{"id":3906,"date":"2005-11-18T16:46:11","date_gmt":"2005-11-18T21:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=3906"},"modified":"2022-10-09T20:50:37","modified_gmt":"2022-10-10T00:50:37","slug":"james-cagney-appreciation-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=3906","title":{"rendered":"James Cagney Appreciation Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Peter Bogdanovich’s marvelous book, Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors<\/a>\"\"<\/i>:<\/p>\n

The year before I had run for Orson Welles a 16mm print of Raoul Walsh’s devastating gangster film starring Cagney, White Heat<\/i> (1949); Welles had never seen it and was a very enthusiastic admirer of both Cagney’s and Walsh’s, so we looked at it one night. Afterwards, Orson got to musing on the absurdity of all those theoretical writings about the supposedly huge difference between movie acting and stage acting. “Look at Cagney!” Orson exclaimed. “Everything he does is big<\/i> — and yet it’s never for a moment unbelievable — because it’s real<\/i>, it’s true! He’s a great movie actor and his performances are in no way modulated for the camera — he never scaled anything down.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n