PAUL NEWMAN used to joke that his headstone should say: “What if my eyes were brown?” James Cagney’s should have read: “What if I were a foot taller?”
Hollywood has had many miniature peacocks, like Alan Ladd and George Raft, who went to great lengths to hide their lack of stature. Cagney was the pint-size star who didn’t care. He made a virtue of it. He stood on his toes to give himself more energy. He puffed up his chest, tweaked people under the chin with his fist and dared anyone to try him on for size.
The essence of Cagney’s career, which is celebrated next month with a season of films at the National Film Theatre, was cocky defiance, but it was pugnacity delivered with surprising daintiness. He was the graceful gangster, exultant with confidence. “What d’ya hear, what d’ya say?”
He was always on his way up.
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And yet, along with Humphrey Bogart, he was one of the few 1930s stars who could die in a film and not hurt its box office. He had a streak of ferrety ruthlessness that was perhaps too dangerous for the times — shoving grapefruit into girls’ faces, dragging them by the hair. He was real and sadistic in a way that movie idols like Gary Cooper were not — the sneering smile, the face-slapping threats, the cold-blooded killings.
Even death was not a defeat for this character as long as he remained defiant. It was a tenet he took to psychotic extremes in the end, going up in flames in White Heat with the blood-curdling cry: “Made it, Ma. Top of the world.”
Cagney made his name at Warner Bros with The Public Enemy in 1931 — still a crackling, live-wire performance — and within three years the studio had his jaunty hoodlum down to a science. A memo from Darryl F. Zanuck, then a producer at the studio, says: “’s character has got to be tough, fresh, hard-boiled, bragging — he knows everything, everybody is wrong but him. He can do everything and yet it is a likeable trait in his personality.”
Cagney battled with the studio many times, mostly over money, but he also got fed up with starring in so many gangster quickies. His roots were in vaudeville and he regarded himself as “a song-and-dance man”. Having set up his own production company with his brother, he was able to achieve his dream with Yankee Doodle Dandy, his biopic of the Broadway legend George M. Cohan.
Cagney dancing in Yankee Doodle Dandy is one of cinema’s most strangely apposite sights because it is neither clumsy nor effeminate. He dances the way he fights — straight-legged, arms swinging, with no dilution of his brawny brio. It is precise and street-rough simultaneously.
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Ronald Reagan adored Yankee Doodle Dandy, and not because of its gee-shucks meeting in the Oval Office between the hero and President Teddy Roosevelt. It was the stage acrobatics that moved Reagan, even after 50 years, to muse, “Who knew Cagney could dance?”
Despite the elegant flurries — the finger-flicks, the trilby adjustments — Cagney’s strength as an actor was his utter lack of pretension. He was a working-class kid at heart who approached acting as if it were any other roll-up-your-sleeves job. He kept the psychology to a minimum and thought the best actors in the world were children. “They don’t think about how they’re holding their little tea party. They just do it.”
This blunt, practical approach would be nothing, though, without his emotional fearlessness. Cagney had a sentimental streak — how could he not, being half Irish? — but he traced his ability to express it soberly back to the time he impulsively kissed his grandfather. “He started to cry, but he was happy, I could tell. That taught me one thing. Never hide your emotions. Never fail to kiss someone when you know it’s right.”
However grandly scaled, his performances usually had the stamp of truth. Orson Welles loved to cite Cagney as the best argument for big acting on screen. “Force, style, truth and control — he had everything,” Welles said. “God, how he projected. And yet nobody could call Cagney a ham. He didn’t bother about reducing himself to fit the scale of the camera. He was too busy doing his job.”
There were missteps. Even Cagney couldn’t handle playing a cowboy seriously in The Oklahoma Kid and, in Mister Roberts, he played the hated ship’s captain with a twinkly menace, which is to say no real menace at all.
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But there is no one who can match the crackle and drive Cagney shows in his rising gangster roles like The Roaring Twenties. His delivery is rapid-fire even by the standards of the times. So often it feels as if Cagney is forcing his co-stars to catch up with him as he reads their expressions more swiftly and more intently. He is ahead of everything, or picking it up fast.
It is hilarious how different Cagney’s real self was from his tough-guy roles. He started life as slum kid with an alcoholic father, but he was a shy, retiring, book-loving autodidact who took up painting, farming and campaigning for the environment. He stayed married to the same woman all his life. He drank rarely and shirked social engagements, although he loved telling anecdotes on set. Pat O’Brien, who played his priest in Angels with Dirty Faces, called him a “faraway fella”. His two adopted children slept in a separate house.
The only area where he broke his own strictures against being fussy and clever was his poetry, a life-long habit full of sing-song rhymes and cumbersomely naive pensées: “One phrase is large on mankind’s scroll/ All is ephemera — except soil and soul.”
He retired to his farm in 1961 and made only one film — Ragtime — in his last 25 years, saying: “In this business you need enthusiasm, and I don’t have the enthusiasm for acting any more.”
As on film, so in life. He was all or nothing.