{"id":3909,"date":"2005-11-18T16:58:38","date_gmt":"2005-11-18T21:58:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=3909"},"modified":"2022-10-09T20:51:29","modified_gmt":"2022-10-10T00:51:29","slug":"james-cagney-appreciation-day-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=3909","title":{"rendered":"James Cagney Appreciation Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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<\/i>, with unsentimental pathos in Love Me or Leave Me<\/i>, with complicated and disturbing psychopathic ambivalence in White Heat<\/i>. 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<\/i>, 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n