After watching this again last night, for about the third or fourth time over a five year period, I came to the conclusion that it just wasn't very good --- as a film. However, my disc comes with the Scorsese interview, and after listening to him I thought perhaps I was wrong, and that this film was a work of genius after all.
There's not much of a story, and nothing that could be called a plot. Irish-American youngster steals roller-skates, and is viciously given the strap by his evil-looking keystone copper father. He graduates up the crime ladder, earns a minor mint from Prohibition, functioning simply as a thug enforcer employed by what appears to be a multi-millionaire Jewish crime boss. He kills men and horses with a total lack of remorse, gets involved in mobster warfare, and ends up as a parcel, delivered home to his mother by special courier. The loose ends are multiple. A number of characters, such as Cagney's first live-in squeeze, simply vanish from the narrative. But for Cagney's charisma the whole business would be oddly boring and uninteresting.
The lack of narrative continuity make one suspect that great chunks of footage have been cut away at some stage, creating a strangely staccato sequence of scenes. This left Scorsese to convince me that each scene had been extremely inventively planned and shot, with ingenious lighting, framework and camera angles. I'll buy it, if he says so. I'd agree that a number of them of them were vivid. Many of the personalities were unfortunately also annoyingly fake, like the dopey mother, the goody brother, the cipher-like sister, Paddy Ryan the crime lord. Even when all allowances are made for the early date, I'd much rather watch Hell's Angels.
The short extra featuring the 1932 US women's Olympic team was a genuine eye-opener. One reviewer thinks the moll who got the grapefruit was Jean Harlow. The gaffes on these reviews never cease to amaze me.
Six stars for Cagney. Zero for the rest.
There's not much of a story, and nothing that could be called a plot. Irish-American youngster steals roller-skates, and is viciously given the strap by his evil-looking keystone copper father. He graduates up the crime ladder, earns a minor mint from Prohibition, functioning simply as a thug enforcer employed by what appears to be a multi-millionaire Jewish crime boss. He kills men and horses with a total lack of remorse, gets involved in mobster warfare, and ends up as a parcel, delivered home to his mother by special courier. The loose ends are multiple. A number of characters, such as Cagney's first live-in squeeze, simply vanish from the narrative. But for Cagney's charisma the whole business would be oddly boring and uninteresting.
The lack of narrative continuity make one suspect that great chunks of footage have been cut away at some stage, creating a strangely staccato sequence of scenes. This left Scorsese to convince me that each scene had been extremely inventively planned and shot, with ingenious lighting, framework and camera angles. I'll buy it, if he says so. I'd agree that a number of them of them were vivid. Many of the personalities were unfortunately also annoyingly fake, like the dopey mother, the goody brother, the cipher-like sister, Paddy Ryan the crime lord. Even when all allowances are made for the early date, I'd much rather watch Hell's Angels.
The short extra featuring the 1932 US women's Olympic team was a genuine eye-opener. One reviewer thinks the moll who got the grapefruit was Jean Harlow. The gaffes on these reviews never cease to amaze me.
Six stars for Cagney. Zero for the rest.