record reveals Cagney as an East Side student dentist with a mooching Irish father (Alan Hale) whose philosophy is: "I was never in the world cut out to be a street cleaner and there's no use reaching for the stars." Cagney loses the neighborhood strawberry blonde (Rita Hay worth) to a chiselling contractor (Jack Carson) and on rebound marries her girl friend (Olivia de Havilland). Later they visit the contractor, grown rich, where they dine under newfangled electric light. "Isn't it dangerous?" asks Olivia. Says Carson: "Not if you pay the bill...
Frank Craven knows the urchins around the corner of Forsyth and Delancey Streets in Manhattan's lower East Side. He watches one of them grow into a scrappy little pug (James Cagney) who almost wins the world's championship, another become a sultry, sirenic dancer (Ann Sheridan), another a sneering gangster named Googi (Elia Kazan),still another a willowy, clean-cut composer (Arthur Kennedy...
...fiddle. Piqued at her assignments on her return to Warners from her success as Melanie in Gone With the Wind, Miss de Havilland flounced out of the studio. Brought flouncing back by suspension (the big stick with which the Warner Brothers have subdued Bette Davis, Priscilla Lane, James Cagney, Ann Sheridan), spunky Miss de Havilland kept the Brothers and her fellow players guessing about her grudging promise not to elope with James Stewart during the six weeks filming...