The Public Enemy

James Cagney was the first screen star to tell the audience to go screw themselves. That the audience not only didn’t mind but came back for more is a testament to Cagney’s quite extraordinary combination of charisma and attitude. His ability to take the most unpleasantly amoral characters and turn them into crowd-pleasing anti-heroes, without sentimentalising them in the process, is perhaps the key to his fame. His insistence on a confrontational attitude to his audience was something new and Cagney clearly found it such a pleasing approach that he carried it over into films like Yankee Doodle Dandy and Footlight Parade in which his heroes are a lot more conventional. What's remarkable is that in The Public Enemy, his star-making role from 1931, all the things which made him one of the all-time great screen actors are already present.

The Public Enemy is very much by-the-numbers gangster pulp. Based on ‘Beer and Blood’, a popular novel by John Bright and Klubec Glasmon, it tracks the career of Tom Powers (Cagney) and his best friend Matt Doyle (Woods) from their childhood misdeeds in 1909 to their adult success as criminals during the days of prohibition and their eventual, and inevitable, violent deaths. This plot-line isn’t all that different from the ones explored in Little Caesar, from the year before, and Scarface, made in 1932. It’s clearly inspired by real events and the headlines which had turned a group of seedy racketeers and thuggish enforcers into figures on an almost mythical scale for an American public transfixed by their exploits. What’s different about Tom Powers in The Public Enemy is the small-time banality of his crimes. He’s not much of a leader of men, either through fear or loyalty, and his taste of the highlife is relatively brief. He and Matt are little more than rum-running thugs who get lucky but rapidly find that their good fortune runs out. There’s little of the moral message of Little Caesar, in which Rico is brought low and forced into alcoholic vagrancy through vaulting ambition. Instead, we simply see a violent man who dies in the same brutal way in which he lives. There’s some attempt in the written prologue to claim some intentional social message but I don’t think we should be deceived any more than audiences at the time were. This is lavish, melodramatic exploitation and it’s absolutely riveting, made with immense skill and providing the frame for a superb performance.

Whereas Edward G. Robinson always came across as a cultivated actor who liked to explore his dark side, Cagney seemed to live within his. Although he portrayed a wide variety of characters and was, by training, a fine song and dance man, he comes across, particularly in his films for Warner Brothers, as the toughest guy on the block who doesn’t care what we think of him. Even when playing George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, there’s an edge, an undertone of danger and risk that makes his singing and dancing a kind of choreographed punch-up. The genius of this, however, is that Cagney’s tough guys are the characters that we want to watch. We rarely care a great deal about the other characters in the film, particularly not the bland representatives of ‘good’ that we are meant to be sympathising with.

A lot of this is also present in Eddie Robinson’s performance as Rico in Little Caesar but Cagney adds two things of his own. Firstly, a sense of comic timing and a fast delivery which strongly suggests both the screwball comedy which was to flower a few years later and the influence of Groucho Marx. Cagney’s heroes are often very funny and that adds to their menace, probably because it leads to a certain sense of psychotic remove from the world around him. In the famous scene where Tom Powers stands in the rain and grins, pulling the lips away from the teeth like some kind of hellish monster about to feed, he barely seems human. Few other actors could deliver a line like “I wish you was a wishing well. Then I could tie a bucket to you and sink you” with quite the perverse combination of charm and threat that Cagney could. The same goes for the infamous grapefruit scene – we not only forgive Powers for doing it, we laugh at this bit of petty sadism. Secondly, Cagney adds sexual potency and attraction. No-one could ever accuse Edward G. Robinson of being remotely desirable but Cagney’s bad guys emit an erotic heat which renders more than understandable the idea that women would fall for the little bastard. It’s partly the swagger, the sensation of lunatic self-assurance and total lack of interest in consequence. But it’s also the absolute certainty that no-one else matters a damn. When Cagney developed his anti-hero and added an extra layer of humanity in later films such as Angels With Dirty Faces and, subsequently, a tragic desperation in The Roaring Twenties, the effect was all the more powerful because it was founded on the electricity of Tom Powers, the man who destroys everyone and, ultimately, himself.

