A Dancer in a Gangster’s Suit
In the spring of 1931, a thirty-one-year-old song-and-dance man from the Lower East Side walked onto a Warner Bros. sound stage to play a gangster. Nobody on the lot expected much from him. James Cagney had been in Hollywood for less than a year, he had made only a handful of small films, and his reputation was as a Broadway hoofer who could sing, dance and talk fast. The gangster picture he was about to make was supposed to belong to someone else.
The film was The Public Enemy, directed by William A. Wellman, and Cagney had been cast as Matt Doyle, the hero’s loyal best friend, the nice guy who stands beside the villain and shakes his head. The lead role, the gangster Tom Powers, belonged to Edward Woods, a handsome young actor the studio had signed for the part. Cagney was the sidekick, and everyone, including Cagney himself, assumed that was where he would stay.
But there was something about the way Cagney moved, the way he talked, the way he seemed to vibrate with energy even when he was standing still, that made people look twice. Wellman looked twice. The dailies looked twice. And before the cameras had finished rolling, the two actors had swapped parts. The dancer was now the gangster, and Hollywood was about to find out what that meant.
From Penny Arcade to Hollywood
Cagney had come to Hollywood by accident, more or less. He had scored his first real Broadway success in 1929, playing opposite Joan Blondell in the musical Penny Arcade, a rough, slangy show about a carnival arcade. Warner Bros. bought the film rights, renamed it Sinners’ Holiday, and brought Cagney and Blondell west to repeat their stage roles on screen. His film debut came in 1930, and he signed a seven-year contract with the studio.
His first films gave no hint of what was coming. He played a crook’s sidekick in Doorway to Hell, a supporting part in a George Arliss picture, and a series of small roles that used his speed and his slang but never asked him to carry a film. He was fast, funny and full of energy, and the studio liked him, but they did not know what to do with him. He was too small to be a leading man in the usual sense, too rough to be a romantic hero, and too much of a dancer to be taken seriously as a tough guy.
That was the joke of it, of course. The very qualities that made him seem wrong for a gangster were the qualities that made him the definitive screen gangster. He was small, so his violence was shocking. He was a dancer, so his movements were sudden and precise. He talked fast, so his threats sounded like machine-gun fire. Hollywood had been looking for a gangster who looked like a gangster. Cagney was a gangster who moved like one.
The Swap
The story of how Cagney and Woods changed places has been told many times, and the details vary with the telling. What is certain is that Cagney was first cast as Matt Doyle, the decent friend, and that by the time the film was finished he was Tom Powers, the gangster at its centre, while Woods played Matt. The most widely told version says that Wellman watched the early footage, saw that Cagney was stealing every scene he was in, and switched the two men during rehearsals.
The American Film Institute’s catalogue notes that the simple version of this story, that Wellman took the lead away from Woods and gave it to Cagney, is not quite correct in every detail, and that the truth was more complicated. That is worth remembering, because Hollywood legends are rarely as tidy as they sound. But the essential fact is not in dispute. The studio had hired one man to be the star and another to support him, and the supporting man turned out to be the star.
The Grapefruit
The Public Enemy is remembered today for a single scene, and it lasts only a few seconds. Tom Powers is having breakfast with his girlfriend Kitty, played by Mae Clarke, and she nags him, sweetly and persistently, about settling down. Tom listens, his face hardening, and then he picks up half a grapefruit from his plate and shoves it into her face. She sits there, stunned, juice running down her chin, and the scene ends. It is shocking even now, nearly a century later.
The scene was not in the script as filmed, at least not in that form. In the original script, according to Cagney’s autobiography, Tom was supposed to stuff an omelette into Kitty’s mouth, which would have been odd but not memorable. The grapefruit was something else, and its origin has been argued about ever since. Cagney and Clarke both said it was staged as a practical joke on the film crew, never meant to be used, and that Wellman liked the shot so much he kept it.
Other accounts tell it differently. Wellman himself said the scene was inspired by an argument with his wife, in which he had been tempted to do exactly what Tom does. The studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck is also said to have claimed credit for it. The truth is probably lost, and that hardly matters. What matters is that the scene made audiences gasp in 1931, and that it still makes them gasp, because it showed, in a single gesture, everything Tom Powers was: charming, funny, and capable of casual cruelty.
