Sinners' Holiday

A flop Broadway show, Penny Arcade, served as the vehicle for the joint debuts of James Cagney and Joan Blondell on the big screen. Both Cagney and Blondell repeat the roles they played on Broadway and both received a lot more notice than nominal stars Grant Withers and Evelyn Knapp.

Penny Arcade only ran for 24 performances on Broadway, no doubt the Depression played a part in closing it as it did many shows that season. Retitling it Sinner's Holiday, the film is about the Delano family who run an amusement concession in Coney Island. Lucille LaVerne is the tough minded mother and she's got daughter Knapp and sons Cagney and Ray Gallagher working for her. She's a tyrannical old woman, who's determined to see that none of her kids get into the illegal booze business for the quick money.

Unfortunately Cagney's involved up to his eyeballs with another concession owner, Warren Hymer, whose place is used as a front for the sale and transportation of illegal whiskey. Cagney and Hymer quarrel and Cagney shoots Hymer dead.

LaVerne is quite willing to see petty drifter Grant Withers take the fall for her son even though Knapp's falling for him. She holds out that Knapp can do better for herself, like this crowd of Carnies ever could.

Cagney's screen presence overawes the rest of the cast with the possible exception of Blondell who provides Cagney with an alibi for the shooting. You can easily tell who was heading for stardom in this bunch.

Grant Withers at the time was a promising leading man who was married around this time to Loretta Young, ever so briefly. He had a lot of substance abuse problems and faded gradually into supporting parts. John Ford used him occasionally as he got older and John Wayne always found work for him in several of his films. Cagney was still in support of Withers the following year in Other Men's Women, but in 1954 Withers had a supporting part as an outlaw leader in Cagney's western, Run For Cover. Withers committed suicide in 1959.

Sinner's Holiday is an entertaining enough film, but it really could have been a classic if Cagney had played Withers's role. William Wellman eventually remedied that in Public Enemy.

Gotta love these old pre-code black and white films; there is a great scene where if the fair-goer hits the target, the girl sitting on a swing lifts up her dress for a little "show". This straight-forward no-surprises murder story takes place during prohibition , in a penny arcade, which was also the name of the play on which it is based. It stars Cagney in his very first performance in 1930, brought in from the original play; Also in a big role is Joan Blondell, who had already made four films, but would go on to make eight more films with Cagney, as well as over 150 films on her own. The top bills are Grant Withers and Evalyn Knapp, and Lucille Laverne, who had all started in silents. Also love the plain-talking mother who has an opinion on everything and everybody. John Adolfi, the director, had started as an actor in 1907, and worked mostly in silent films. This was one of his last movies as director. Due to its age, the sound and picture quality is a little iffy, but enjoy it as a fun, plain, simple story.

This is a must-see film which captures a specific time and place: the prohibition-era Atlantic City Boardwalk scene.

This movie was released in 1930 at the height of prohibition and the beginning of The Great Depression.

It is the first film teaming of Cagney and Blondell, lifelong friends.

They acted these roles in the theater before the rights were purchased by Al Jolson to sell the script to Warner Brothers.

The scenes showed would have been absolutely scandalous five years later when the code went into effect.

The acting is great from the top down.

Cagney is at his most raw and gripping.

Great story which truly depicts the period and place with a reality-based tone that is hard to find in pictures anymore.

In 1929, James Cagney and Joan Blondell (neither of them well-known at the time) played supporting roles in a Broadway drama called "Penny Arcade". Warner Brothers bought the film rights and brought Cagney and Blondell to Hollywood to repeat their stage roles in the screen version, retitled "Sinner's Holiday". This was the first movie for both of them. (Blondell's second film, a quickie, was released before "Sinner's Holiday", a more prestigious picture.) The actual star of this film is Grant Withers, playing a gangster who's made a lot of enemies and needs a place to hide before he gets rubbed out. Withers is pretty good, and he deserves to be better known. Cagney's role is much smaller, but he's absolutely electrifying. As soon as he steps on screen, there's no question that he's the best actor in this movie ... one of the best actors in the history of films, in fact.

Joan Blondell is boring in this film, as usual. Her appeal has always eluded me. At least in her other films she usually had something to do; here, she doesn't. There are good performances by Lucille LaVerne and Warren Hymer, in his usual typecast role as a dim gangster. Hank Mann, who was one of the original Keystone Cops (and who eventually outlived all the other Keystone Cops), is excellent here in a small role.

"Sinner's Holiday" suffers from the usual Warner Brothers complaint: low budget-itis. I saw the trailer for this film before I saw the movie itself. The trailer features a shot of amusement park rides in a funfair. This is obviously stock footage, but at least I expected the stock shot to turn up in the movie itself. Surprisingly, it doesn't. There's almost nothing on screen to convince you that this movie takes place in an amusement park. It looks like a stage play recorded on film, rather than a movie in its own right. Still, "Sinner's Holiday" has much to recommend it, and Cagney's performance alone is worth your time. I'll rate this movie 6 out of 10 points, or 7 if you're a Cagney fan. If you're a Joan Blondell fan, I don't want to know about it.

This is a fun movie. Great to see some true movie stars in their earliest roles.

But the movie suddenly ends. It's as if they realized they were down to their last reel of film and decided to jump ahead several pages to the final scene.

It's still worth seeing.