Jimmy Cagney is a whole show in himself but he’s fortunate that the movie which made him a star is a fine piece of filmmaking. William Wellman’s direction is poised and intelligent and he paces the story with a good deal more assurance than Mervyn LeRoy manages in Little Caesar. There are few stilted dialogue scenes and the constantly mobile camerawork is a delight. Wellman’s refusal to wallow in the violent scenes is fascinating. Virtually every extreme act of violence is played off-camera but the pervading atmosphere of brutality and doom is brilliantly achieved. A good deal of this is due to Cagney’s portrayal of Tom Powers, a study which is filled with the constant potential for explosive violence. We don’t need to view the effects of what he does because we can already see it happening in the cold blackness of his eyes, twin moral voids which seem to reflect an nowhere of eternal emptiness. Even when seducing Jean Harlow’s blonde bombshell, a dream of something which he can’t ever feel, or feigning nostalgic reminiscing with his Ma, Tom Powers seems to have a aggression bubbling under the surface. This helps the film through the usual weak-spots of stage-Irish sentimental melodrama represented by the incredibly tedious character of Ma Powers. Cagney seems to understand this character and he claims to have based it on a real friend of his fathers, Jack Lafferty: “There are some people who, for whatever reason, are damned souls, and Jack Lafferty was one. I played Tom as a kind of tribute to Jack...” When, at the end, Tom says “I ain’t so tough”, I don’t for a single moment think he means it.

For a long time, William Wellman was a director who was underrated, largely because Andrew Sarris and the rest of the Cahiers Du Cinema inspired critics didn’t consider him sufficiently important to bother with. But when you look through his credits, you see a string of great Hollywood movies which are paced with split-second timing and packed with good performances. I’d particularly recommend, along with this movie, A Star Is Born and Nothing Sacred. He cultivated a reputation for macho bullshitting and seems to have delighted in his nickname ‘Wild Bill’ Wellman – he was particularly famous for insisting on using real bullets wherever possible. The camerawork is worth mentioning too. There’s an expressionist quality to the film which is something quite new in American sound film and which points the way forward to both the rest of the gangster movies of the 1930s and the film noir era of the mid-forties to the fifties. The final scenes are particularly well staged, combining visceral excitement with an overwhelming sense of tragedy in a manner which is almost Shakespearean. As for the sexism which some critics have found in the film, it reflects both the attitudes of the time and the negative feelings of Tom Powers towards the women in his life. I always feel guilty laughing at it, particularly the grapefruit scene, but I still laugh. Perhaps I shouldn’t.

I want to round off my review of the film by quoting the critic Kenneth Tynan. He said of Cagney’s performance in The Public Enemy that it “abolished both the convention of the pure hero and that of approximate equipoise between vice and virtue.” There’s no better way of putting it. Cagney was a new kind of movie star and when you watch his performance of Tom Powers, its like watching the birth of something unique and exciting. A lot of people imitated Cagney but no-one got the “equipoise between vice and virtue” quite right. He would give deeper, better performances but none of those was quite as exciting as this one. He doesn’t date and, despite being more than seventy years old, nor does The Public Enemy.

The Disc

The DVD of this important film is another triumph for the Warner Brothers Gangster Collection. I doubt it has ever looked as good as it does here and the range of bonus materials really adds to the experience.

The 1.37:1 transfer is exceptionally good. There are very strong blacks, plenty of detail and a level of grain which is suitably filmic without being excessive. No problems with artifacting or edge enhancement. There is a small amount of very minor print damage but nothing particularly significant. Overall, this is a superb transfer for a film which is nearly three quarters of a century old.

Much the same goes for the mono soundtrack. As I said in my review of Little Caesar, there’s nothing to be gained in over-cleaning a Vitaphone soundtrack and a good deal to be lost. The hiss and crackle are integral to the whole experience of watching the movie. Dialogue is eminently clear and the music comes across well too. Those addicted to surround sound are unlikely to be impressed but the rest of us should be more than happy.

As with the other discs in the collection, the extras are exceptional. Pride of place, once again, goes to the 19 minute documentary, “Beer and Blood: Enemies Of The Public”. This may be short but it’s packed with information and some insightful comments from an array of people. The best comments come from Martin Scorsese, a major fan of the film, but Alain Silver and Robert Sklar also come out of it well. Thankfully, the egregious Andrew Sarris doesn’t make an appearance this time. Also good is the commentary track by the aforementioned Robert Sklar. This is a detailed and intelligent analysis of the film and the genre and it’s put across with plenty of enthusiasm. We also get the original, priceless theatrical trailer for the film, looking in reasonably good condition.

Adding a touch of class is another ‘Warner Night at the Movies’ feature, hosted by the engagingly excited Leonard Maltin. This includes a trailer for Cagney’s enjoyable comedy Blonde Crazy, a newsreel about women athletes training for the 1932 LA Olympics, a short vehicle for ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy, and “Smile, Darn Ya, Smile”, a Merrie Melodies cartoon showcasing the popular song. All of these features are in remarkably good condition for their age.

Once again, the main feature is subtitled but the extra features are not. This is the only major blemish on the Gangsters Collection and is something which Warners should try to rectify on future releases.

The Public Enemy is essential viewing. It’s a great movie which remains excitingly provocative and contains one of the most daringly extended downbeat endings of its era. Best of all, it gives us James Cagney at the beginning of his incredible career. The DVD presentation of this film is immaculate and I can’t even begin to think of a reason why you shouldn’t own it, preferably as part of the box set.