James Cagney Collection (Blu-ray Review)
Director
William A. Wellman/Michael Curtiz/Raoul WalshRelease Date(s)
1931/1938/1942/1949 (November 18, 2025)Studio(s)
Warner Bros. Pictures (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: See Below
- Video Grade: See Below
- Audio Grade: See Below
- Extras Grade: A-
- Overall Grade: A-
Review
Yet another Warner Archive 4-fer, this set focuses on actor James Cagney and his Warner Bros. career in a repackaging of four Blu-ray titles released individually before, using the same video masters and extra features.
Cagney’s (1899-1986) reputation has diminished some over the last 40 years, but remains one of the screen’s all-time great actors. Look around YouTube and you’ll easily find videos with the likes of Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick extolling Cagney’s acting.
At the start of production on The Public Enemy (1931), director William A. Wellman reportedly told Warner Bros. head Jack L. Warner, “I’ll bring you the toughest, most violent picture you ever did see.” Seen today, this pre-Code gangster film still impresses, but perhaps not to the degree it did when it was new. So influential was The Public Enemy, gangster films imitated its genre-defining tropes, even later Cagney pictures. In other words, it was a victim of its own innovations, some of which today even seem a little corny now. But its influence was profound; movies as late as GoodFellas owe a debt to Wellman’s film.
In Chicago not long after the turn of the century, wayward youths Tom Powers and Matt Doyle engage in petty theft, selling their hot merchandise to “Putty Nose” (Murray Kinnell), a real Fagin type. When he “promotes” them for a fur warehouse robbery and the job goes south, Putty nose does a runner. Meanwhile, Tom’s straitlaced brother, Mike (Donald Cook), enlists during the First World War but not before encouraging Tom to give up his life of crime.
But Prohibition moves Tom (now played by Cagney) and Matt (Edward Woods) into high gear, joining forces with Paddy Ryan (Robert O’Connor) and becoming enforcers, allied with big-time gangster “Nails” Nathan (Leslie Fenton). Meanwhile, Tom keeps telling his Ma (Beryl Mercer) that he’s earning big money doing political work, but Mike isn’t buying it. Tom and Matt acquire girlfriends Kitty (Mae Clarke) and Mamie (Joan Blondell), but Tom quickly tires of Kitty, famously smashing a half a grapefruit in her face, dumping here for voluptuous platinum blonde Gwen Allen (Jean Harlow).
Incredibly, Cagney and Edward Woods were originally cast in the other’s role, Cagney to play the more reflective, straighter arrow of the two, until Wellman had them switch parts. Likewise, Louise Brooks was intended for the Jean Harlow part but she refused it, a role that helped propel Harlow into stardom at MGM. Though convincingly slutty-looking, at this point Harlow was still clearly a beginner: she gets her lines out, barely, but with zero conviction, the opposite of Joan Blondell, who lights up the room in her too-few scenes. Cagney, however, is already burning white hot, even if the character is thinly defined—he’s just in it for the easy money, and won’t let anything stand in his way.
Wellman’s declaration notwithstanding, The Public Enemy is considerably less violent that I had remembered, except for its shock ending. Rather, its reputation perhaps stems from Tom’s intimidation tactics more than his physical acts of violence. For 1931 audiences, he must have come off like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, a loose cannon ready to go off at any unpredictable minute.
Originally released to Blu-ray in 2013, this 1.37:1 black-and-white transfer still holds up well, though a couple of scenes cut for reissues but reinstated here are notably grainier. The DTS-HD Master Audio (1.0 mono) is reasonably good, and supported by optional English subtitles.
Extras, mostly repurposed from the original DVD release, consist of a Warner Night at the Movies that includes an introduction by Leonard Maltin, a trailer for Blonde Crazy, a 90-second newsreel excerpt, an Edgar Bergen Vitaphone short called The Eyes Have It, and a Merrie Melodies cartoon called Smile, Darn Ya, Smile! Also included is a featurette, Beer and Blood: Enemies of the Public featuring Martin Scorsese, a forward added for the film’s 1954 reissue, and a trailer.
