best film: White Heat by a mile. As good as Yankee Doodle Dandy is and Roaring Twenties (Cagney’s second best film) is the answer here is easily the 1949 crime masterpiece. Cagney is a bat out of hell with a mother complex. It’s a marvelous role and Cagney’s explosive performance is pitch perfect. I’m not sure it’s a masterpiece without that ending—but—by god—that ending.
best performance: White Heat. Cagney came to fame playing gangsters and there’s no debating that White Heat is the pinnacle of his career. It’s a little strange that it would come so far after his prime (he was an actor of the 1930’s and this came on the turn of the 1940’s going into the 1950’s). Cody Jarrett has it all. Cagney plays him with unsurpassed energy, there’s Freudian stuff galore here of course, and he’s frankly quite frightening—close to literally a tour-de-force.
stylistic innovations/traits: Cagney debuted 1930, became a star with The Public Enemy (first of the famous trio of early gangster films that include Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932)) and dominated the decade along with Gable and a few others. He’s in 8 archiveable films in the 1930’s He made two films with Bogart in 1939 and it’s fascinating because Cagney is the star and Bogart the heavy (albeit a talented heavy). Bogart hadn’t perfected his style yet and Cagney is clearly in top form—that would change despite the fact that Cagney’s two best performances came in the 1940’s he could. Cagney was a bulldog and played tough characters even in his musicals—which certainly show his talent as a performer and range. His two films with Raoul Walsh put him where he is on this list- White Heat is a masterpiece and Roaring Twenties is a MS top 5 of the year quality film.
directors worked with: Walsh (2) and this is the most important of his auteurs—Bacon (2) gave him diversity (musical and western) and Curtiz (2)…he also worked once a piece with Hawks, Wilder, Nicholas Ray and Milos Forman
Top 5 Performances:
- White Heat
- Yankee Doodle Dandy
- The Roaring Twenties
- The Public Enemy
- Angels with Dirty Faces
Archiveable films
| 1931- The Public Enemy |
| 1933- Footlight Parade |
| 1935- A Midsummer Night’s Dream |
| 1935- G-Men |
| 1936 – Ceiling Zero |
| 1938- Angels With Dirty Faces |
| 1939- Oklahoma Kid |
| 1939- The Roaring Twenties |
| 1942- Yankee Doodle Dandy |
| 1949- White Heat |
| 1950- Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye |
| 1955- Love Me Or Leave Me |
| 1955- Run For Cover |
| 1961- One, Two, Three |
| 1981- Ragtime |
White Heat may be the perfect example of a film being elevated to masterpiece status by its lead performance. It is the quintessence of the tour de force.
SPOILERS FOR WHITE HEAT
Of course everyone remembers the scene where Cody learns about his mother’s death, and that’s one of the best acted scenes of all time, but he may have been even better in the scene where he’s leaning against the tree and talking about his mother. Either way he manages to make Cody Jarrett both terrifying and poignant/human, a truly incredible achievement. If you want to know why Orson Welles said Cagney may have been the greatest actor to ever appear in front of a camera, watch White Heat. I seriously don’t think Brando would have been nearly as good in the role. Speaking of Brando, it makes you wonder what Cagney as Vito Corleone would have been like, since he was considered for the part, though Vito isn’t nearly as unstable a character.
Correcting myself here, Cagney was considered for the role of Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II, not Vito.
Edward G Robinson, Burt Lancaster, Laurence Olivier, Anthony Quinn, Ernest Borgnine, Paul Scofield, George C Scott and others were considered to play Vito.