From Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors
He was different from most of the great stars of the golden age in that he often played villains — even late in his career — comically in Mister Roberts, with unsentimental pathos in Love Me or Leave Me, with complicated and disturbing psychopathic ambivalence in White Heat. His essential persona was as fixed in the public’s consciousness as Bogart’s or Cooper’s or Gable’s but — being a more resourceful and versatile actor — he could express ambiguities in a character even if they weren’t written into the script or featured by the direction. Because he was innately so sympathetic, his heavies created an intriguing, even alarming, tension in the audience. As a result, White Heat, as an example, contains a decidedly subversive duality: in the glare of Cagney’s personality — though his character is in no way sentimentalized — the advanced, somewhat inhuman technology of the police and the undercover-informer cop become morally reprehensible. As a result, I remember [Orson] Welles and I hissing the law and rooting for Cagney like schoolboys. That rarest of actors — who could totally transcend their vehicles — and in common with a number of other stars in the movies’ greatest period, he was indisputably one of a kind.
Cagney was a fantastic actor. And I bet he was fun at parties!
The great thing about Cagney was his confidence. He devoted himself fully to his parts without the luxury of ironic distance. It always seemed to me that he was trying to get as close to the line of overacting without actually crossing it. That sense of daring gave him a magnetic intensity. He was able to be the center of focus in a scene without pulling your attention from the story.
When we were talking about John Wayne, I said that I doubted that the Duke would be successful if he were just starting out today. Cagney, on the other hand, would be just as big a star today as he was in his own time. I can see bits of Cagney in actors like Joe Mantegna, William H. Macey, and Andy Garcia (of course, they seldom play villans…).
Cagney had the presence that all major stars either have, or crave. Always himself and, at the same time, always the character he was playing.
He was in those roles, as Bogdanovich notes, innately sympathetic.. and innately vulnerably human.
In an unfair comparison with Richard Gere, there are no layers between Cagney and the audience. Magic.