The place occupied by James Cagney in the Olympus of classic Hollywood is not far from that of Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, or Humphrey Bogart.
Of the latter, in some aspects, he was a mentor in the priceless gangster films produced by Warner in the 1930s, when the term "film noir" was yet to be coined. But since crime always pays, as Chester Himes said, James Cagney died in the final sequence like nobody else. He did it for the last time on March 30, 1986. This time he was serious. Three decades later, despite the omnipresence of the crime story in current novels and movies, oblivion seems to have fallen on this great badass of classic Hollywood.
Actually, limiting Cagney's glory to his unforgettable thugs is an understatement. In fact, the only Oscar awarded to him by the Academy was for his portrayal of George M. Cohan, one of the most famous American composers, in the patriotic musical Yankee Dandi (Michael Curtiz, 1942).
Nothing to do with those criminals for whom posterity would remember him. Already in his childhood, he realized the paradox in which he would cement his star: he liked hitting the street as much as dancing. Only the most observant are capable of appreciating that dancer's cadence in those powerful punches that he unloaded with his short arms after smiling cynically at the opponent.
Born in New York in 1899, he was the second of seven children born to a waiter. From a very young age, he was forced to carry out the most varied jobs to help in his house. He discovered boxing by defending his brothers in neighborhood fights and would have been a professional in the ring if his mother hadn't forbidden it.
He came to the cinema after having made himself known as a dancer on Broadway. Sinners' Holiday (John G. Adolfi, 1930), his first film, is already a crime story. Months later came the trail of crime (Archie L. Mayo, 1930).
But it was his creation of Tom Powers in The Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931), which made him the quintessential Warner gangster, as well as Jean Harlow -Gwen Allen on that occasion- in the platinum blonde of those productions.
Joe Greer, the automobile pilot whom he recreated at the command of Howard Hawks in Avidity for Tragedy (1932) was not far behind despair and the entire catalog of complexes that James Cagney's thugs carried. His first great musical was Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon, 1933).
Brick Davis from Against the Empire of Crime (William Keighley, 1935) was one of the few characters within the law that the actor embodied as a policeman. But the greatest of Warner's thugs has to remember him in The Roaring 20s (Raoul Walsh, 1939), one of the masterpieces of the genre.
Already in the following decade, also for Walsh, he was Cody Jarrett in Red Hot (1949). His death in the latter, in the explosion of the fuel tank that she climbed on while fleeing from him, invoking her mother to tell her that he has reached "the top of the world", is anthological. As is C. R. McNamara's recreation of him in Billy Wilder's One Two Three (1961).
