Mark Harris dips into "Volume 3" of Warners' Gangsters Collection DVD box sets and decides that it's all about the minor James Cagney pictures. A taste for Cagney, who who credited by obscure film geek Martin Scorsese with inventing "modern screen acting" when he wasn't dancing like a son of a bitch, is always a mark of superior taste and probably evidence that one's mom was real pretty. The first set in the Gangsters series was stuffed with the movies that chart the evolution of Cagney's gangster persona: The Public Enemy, which made him a star (and where he was originally supposed to play the leading man's best friend, before the director, William Wellman, saw the two men acting side by side and thought, well, that's fucked up); Angels with Dirty Faces, in which he went to the chair like a yellow rat as a favor to his buddy, Father Pat O'Brien, so that the Dead End Kids wouldn't get the wrong idea about a life of crime being glamorous; The Roaring Twenties; and the later, primitive-Freudian White Heat, which closes with a death scene that Rasputin wouldn't want to have followed. They didn't really leave much for Volume 2, but it did include some lively, lesser-known B's, notably G Men, in which Cagney, playing an amoral lawyer, is reformed in the first reel after gangsters whack his pal and immediately joins the feds so he can get revenge on the mob.
The new box mops up various odds and ends starring Cagney, along with the other mainstays of the series, Humphrey Bogart and Edward G, Robinson. Both Bogart and Edward G. are ill-served by the selection here: Robinson at least performs with customary force and humor in the whimsical Brother Orchid, in which he plays a crook who disguises himself as a monk with a green thumb, but Bogart looks paralyzed with boredom by the script for the social-issues drama Black Legion, which actually makes the case against masked secret societies that practice lynching seem almost shaky. Luckily, the B's here starring Cagney--Picture Snatcher, The Mayor of Hell, and Lady Killer (in which Jimbo cons his way into a motion picture contract) serve to demonstrate just how hard it was to get in our boy's way. (So does Smart Money, which offers the dream team pairing of Robinson in the leading role and Cagney as his faithful sidekick.) These movies are scrappy affairs, thrown together with gimmicks and cheap thrills, powered by tabloid fumes and peppered with snappy patter. With all due respect to his A-picture classics, in some ways Cagney never seems more contemporary and alive than when he's at the wheel of movies like these, pushing ahead full throttle as he works simultaneously at keeping the audience entertained and striving to get the picture to the finish line before the budget runs out or his personal assistamt is hauled off by the bunco squad. Harris tends to favor The Mayor of Hell, just on the grounds that it has a title that would improve anything from a Strindberg play to So You Think You Can Dance? As a devotee of old newspaper-room movies, my own favorite is Picture Snatcher, for the way that society recoils in horror when Cagney, fresh out of the jug, announces that he's going to abandon his criminal career for one in photo journalism. (The whole movie is spun off from the incident of an actual tabloid photographer who strapped a camera to his leg and got a shot of the convicted murderer Ruth Snyder in the electric chair, just as the current hit her.)
Harris's Slate article is also worth taking notice of just because it features my favorite appended correction in quite a while, to wit: "The article originally noted that in addition to being racist and sexist, pre-Code gangster movies were also homophobic, citing as evidence a line from Lady Killer, in which cops threaten James Cagney by saying, "We'll run you in as a fag, and that'll mean 30 days in the tank." In fact, the line is, "We'll run you in as a vag, and that'll mean 30 days in the tank." Sometimes, you quote 1930s movie slang at your own risk.