THE PUBLIC ENEMY (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): A/A-/A-/B+
Emblematic late 1930s Warner Bros., Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) exemplifies the studio and gangster genre adjusting to Production Code restrictions. The result is schmaltz of the highest order, the picture famous/notorious for its outrageous yet effective ending. The evening after I watched this, I looked at an episode of the 1960s TV Western A Man Called Shenandoah, which shamelessly pilfered that final scene from Angels, so surefire dramatically it remains.
It’s rather fascinating watching this immediately after The Public Enemy, since the first-half of Angels with Dirty Faces in particular is like a Production Code-friendly reworking of the earlier film, even having little Jimmy and his lifelong pal as delinquent teenagers in the opening scenes.
In the 1920s, Irish-American teenagers Rocky Sullivan (Frankie Burke, impressively a dead ringer for Cagney) and Jerry (William Tracy) attempt to rob a railroad car carrying fountain pens; Rocky is sent to juvie, while Jerry eventually becomes a priest. Through the years Rocky (now played by Cagney) becomes a gangster and bootlegger, eventually landing in prison for armed robbery, he taking full blame for the crime while his co-conspirator, attorney Jim Frazier (Humphrey Bogart), promises to hold onto Rocky’s $100,000 share of the loot.
Three years later Rocky nostalgically returns to the Old Neighborhood, renting a room at a boarding house run by Laury Martin (Ann Sheridan), a girl he used to tease mercilessly when they were kids. His old hideout is now occupied by the next generation of street toughs, played by the Dead End Kids—Billy Halop, Bobby Jordan, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell, and Bernard Punsly—all whom quickly come to idolize their hometown hood.
Frazier has used Rocky’s loot to open a swanky casino, though he still works under the thumb of “businessman” Mac Keefer (George Bancroft). Naturally, Frazier makes repeated empty promises to turn over Rocky’s dough while simultaneously ordering torpedoes to bump off his former partner.
Meantime, extraordinarily naïve Father Jerry (now Pat O’Brien), noticing how well Rocky seems to manage the unruly Dead End Kids, thinks Rocky himself might be induced back into the straight and narrow, though Laury, a young widow married to a gangster once before, is much more cynical about Rocky’s chances, even as she falls in love with him.
For such an emphatically Warner Bros-esque picture, it’s surprising the project originated elsewhere, as a vehicle for Cagney during his brief stint with Grand National Pictures, Edward L. Alperson’s short-lived company that tried to be something like a fusing of United Artists and Republic Pictures. Regardless, it just kind of had to be a Warners picture: Michael Curtiz’s direction is fast-paced and exciting, augmented by the studio’s excellent use of montage sequences and Max Steiner’s superb musical score. A huge section of the backlot covers several blocks of recreated Bowery (or wherever in New York City this is supposed to be), streets choking with drying laundry, poverty-stricken extras, and fruit stands.
The screenplay is sheer hokum, as much Boys Town and Father Flannagan as a gangster picture, though the charisma overload of Cagney and the naturalistic performance of Ann Sheridan keep audiences riveted. For fans of the later, low-budget East Side Kids and Bowery Boys movies, it’s fascinating, too, to see the ever-changing line-up, the actors all still in their late-teens and early 20s, when Gorcey and Hall were still effectively spear-carriers, while Billy Halop, Bobby Jordan, and Bernard Punsly have more direct interaction with Cagney.
The big loser here is Humphrey Bogart, then enduring a period of almost always getting bumped off in the last reel by Cagney, George Raft, or Edward G. Robinson. Jim Frazier is maybe Bogie’s most spineless, weaselly role, though more embarrassments (The Return of Doctor X, Swing Your Lady) were yet to come.
Originally released to Blu-ray in 2021, the 1.37:1 standard black-and-white film gets a strong transfer that still holds up well. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is also excellent, and supported by optional English subtitles.
