Product Description
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Packin' A Punch...and Packin' Heat! On the heels of the success
of the Warner Bros. Gangster Collection, the Warner Bros. Tough
Guys Collection delivers six all new to DVD Classics featuring
Hollywood's greatest Academy-Award? winning Tough guys - James
Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward G. Robinson.
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Say "Warner Bros. in the '30s" and you're talking, first and
foremost, about the tough, gritty, urban, street-smart movies
that help define that American decade for us. Which means you're
talking about James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey
Bogart: unpretty but charismatic guys with lived-in faces, and
bodies that always seemed cocked, ready to spring. When one of
them entered a room, he owned it, no matter how many people were
there already. Their most celebrated habitat was the gangster
picture. The genre didn't originate with them, but they, more
than anybody else, defined it, gave it a face and a silhouette
and a heartbeat.
The films in this set were produced half a decade and more after
Little Caesar and The Public Enemy made stars of Robinson and
Cagney, respectively, and after repeal had be to lend
Prohibition the patina of nostalgia. The studio's gangster
franchise was evolving, and so were the careers of its top stars.
When it came to toughness, the boys could still dish it out, and
take it, too. But increasingly they were doing it on the other
side of the law-and-order divide.
Cagney was first to reform. In 1935's "G" Men he plays a lawyer
put through college by the avuncular neighborhood crimelord.
After a law-school pal turned F.B.I. agent is murdered, Cagney
abandons his (resolutely legit) one-man practice and joins the
Bureau. The film memorializes several big moments in F.B.I.
legend, but what's grabbiest is the personal drama growing out of
Cagney's lingering underworld friendships. William Keighley
directs the murders and shootouts with jolting ferocity, Barton
MacLane and Edward Pawley supply flavorful villainy, and there
are times when Sol Polito's cinematography literally glows (all
these films have been restored, but "G" Men looks especially
terrific). One gripe: The movie should have been presented
without the F.B.I.-classroom intro tacked on for 1949 reissue
(which belongs under "Special Features").
In Each Dawn I Die (also Keighley, 1939), Cagney teams with
George Raft making his Warners debut. It's mostly a prison
picture, with muckraking reporter Cagney behind bars after being
framed by crooked politicos. Career felon Raft has little
sympathy for him till Cagney proves to be a stand-up guy,
whereupon the two bond in mutual loathing of sadistic guards,
rat-fink convicts, and the endlessly malleable system. The movie
boasts one indelible scene (involving a movie screening for the
cons), some evocative prison workhouse detailing, and a fine
Cagney performance as always. But it's undone by a script
cluttered with melodrama and contrivance.
Bullets or Ballots (Keighley yet again, 1936) is much more
satisfying. Again we get two icons for the price of one, with
Robinson as a tough but square-shooting detective and
Bogart as the ambitious number-two man to a big-time racketeer.
Bogart's effectively the co-star, albeit fourth-billed behind
Robinson, Joan Blondell, and Barton MacLane. But it's Eddie G.'s
movie, and he walks the line beautifully as an honest cop who,
unjustly jettisoned from the force, signs on with the mobster
he's long pursued. Despite a rhetorical reference to "ballots" as
the public's means of combatting crime, it's bullets that get the
job done. Bullets and fists: the movie makes clear that Robinson
has beaten confessions out of people plenty of times, just as it
has no illusions about the empty symbolism of crime commissions
and grand juries.
The only other Bogart vehicle in the set is San Quentin (Lloyd
Bacon, 1937), a scrap-work effort below the standards of
everybody involved. Bogart's a small-time crook whose arrest at a
nightclub occasions a meet-cute for his big sister Ann Sheridan
and Army training officer Pat O'Brien--who's on his way to become
yard captain at the penitentiary where Bogart will be interred!
O'Brien tries to reform the lad, but with corrupt/sadistic guard
Barton MacLane on one side and sociopathic con Joe Sawyer on the
other, Bogart never has a chance. Neither does the viewer.
Lloyd Bacon, normally one of Warners' zippiest directors, is
back on his game with A Slight Case of Murder (1938), a delicious
gangster comedy. Robinson plays baron Remy Marco, who craves
respectability as a legitimate businessman once is legal
again. Problem is, nobody has ever had the heart to tell him his
product tastes like varnish, and soon the bank is out to
foreclose on his brewery. At which point Remy learns that his
summer home upstate is full of fresh gangland corpses.... Based
on a play by Damon Runyon and Howard Lindsay, the picture gives a
trio of glorious goons--Allen Jenkins, Edward Brophy, and Harold
Huber--a rare chance to shine as Marco's house staff.
City for Conquest (1940) ought to be the showpiece here. It's the
longest and most ambitious entry, with prestige-picture scale and
production values (including Polito and James Wong Howe as
cameramen) and a cast including Cagney, Ann Sheridan, Arthur
Kennedy, Frank McHugh, Donald Crisp, Anthony Quinn, Jerome Cowan,
and--in his first of only two film performances--future
directorial giant Elia Kazan. Working-stiff Cagney loves his
gifted musician brother (Kennedy) and childhood sweetheart
(Sheridan), a dancer with her own aspirations for the limelight;
he becomes a boxer in order to pay for the brother's musical
education. Triumph and tragedy ensue. The film's avowed , and
Kennedy's, is to create an urban symphony of New York and the
many little people striving against all odds to rise; there's
even a one-man Greek chorus--Frank Craven, the Stage Manager of
the recent Our Town--to hammer the theme periodically. But over
the previous decade Warners' honest, hard-charging, small-scale
movies had collectively achieved that "symphony," without the
pompous flourishes Anatole Litvak's direction brings to the
project. Here's hoping DVD showcases more of them. --Richard T.
Jameson