Showing posts with label james cagney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label james cagney. Show all posts

July 27, 2010

The Public Enemy - 1931

Public Enemy, The


The Public Enemy Framed Art Print
16 in. x 22 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com


A definitive, brutal gangster film from the early 1930s with James Cagney's effective portrayal of the rise and fall of a prohibition-era criminal. Two young punks who grew up on the South Side of Chicago - Tom Powers (Cagney) and Matt Doyle (Woods) - move from petty crimes to armed robbery and bootlegging. They lead violent and lethal lives, slap their blonde girlfriends around, and retaliate against rival hoodlums. (The film is most notable for its scene in which Tom pushes his breakfast grapefruit into the face of his moll girlfriend Kitty (Clarke).) They become associates of mobster Nails Nathan (Fenton), self-destructively engage in gang warfares, and Tom takes a new girlfriend Gwen Allen (Harlow). The final image of the delivery of Tom's 'mummified' bullet-ridden body at his estranged family's door is bone-chilling.

July 7, 2010

Yankee Doodle Dandy - 1942

Yankee Doodle Dandy


Yankee Doodle Dandy Framed Art Print
16 in. x 22 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com


Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) is one of Hollywood's greatest, grandest and slickest musicals. The nostalgic, shamelessly-patriotic, entertaining film also supported the war effort as it paid tribute in its mostly fictional story to a popular Irish/American entertainer and the grand American gentleman of the theatre in the early 20th century.

The timeliness of its release, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941, helped the 'propaganda machine' of going to European battlegrounds overseas with a song that was a rousing theme song written years earlier for WW I - Over There. And a second song, You're a Grand Old Flag, contributed to morale-boosting, flag-waving patriotism and love of one's country. And it was the first time that a living US President (FDR in this case, played by Jack Young) was portrayed in a motion picture.