Most or all of the extras appear derived from the earlier DVD version. They consist of a Warner Night at the Movies program that includes an introduction by Leonard Maltin, a trailer for Boy Meets Girl, a two-minute newsreel excerpt, a two-reel musical called Out Where the Stars Begin, and the one-reel cartoon Porky & Daffy. Also included is an audio commentary with film scholar Dana Polan, the featurette Whaddya Hear, Wahddya Say?, running 22 minutes, a trailer for the film itself, and a one-hour Lux Radio Theater adaptation with Cagney and O’Brien.
ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): A-/A/A/B+
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), the odd man out of this set, is a musical biopic/war propaganda flag-waver, for decades a perennial of local TV stations on the Fourth of July. That’s where I saw it, multiple times, but maybe not since until this Blu-ray release. The story of actor-songwriter-producer George M. Cohan, it’s still entertaining thanks to Cagney’s fully-invested performance, Walter Huston’s very good work as Cagney’s father, and for its song-and-dance numbers, recreations of a time in the American theater long-gone and mostly forgotten. Watching it again I was reminded of the opening shot of the much later The Sunshine Boys, of the statue of Cohan in the middle of Times Square, covered in pigeon shit.
In production just as the U.S. was entering the Second World War, Yankee Doodle Dandy’s propagandistic aspects now seem very dated. George M. Cohan (Cagney) comes out of retirement to star as a (dancing!) President Franklin Roosevelt in the Rodgers and Hart musical I’d Rather Be Right. The show is a hit, but Cohan is summoned to the White House by FDR himself. The meeting is cordial and Cohan spends the next two hours improbably telling the President his life story.
The Four Cohans was a popular vaudeville act consisting of Jerry (Walter Huston), wife Nellie (Rosemary DeCamp), and their son and daughter, George and Josie, played as adults by Cagney and real-life sister Jeanne. Starring in Peck’s Bad Boy, George (Douglas Croft) develops insufferable megalomania, his arrogance spoiling many opportunities for the act to hit the Big Time, and eventually leading to George’s blacklisting.
Going solo, George eventually teams up with struggling producer Sam Harris (Richard Whorf), and soon are producing so many hit shows Broadway is positively choking with Cohan-Harris shows with hit songs including Harrigan, Give My Regards to Broadway, Mary’s a Grand Old Name, Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway, and especially patriotic numbers including You’re a Grand Old Flag, Over There, and, inevitably, Yankee Doodle Dandy. Pigeonholed by critics and the public, Cohan fails spectacularly with the drama Popularity, but quickly rebounds. He happily marries performer Mary (Joan Leslie, adorable throughout), eases his family into comfortable retirement, and FDR encourages Cohan to join the war effort for WW2.
Yankee Doodle Dandy is much more a Greatest Hits-Celebration than hard-hitting biopic, anticipating the vogue for such lightweight entertainments later in the decade. Like these later films, historical accuracy goes out the window: the film implies I’d Rather Be Right was brand-new in 1942 but it actually opened in 1937; Huston’s father outlives his mother but in reality it was the other way around; and, most famously, while Cohan liked to claim he was born on the Fourth of July per the song, it was actually July third.
Mostly it’s fun watching Cagney’s impressive work, very funny in his meet-cute scene with Leslie, convincing as the older Cohan, his big dramatic scenes with Huston and, of course, his singing and dancing, which he had only done once before, in Footlight Parade nearly a decade before.
Fred Astaire was apparently the first choice to play Cohan, but his dancing was incompatible with Cohan’s oddball style, which resembles an electrified ragdoll, Cagney’s feet and legs rubbery while his spine, ramrod straight, leans forward and back. Yet Cagney’s athletic moves impress, and he’s clearly having the time of his life playing Cohan, a joy generously conveyed to the movie audience. It’s fun to see him interact with his sister, Jeanne, and though shoehorned into the narrative, Cohan’s meeting with Eddie Foy (played by lookalike son Eddie Jr.) is pretty funny.
