As this one began I was worried I was in for the kind of old crime movie I don’t really like much. They’re often particularly wooden and it ultimately feels like nothing more than little boys playing cops and robbers (fair enough, in a sense that’s all cinema is, but there are degrees to it). I knew I had to watch it, though, not least ‘cos I remember loving The Roaring Twenties when I saw it studying Film Studies all those years ago.

This one is a little wooden in places but around half way I found myself strangely comfortable watching it in a way I just don’t get around more modern movies of the kind. It’s fun to see where certain other more recent famous scenes originated, too: the scene in The Terminator, for example, when Arnie goes to the gun store and loads the gun right in front of the salesman – it’s right here. There’s a fantastic set piece with a guy playing piano, too, the kind of thing which must have been done a hundred times since (maybe a few times before, too), the gun is pulled and the camera swishes off to the side, all you hear is a gunshot; here the effect is magnified by the fact the camera, as was the norm in the early 30s, doesn’t move much otherwise in the movie.

The ending is all very preachy, but it’s still kind of moving … our antihero gets his last words (not quite as good as the last line of The Roaring Twenties, “He used to be a big shot,” though) and a postscript comes up telling us how to do our part in fixing society – for once, though, this moralistic end scrawl didn’t strike me as being at all cheesy, it’s actually quite brilliantly written and is still true today. The reason we love Cagney in these roles, and any of those villains we “love to hate,” despite their still being criminals, is exactly what the end scrawl is about, saying that the problem doesn’t lie with any individual or character, the problem, basically, lies with the problem itself. And that’s why we keep making movies about them, I guess.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 5th, 2005 at 11:34 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.