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.
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