White Heat
Should we be sad that James
Cagney is slipping from memory, or was it inevitable that his star would fade?
These days, Cagney's image tends to flicker: He's that tough guy who talks so
fast you can hardly hear the words, and who, at the end of his films, gets
killed. Few people know Cagney's performances as intimately as they know the
high points of the performances of Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart or Cary
Grant. Or compare Cagney with fellow macho icon John Wayne: The punk gangster's
stock has fallen, while the silent cowboy's keeps on rising. What Americans do
recall about Cagney they're likely to have picked up from imitators (including,
of all people, Sammy Davis Jr.), who loved to mimic his nasal, rapid-fire
delivery, and to re-enact that moment at the end of his films when he gets
plugged with what seems like 300 bullets and reels theatrically for 12 minutes
before dropping dead.
Cagney's
slow fade is especially surprising when you consider how much the genre he
helped to invent, the gangster film, thrives. As described by John McCabe in
his old-fashioned and sometimes overly affectionate new biography, the street
milieu that Cagney brought to the screen seems contemporary, too. He was born
in 1899 on Manhattan's Lower East Side, into an Irish family facing problems
you can still see every week on NYPD Blue . His father was a tragic
combination of saloonkeeper and drunk who died relatively young during the
Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. His mother was a martyr with Irish red hair--the
stuff Oedipus complexes are made of. He grew up all the way east on
76 th Street, in Yorkville, and although he seems to have been a
mama's boy, a loner who liked to read, tough guys in the neighborhood gave him
nicknames like Red, Runt, and Short Shit, and forced him to learn how to fight.
(A few of them also taught him Yiddish, a language he adored and drew on
throughout his life for insults. He called his main career nemesis, studio head
Jack Warner, "the Schvontz ," one of Yiddish's many creative terms for
"prick.") Cagney's first showbiz gig was unplanned and inauspicious: a musical
revue about sailors in drag. According to McCabe, the need to support his
fatherless family, not vain hopes of becoming a star, is what drove him.
He worked his way up in vaudeville, perfecting a
distinctive style of dance in which he stiffened his legs and stuck out his
butt, and he was playing a sniveling bootlegger on Broadway when Warner
recruited him to Hollywood in 1930. While other movie companies of the early
'30s filmed literary adaptations or drawing-room comedies or musicals, Warner
Bros., which specialized in no-frills realism, set Cagney to work in a cycle of
social-problem flicks--movies drawn from headlines about striking milk truck
drivers, warring taxi unions and, of course, gangsters. These films claimed to
warn America about its urban ills, but what Cagney's first breakout hit, The
Public Enemy (1931), conveyed was the charisma of the amoral hood. He
played Tom Powers, a street punk who gets rich running booze during
Prohibition, grows too big for his britches, and winds up being shot. Other
actors had played scum, but only Cagney played scum with an awesome dignity,
like a predator in a nature documentary. Years later, Kenneth Tynan said this
was the role that let audiences admit they'd take a stinking lowlife over a
fussbudget hero any day.
The career
that followed is a good example of how shrewd the old studio system was at
figuring out exactly what a star is supposed to do, and an even better example
of how the system locked stars into an increasingly stultifying caricature of
their greatest roles. Cagney riffed on this hard-boiled persona for about a
decade, most harrowingly in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), playing
Rocky Sullivan, a killer who freaks out just as he's about to go to the
electric chair. (The audience is left to guess if Rocky is spineless or if he's
just trying to convince all the kids who worship him that crime doesn't pay.)
To keep his fans from getting bored, he improvised what he called "goodies,"
little touches like kicking a chair out from under his co-star. Shortly before
he died, Cagney described to McCabe his method of acting. Basically, he
listened. Watch Cagney while someone else is speaking and you'll see a darting
eye, a quivering eyebrow, a split-second grin. He hardly moves, but he makes
everyone on-screen seem important, and he creates a rare kind of in-the-scene
suspense.
