Sometimes I come to a film because it looks like it can directly fulfill, sometimes because it can provide precious background to other things that matter, letting them stand.
It's watchable in itself, this one; a misfit's rise and fall played against the passing of times. Released on the cusp of WWII, it opened a portal back to more careless times, taking us on a journey from WWI trenches through the highs of Prohibition to the lows of Depression, so we could have this clear moral stance: in the new world there's no room for scoundrels. Right.
Interesting here is that only a year or two before Citizen Kane we have a similar saga about the passing of the times, but one that asks no fundamental question of us, casts no doubt on its testimony. It's as lurid and constructed as newspaper headlines of the time, a main contrast in Welles' film about its world-creating newspaperman. It's machinegun history written in the staccato sounds of a newspaperman's typewriter.
What I really wanted to see though was Cagney.
I am in the middle of a film noir quest looking for its machinery, and as an aside I was brought to explore its roots in 1930's crime stuff. Cagney is a force in this niche. He had so much energy that he could turn into presence. He is not just amused, he doesn't coast on pushing things back like Bogart; he throws himself on the encounter, bitterly cutting himself on the edges.
Not so here. He was asked to play a basically decent guy led astray by the prospect of easy money, meaning to reflect the broader American endeavor that ended on Black Tuesday. Usually in a Cagney film he lets loose in the end. They asked of him here the precise opposite; he sleepwalks, numbed by failure, a human ruin clawing at redemption. He looks like he gives it his all, but it's just not who he is. It's as if you asked Welles to strut like Wayne.
If you want to see Cagney in top form, look him up in Footlight Parade fully in command of a show, White Heat to see him face real demons.
