A Lion Is in the Streets

Cagney (clever & aggressive) is seen peddling his wares in the back-hills country of a cotton-growing southern state... He falls for beautiful Barbara Hale, a sympathetic grade-school teacher from up North... They wed and honeymoon in a small house supplied by aristocratic Warner Anderson...

Watchful to the possibilities of a political career in which he could easily become the governor of the state, Cagney increases his interest in a blonde tramp called Flamingo (Anne Francis), a violent and turbulent woman, who in a fit of jealousy nearly gets rid of her competitor (Barbara Hale) in a premeditated swamp accident...

Barbara Hale is sweet, charming and understanding, but she has the least showy role in a film full to the disintegrating point with well-delineated colorful characters performed by a very experienced cast...

Raoul Walsh's direction keeps the film moving lively and Harry Stradling's excellent Technicolor photography captures the very atmosphere of the deep South...

... that is basically a poor man's "All The King's Men". I can't remember ever giving a James Cagney film less than a 6/10, if only because of James Cagney. This would probably get a 3 or 4 without him.

There's no chance for any of the cast to do any real character development as you jump from scene to scene. Cagney's Hank Martin is a bayou peddler who aspires to political office claiming to be a man of the people. He makes goofy moves considering he is an aspiring politician, with his rise to fame based on one scandal that Hank uncovers and a murder that results. Cagney assumes it is cotton gin owner and merchant Castleberry behind everything, but by the end of the film when I was told who was actually behind it, I just went WHO? And had to back up into the film to even see who this person was. And you haven't lived until you've seen a dead man -actually sitting in the courtroom - tried for murder.

Barbara Hale plays Hank's school marm wife. Ann Francis plays a bayou girl with a crush on Cagney who first tries to feed Hale to the alligators to get rid of her, then just pushes Hank - she doesn't have to push hard - until he relents and begins cheating on his wife with her. One interesting thing here - Frank McHugh as a malicious person. You don't see that very often. And I have no idea why a hound dog sleeping at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial has anything to do with this story, symbolically or otherwise.

I'd suggest it for Cagney completists and probably nobody else.

A Lion Is In the Streets wastes enough talent for at least a half-dozen good movies. It had an excellent director, Raoul Walsh, but a bad script. James Cagney is energetic in the lead, as a Huey Long-like Southern pol, but his accent is poor, and he seems out of place running around the bayous in a white suit. The fine supporting cast,--Barbara Hale, Anne Francis, John McIntire, Warner Anderson--don't have much to work with, and the dialogue is mediocre throughout. Franz Waxman's dynamic, stirring score is wasted also, and deserves a better film. The movie looks anachronistic for its year of release (1953), and might have worked better had it been made in black and white, five or ten years earlier, while color just makes it seem artificial and unreal. I kept on expecting Lon Chaney, Jr. to turn into an alligator man every time he showed up.

The idea of this movie is an interesting one and the political shenanigans are convincing but unfortunately the performance by James Cagney is distinctly over the top. A certain amount of playing to the gallery is appropriate to campaigning but the constant declaiming by Cagney is very wearing; to say nothing of the singing and hammy marching!

It's a shame because some of the supporting performances are excellent, particularly Barbara Hale and Jeanne Cagney.

I would have given this a lower score were it not for the worthwhile content; it's a pity that was let down by the realisation.

As a serious study of a corrupt demagogue this film is clearly useless. There are simply too many ludicrous scenes. Let's list two, shall we? First there's the one where the demagogue's mistress attempts to feed his wife to the gators (yeah, you read that right) only to have the wife decide, when the attempt fails, not to rat her out. Then there's that trial scene where we are asked to believe that a judge, even a crooked one, would allow a man who is bleeding to death from multiple gunshot wounds to take the stand. As a biopic of Huey Long this film also falls short, mostly due to Cagney, with his pathetically inept try at a cracker accent and being ten, no make that twenty, years too old for the part coming in a distant second to Broderick Crawford who deservedly picked up the Oscar for "All The King's Men". However, (and it's this "however" that makes "Lion" a fairly good movie) as a study of mob violence and the suddenness of its onset and the scariness of its furor director Raoul Walsh and scenarist Luther Davis are not only on firmer ground than in their attempts to show how power corrupts but they are on strong prophetic ground as well with the scenes of Cagney, (who was born in Manhattan), refusing to concede, inciting a riot and exhorting his rioters to march on the state capitol, all eerily reminiscent of the behavior of another native New Yorker on Jan. 6, 2021. At this point, roughly the last third of the film, I became mesmerized. Give it a B minus. PS...The only performance that stood out for me was Onslow Stevens as a Southern version of Edward Arnold in "Mr Smith". Haven't really seen much of this actor's work, a condition I hope to rectify.