Nonetheless, he kept getting stuck with hack
directors and predictable scripts. Relief came when he got to play the great
Irish song and dance man George M. Cohan in the musical Yankee Doodle
Dandy (1942). At last, a showcase for his stiff-legged routine and a chance
to be recognized as a wholesome patriot, instead of a rat. He thought he'd
broken out of his niche, but Warner still wanted to boss him around. So, in
1942, Cagney became one of the first stars to start his own production company.
Unfortunately, in his rush to change his image he picked a string of sappy,
pseudo-profound roles. He was a gentle country newspaperman ( Johnny Come
Lately , 1943), or a lovable alcoholic who sits in a bar all day musing over
the destinies of his friends ( Time of Your Life , 1948). A couple of
times during this period, he'd test-screen a film, the audience would object to
the new passive Cagney, and he'd have to shoot a new ending in which he went
crazy and punched someone out.
McCabe
leaves the impression that Cagney never got over this rejection of his
sentimental side. When he started out in show business, he was something of a
lefty, living briefly on a quasisocialist commune in New Jersey, sending money
to striking Mexican lettuce pickers, and naming Stalin and Gandhi as his
favorite human beings in a survey in 1933. But he was less an ideologue than an
idealist, and as he got older his views shifted to the right. In fact, beneath
Cagney's amoral public image there seems to have been a Norman Rockwell
struggling to get out. In his spare time he wrote naive mystical verse about
God's presence in nature: "All space is filled with wondrous things/ Unseen by
human eye./ Before us hover kings and queens,/ With realms that float and fly."
Perhaps the most shocking fact revealed in Cagney is the actor's
lifelong secret desire to leave Hollywood and go into agriculture. He bought a
number of farms and apparently loved to sit in the pasture and meditate on his
cows.
Cagney's corniness never really worked on-screen--the
"goodies" were drowned out by windy speeches--but when he turned it upside down
in White
Heat , his great 1949 comeback to the gangster genre, he
was unmatched as a ruthless pervert. He played Cody Jarrett, the head of a
bank-robbing gang who was trained in criminality by his mother, and who, though
well into middle age, still dotes on her with an infant's fierce love. White
Heat features two of Cagney's greatest primal tantrums: in prison, when he
finds out that his mother is dead and moans like a maniac; and at a chemical
refinery, where he screams, "Top of the world, Ma!" and then gets shot by the
police and consumed by fire.
To play
someone this unpredictable today, we might turn to an actor like Nicolas Cage.
But Cage's eruptions look narcissistic next to Cagney's: When he snaps, he's
not responding to other people in a scene, he's hearing voices in his head. The
other obvious comparisons to Cagney are Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, but
they're prestige actors--cerebral, introverted, and usually not as funny. I
tried to think of a modern actor who is as natural as Cagney, and to my
surprise the name that made the most sense was John Travolta. Like Cagney, he
has a dancer's grace. In Saturday Night Fever his charisma elevated junk
to greatness, and in Pulp
Fiction he played a dirt-bag with just
the right winking theatricality. Also, a few years ago, when left to choose his
own material, Travolta made the hideous Phenomenon , thereby
demonstrating a Cagneyesque taste for treacly fables.
The search for a modern Cagney is a vain
one--nobody could compare to him. So why do we remember Wayne so much better?
One reason is that Cagney didn't make enough really great films. But there's a
larger explanation. Wayne had the good luck to rule over Westerns, a genre that
was set on wide-open land and commemorated the past and dealt in stark moral
truths--a genre doomed to grow obsolete, leaving Wayne to dominate the
landscape, a proud and lonely warrior. Cagney's charisma launched what looks,
decades later, like the most enduring film style of all. He's been sucked into
the cultural ether. His skepticism and short fuse, which once seemed so
radical, are taught at the Actors Studio. His name may be vanishing, but more
than ever, he's everywhere.