Tom Powers
Tom Powers is not a likeable man, and that was the point. The film follows him from boyhood, when he and Matt fall in with a small-time thief called Putty Nose, through the Prohibition years, when bootlegging makes him rich, to his violent end. He betrays his friends, he beats his women, he murders without hesitation, and he loves only one person in the world, his mother, played by Beryl Mercer. He is a monster, but he is a recognisable monster, a boy from the streets who learned early that the world rewards the ruthless.
Cagney played him without apology and without softening. He based the performance, by his own account, on gangsters he had known and on street types he had grown up around in New York, men who talked fast, moved fast and settled arguments with their fists. He gave Tom a walk that was half dance and half swagger, a voice that could turn from a joke to a threat in a single sentence, and a smile that never quite reached his eyes. It was a performance with no safety net.
The ending is one of the most famous in early sound cinema. Tom, shot and broken, is delivered to his mother’s house wrapped in bandages, and he collapses dead on her doorstep as she opens the door. It is a brutal, almost operatic image, and it made the film’s moral plain: crime does not pay, and the wages of crime are paid at home. The censors were satisfied, and the audiences were thrilled, and Cagney was a star.
Overnight
The Public Enemy was released in 1931, and it made James Cagney a star in a matter of weeks. He had been a chorus dancer a decade earlier, a Broadway actor two years earlier, and a film sidekick a few months earlier. Now his face was on posters across America, his name was above the title, and Warner Bros. had a new star to sell. It was one of the fastest rises in Hollywood history, and it never really stopped.
The studio knew exactly what to do with him, and it did it again and again. He played gangsters and tough guys in Taxi! in 1932, in The Mayor of Hell, in Lady Killer, and in a string of pictures that kept him in a snap-brim hat and a snarl. He fought the typecasting from the start, and he fought the studio over pay and working conditions, walking out more than once, but the image stuck. Audiences wanted the gangster, and Warner Bros. wanted to give them the gangster.
The Price of the Image
The success of The Public Enemy came with a price that Cagney paid for the rest of the 1930s. He was typecast as a gangster, and when he tried to play other kinds of parts, the studio pushed him back. He responded by fighting for better roles and better pay, and by walking out on Warner Bros. when he felt he was being treated unfairly. He was one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild, and he served as its president from 1942 to 1944, because he believed actors deserved to be treated as professionals, not as property.
He did find ways to stretch. In ‘G’ Men in 1935 he played a lawman, turning the gangster image inside out, and in Angels with Dirty Faces in 1938 he played Rocky Sullivan, a gangster with a conscience, a performance that earned him his first Academy Award nomination. In Each Dawn I Die and The Roaring Twenties, both in 1939, he played criminals with more depth and more pain than Tom Powers had ever shown. Each of those performances was a step away from the simple thug of 1931, and each of them depended on the audience remembering Tom Powers.
The real escape came in 1942, with Yankee Doodle Dandy, in which he played the Broadway song-and-dance man George M. Cohan and won the Academy Award for Best Actor. It was the dancer’s revenge on the gangster, and it proved what Cagney had known all along: that the man who played Tom Powers could also sing, dance and charm an audience into standing up and cheering. He had needed eleven years to prove it.
The Echo
The Public Enemy did not just change Cagney’s life. It changed the gangster film, and it changed the movies. Before 1931, screen criminals had been played by older, heavier men like Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar, who was a force of nature. Cagney made the gangster young, fast, funny and terrifying all at once, a boy from the streets who could kill you with a joke on his lips. Every screen gangster who came after him, from Humphrey Bogart to Al Pacino, owes something to Tom Powers.
The grapefruit scene became a piece of American folklore, quoted, parodied and imitated for decades. The film itself was recognised as a landmark, and it has been preserved and studied ever since as one of the founding documents of the gangster genre. It was made for only about 151,000 dollars, a modest sum even in 1931, and it earned its studio a fortune in fame and in money. It was, by any measure, one of the best investments Warner Bros. ever made.
Cagney himself never disowned Tom Powers, even when he grew tired of playing him. He knew that the role had given him everything, his career, his fame, his freedom, and he spoke of it with gratitude. He had walked onto a sound stage as a dancer in a gangster’s suit, and he had walked off as a star. Nothing in his life was ever quite the same again, and nothing in the movies was either. That is what a turning point looks like, and The Public Enemy was his.