Originally released as a single in 2014, this 1.37:1 standard, black-and-white release looks great on Blu-ray, with pleasing film grain, strong blacks and good contrast, while the DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is also strong, and supported by optional English subtitles. The main menu also has a “Song Selection” option.
Supplements consist of an audio commentary track with the much-missed Rudy Behlmer; a Warner Night at the Movies that includes an introduction by Leonard Maltin, a trailer for Casablanca, a 1942 newsreel, 1 two-reel short called Beyond the Line of Duty narrated by Ronald Reagan, and the cartoon Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid. Also included are older featurettes consisting of Let Freedom Sing! The Story of Yankee Doodle Dandy and John Travolta Remembers James Cagney (!); with the Cagney-starring You, John Jones (also in standard-def), the cartoon Yankee Doodle Daffy, a trailer; and an Audio Vault with musical outtakes and rehearsal excerpts.
YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): A-/A/A/A-
For my money, White Heat is by far the best film in this collection. A gangster-noir directed by Raoul Walsh, it’s fast-paced and, by late-‘40s Production Code era standards, uncompromisingly violent but with fully-fleshed out characterizations, topped by Cagney’s Oscar-worthy performance as psychotic gangster Arthur “Cody” Jarrett. The story is a familiar one—a government agent works undercover, infiltrating the gang and winning the trust and even friendship of its leader—but the screenplay by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts has little fat. The first and last 40 minutes are non-stop action, and what’s in between fleshes out even the minor characters nicely. In a nice touch, the vulgarity of Verna is expressed in her opening scene, where she’s heard snoring while napping.
Cody Jarrett (Cagney) is married to two-timing Verna (Virginia Mayo), she cheating on him with Cody’s overly-ambitious right-hand man, “Big Ed” Somers (Steve Cochran), but this matters little, for Cody is already overly devoted and uncomfortably attached to “Ma” Jarrett (Margaret Wycherly), who’s as tough as Cody his, she also helping him through psychosomatic seizure-like migraines.
The movie opens with a bang, the robbery of half a million dollars from a mail train in the Sierra Nevada mountains, with four train works brutally murdered in cold blood and a member of Cody’s gang critically scalded by escaping steam from the locomotive. After a daring escape—including hiding out briefly at a drive-in movie theater—Cody comes up with an ingenious plan: confess to the police a lesser crime, a robbery in far-off Illinois that occurred the same time as the train robbery (thus providing him with an alibi), serve a shorter sentence and be back on the streets in no time.
Sensing this, agent Philip Evans (John Archer) sends Hank Fallon (Edmond O’Brien) to work undercover as Cody’s cellmate, win his trust, and find out where the train robbery loot is hidden.
White Heat couples a crackling, exciting crime film with an outstanding performance by Cagney, with Cody devoted and doting on Ma, ruthless and even sadistic toward Verna and his men and especially anyone he thinks might betray him, yet that mother complex and those sudden fits are a crippling Achilles heel. He’s intelligent and extremely cautious, yet prone to fits of rage and despair. When in prison eating chow, he receives a devastating piece of news about his mother, Cagney goes positively ape-shit, Cody’s emotional and mental breakdown played to the hilt in one of the actor’s many iconic movie moments.
First released to Blu in 2013, Warner Archive’s excellent transfer still holds up great, the 1.37:1 black-and-white image strong with detail, inky blacks and excellent contrast. The DTS-HD Master Audio (1.0 mono) is likewise strong (adding oomph to Max Steiner’s great score), with optional English subtitles. As with the other discs in this set, White Heat is Region-Free.
Supplements consist of an audio commentary by Drew Casper; another Warner Night at the Movies featuring an introduction by Leonard Maltin, a trailer for The Fountainhead, a brief newsreel excerpt, the Joe McDoakes one-reeler So You Think You’re Not Guilty, and the cartoon Homeless Hare. Also included are a trailer for the film and a 17-minute featurette, White Heat: Top of the World, featuring Martin Scorsese.
WHITE HEAT (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): A/A/A/A-
For those of you that don’t already own these titles, this serves as an excellent primer on James Cagney. Highly Recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV