New Orleans Review Summer 1987 Editors John Biguenet John Mosier
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ew Orleans Review l {)YOLA UNIVERSITY VOLUME 14 NUMBER 21$7.00 Cover: fmncs Cagney in a Still from Captains of the Clouds New Orleans Review Summer 1987 Editors John Biguenet John Mosier Managing Editor Sarah Elizabeth Spain Design Vilma Pesciallo Contributing Editors Bert Cardullo David Estes Jacek Fuksiewicz Alexis Gonzales, F.S.C. Bruce Henricksen Andrew Horton Peggy McCormack Rainer Schulte Founding Editor Miller Williams Advisory Editors Richard Berg Doris Betts Joseph Fichter, S.J. John Irwin Murray Krieger Frank Lentricchia Raymond McGowan Wesley Morris Walker Percy Herman Rapaport Robert Scholes Marcus Smith Miller Williams The Nno Orleans Revieu' is published by Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118, United States. Copyright© 1987 by Loyola University. Critical essays relating to film or literature of up to ten thousand words should be prepared to conform with the new MLA guidelines and sent to the appropriate editor, together with a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The address is New Orleans Review, Box 195, Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118. Fiction, poetry, photography or related artwork should be sent to the Art and Literature Editor. A stamped, self-addressed envelope should be enclosed. Reasonable care is taken in the handling of material, but no responsibility is assumed for the loss of unsolicited material. Accepted manuscripts are the property of the NOR. The New Orleans Review is published in February, May, August, and November. Annual Subscription Rate: Institutions $30.00, Individuals $25.00, Foreign Subscribers $35.00. Contents listed in the PMLA Bibliography and the Index of American Periodical Verse. US ISSN 0028-6400 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW CONTENTS VOLUME 14 NUMBER 2 SUMMER 1987 James Cagney: The Quintessential Rebel 5 Neil Hurley, S.]. This Light 16 Kim Bridgford The Belly of the Cinema: The Competition at Cannes 1987 17 John Mosier Waiting for the 7:12 38 Stuart Peterfreu nd Mad Max: Growing Up a Hero 39 Jan Newman That Obscure Subject of Desire: Gender, Sexuality, and Subjugation in the Lewton/Tourneur Cat People Ina Rae Hark 47 Outside the System: The Documentary Voice of Film Nair 55 J.P. Telotte The Hausfrau Angela Sommerltr. Billie R. Engels 64 Cinema History and the "B" Tradition: Notes toward a New Historical Perspective Wheeler Dixon 65 Narrative Mimicry: Citizen Kane and the Function of the Gaze Sara Speidel and Robert Brinkley 72 Way Down East: Play and Film Bert Cardullo 84 Space and Place in John Ford's Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine Philip]. Skerry 87 Welcome to the Unknown: The War on Film John Mosier 92 Neil Hurley, S.J. JAMES CAGNEY: THE QUINTESSENTIAL REBEL ames Cagney wrote his memoirs, Cagney on Tony Camonte in Scarface and Cagney's Tom Cagney, when a friend told him that if he didn't Powers in Public Enemy were the proto-gangster Jwrite his story, others would certainly do so. In anti-heroes of Hollywood's early sound period. the preface, he writes that it is a book about All three were from an immigrant Catholic Cagn2y by the man who knew him best. No background; all three were over-confident and actor, I believe, can be in touch with his sub aggressive; all three were compulsively bent on conscious, that is, the wellsprings of spontaneous power, money and fame, the social symbols of creative energy that bubble up to produce those success in Prohibition America; all three died kinds of inspired performances for which Cagney violently-Rico and Camonte were machine is a legend. Without a doubt, the memories gunned by the police in the streets; Tom Powers contained in Cagney on Cagney are significant and was shot by a rival mob and his body was we shall refer to them throughout this article, wrapped like a mummy and allowed to fall at his which is both a tribute to the actor and a critique mother's feet when her front door was opened. of his work. The endings to these three classical films in the It was in the 1930s that Cagney carved his niche rigid crime genre were dictated by the logic of in the cinematic Hall of Fame. His later roles in both melodramatic story convention and the Yankee Doodle Dandy (winning him an Oscar), 13 political need to prove that crime does not pay. Rue de Madeleine and White Heat embellished those But the images and the bravura acting of earlier accomplishments, but basically it was the Robinson, Muni, and Cagney subverted the tough guy with his own personal code of honor official intent to uphold law and order and to and that "Here I stand, take me as I am" attitude stigmatize the offenders. The sympathies of which has made each subsequent generation of audiences were emotionally enlisted on behalf of moviegoers share that same electrifying the gangster-not only because his cunning and experience that audiences felt when Cagney first brutal tactics personified much that was wrong won their hearts. with post World War I America but because all Cagney's reputation rests on the impressive list three motion pictures had subtle but of non-conformist characters he played: the unmistakable religious allusions. Prohibition gangster, Tom Powers, in Public In Little Caesar, Rico dies by a billboard showing Enemy (1931); the insurgent cab driver fighting for two Hollywood-type stars looking affectionately justice in Taxi (1932); the cocky ex-convict and at one another. It is a symbol of the advertising redemptive victim, Rocky Sullivan, in Angels with of false values that enticed Rico to "do it to the Dirty Faces (1938); the bootlegger, Eddie Bartlett, other fellow and to do it first." Dressed in flop in The Roaring Twenties. Then there is Cagney as house clothes, his face unshaven, Rico lies on the Frank Ross, the hardened prisoner of Each Dawn ground by the foot of the billboard sign and says I Die (1939), who is angry at being framed and to the police inspector standing over him: forgotten; as the cynical and at first cowardly "Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?" This tough from Brooklyn, Jerry Plunkett, who turns is not the usual gangster's death; it is the hero in World War I France in The Fighting 69th awareness of mortality, of "crossing-over," of (1940); and last, but certainly not least, Cody possible accountability. It is the ultimate blow to Jarrett, the unstable killer with the Oedipal egoism and the question is framed as a petition mother complex in White Heat (1949). to the Mother of God. In Scarface, the film opens Critic Judith Crist once wrote that back in the with a shadowy cross over the name of the 1930s the gangster rebel hero began to creep into director, the well-known auteur Howard Hawks. the hearts of the American movie-going Throughout the film there are recurring symbols audiences in strange, unorthodox ways. Edward of crosses. Can this be a reference to the G. Robinson's Rico in Little Caesar, Paul Muni's criminalization of an innocent victim, Christ, NEIL HURLEY 5 suggesting that Tony Camonte was enmeshed in Blonde). As Jack Lemmon testified in his tribute the spurious values of an acquisitive and to the plucky actor, he imprinted every frame of materialistic society? After all, the camera in every picture with sincerity. So searing was the Scarface pans from the bullet-stricken body of sincerity that Frank Capra told me that Cagney Camonte to a travel agency ad atop a tall Chicago was the most electrifying performer he had ever building which proclaims that "the world is seen on the screen-and that from a director who yours!" In this ironic and tragic final scene there supervised stars such as Gary Cooper, Jimmy is a social critique of the unintended Stewart, Ronald Colman, Lionel Barrymore, Cary consequences of acquisitive appeals to Grant, and Spenser Tracy. impressionable citizens incapable of seeing There was a disarming directness that stamped behind the puffery. Cagney as an original. The believability that It was, however, Cagney's performance as Cagney brought to each picture, even the Tom Powers in Public Enemy that created the potboilers he made on an assembly-line basis for definitive anti-hero, smouldering with anger, ambition, and brimming confidence, and with a magnetic charm that stayed in the audiences' memories after the final obligatory scene of retribution through a death by violence. Robinson's Rico was pathetic; Muni' s Camonte was tragic. By contrast, Cagney's feisty hoodlum with the wavy hair and "straight-ahead" look, had an extra dimension. He so ingratiated himself into the hearts of the viewers that the rooting interest in his persona continued beyond the film, beyond the legal definition of criminality imposed by a civilization which was more permissive with indoor ("white collar") larceny than outdoor ("gun-in-hand") thievery. In the 1930s millions of people were being denied the fruits of America's promise. The University of Chicago's sociologists were teaching that environment bred crime and that many felons were victims of circumstances in childhood and neighborhoods far beyond their control. Even more than Rico and Tony Camonte, Tom Powers symbolized that type of sociological redemption. Study that scene of his trussed-up The Roaring Twenties body falling downward to the floor at the feet of his stunned mother. (Cagney had to prepare his Warner Brothers, was something that cannot be own mother to understand this role as a piece of explained merely from the actor's expected ability acting and not to take it too personally.) We have, to dig down into the life of another person and I submit, a strong association, nonverbal to be capture their psycho-history, but came from deep sure, with the "Descent from the Cross," a within the actor's own history of pain, struggle veritable Pieta scene with the power of and transcendence.