Movie Exchange of the Day (Cagney and Clarke, Having It Out in “Public Enemy”)

Tom Powers (played by James Cagney): [shuffling to the breakfast table in his pajamas, hungover] “Ain't you got a drink in the house?”
Kitty (played by Mae Clarke): “Well, not before breakfast, dear.”
Tom: “I didn't ask you for any lip. I asked you if you had a drink.”
Kitty: “I know Tom, but I, I wish that... “
Tom: “...there you go with that wishin' stuff again. I wish you was a wishing well. So that I could tie a bucket to ya and sink ya.”
Kitty: “Well, maybe you've found someone you like better.”
[Enraged, Tom shoves a grapefruit in her face as he leaves the table]—The Public Enemy (1931), written by Kubec Glasmon and John Bright, adapted by Harvey Thew, directed by William W. Wellman

A complete revolution in audience attitudes has occurred in the 80 years to the day that filmgoers first witnessed this scene, but I doubt if the visceral shock has faded a bit. 

Part of this shock derived from Mae Clarke’s reaction to James Cagney’s grapefruit pushed in her face. (Later, the actress claimed that the scene was supposed to climax only with verbal abuse, while he said that the grapefruit was supposed to brush past her but look like a real attack.) 

The surprise—the disgust—registers unmistakably on her face, as you'll see in this YouTube excerpt.

This performance, his fifth for Warner Brothers, made Cagney, in the same way that Richard Widmark’s similarly villainous turn did in Kiss of Death and James Woods’ did in The Onion Field. Impressions this vivid have a way, through no fault of the actor’s, of becoming a creative straitjacket.

It could have been especially true for Cagney, a a song-and-dance man on Broadway before this role led inevitably led to one Hollywood thug role after another. The ironic thing is, he wasn't supposed to play gangster Tom Powers when shooting began. 

Then, a few days into shooting, director Wellman realized that Edward Woods, originally cast as Powers, wasn't working out, and had the brainstorm of having Woods and Cagney switch roles.

This scene was essential for Cagney in staking out the ground for Powers. It’s not enough to show that Powers is a vicious sociopath—any shot of him with his pistol out on the street would do that. No, he is truly dangerous in his volatility, a trait best shown in a seemingly ordinary setting: a breakfast table.

It’s this upsurge of savagery that isolates Powers, as a man utterly uncomfortable with the slightest bit of domesticity, even with his moll. (One suspects he would become positively bug-eyed at mafia chieftain/affectionate papa Vito Corleone in The Godfather, as well as at Tom Hanks’ mob killer by day, devoted dad at night in The Road to Perdition.) 

Though he later dumps Clarke for Jean Harlow, he’s clearly more at ease in the company of fellow male killers than with a female. Never mind a wife—he can’t even keep a mistress without rejecting her.

The Public Enemy wasn’t the prototypical gangster film—that honor belonged to Little Caesar, the Edward G. Robinson vehicle released by Warner Brothers earlier in 1931. But The Public Enemy offered quite a variation on its predecessor. 

As Roger Dooley noted in From Scarlett to Scarface: American Films in the 1930s: “Just as Robinson made Rico, written more or less sympathetically, repellent, so did Cagney make Tommy, meant to be repellent, irresistible.”

Cagney did so through an irresistible force field emitted by his small body. There’s that same sense in another performer and movie as far removed from Cagney and Public Enemy as you can get: Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

I say “unlikely,” except for a qualifier that really makes all the difference: Growing up in the Northern Ireland of the 1960s, an area with strife to match the Prohibition Era Chicago of Tom Powers, Branagh sat enthralled before his TV by the films of the Irish-Norwegian-American Cagney. 

As soon as he had the box-office credibility to do so, he staged a drama whose title directly paid tribute to his boyhood idol: Public Enemy.

Without the matinee-idol looks of fellow Shakespearean actor-hyphenate Lawrence Olivier, Branagh, a self-confessed “short-assed, fat-faced Irishman,” made use of his plebeian looks in Henry V with a restlessness and common touch that Cagney would have applauded.

The electric charge that Branagh recognized in the American was so powerful that Warner Brothers, fearing the heavy hand of censors concerned that he would glamorize evil, began to cast Cagney in films where he would be on the right side of the angels, such as G-Men.

But so outsize is the impact made by Cagney’s gangster roles—Public Enemy, Angels With Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties, White Heat, even the late Love Me or Leave Me—that you wonder where it all came from. That mystery only grows when you recall the nickname bestowed by fellow Hollywood “Irish Media” friend Pat O’Brien: “the faraway fella.”

Cagney was far, far removed from Hollywood mainstream in both living arrangements and attitudes. Sure, he would battle the studios when he had to for better parts, but he was instinctively inclined offscreen to trade pugnacity for pensiveness.

Start with his single marriage, of more than 60 years. Only once during that time was he tempted to stray—on a train ride with Merle Oberon—and even then he stopped before anything really happened. This product of the Lower East Side, as soon as he could, bought farmland in upstate New York, where he raised horses, and became proficient at painting as well.

Maybe the eye he trained in painting enabled him to pick up visual clues that enabled him to become an emotional sponge, to embody those he saw on the mean streets of New York without falling victim to their pathologies. 

The quintessential "New York actor," he would sketch the outline of a broad character type, but fill the space between with different psychological shades and hues that made each role uniquely human, vibrant, still able to burst the bounds of screens all these years later.