GFF 2013: Public Enemy No. 1

Following last year’s very successful Gene Kelly affair, this year’s actor retrospective concerns another of Golden Age Hollywood’s brightest stars. Like Kelly, the charismatic James Cagney is often associated with a particular genre, in this case the crime film. Glasgow Film Festival’s selection highlights his best gangster pictures but also demonstrates his talents beyond the tough guy roles. Among the latter is the film for which he won his lone Best Actor Oscar, Yankee Doodle Dandy (17 Feb), showing from a print brought all the way from the US. That story of a Broadway legend shows off Cagney’s song and dance abilities, elements also found in the Doris Day co-starring Love Me or Leave Me (20 & 21 Feb), a biopic of 1920s singer Ruth Etting. Cagney’s last major film role can also be found in the line-up, in Billy Wilder’s Cold War satirical farce One, Two, Three (21 Feb), in which Cagney’s wily Coca‑Cola executive, stationed in Berlin, must get his boss’ daughter’s affections away from a Communist.

On the crime film front, Cagney’s magnetic breakthrough performance can be found in The Public Enemy (15 Feb), hugely influential in its intense, brutal depiction of gangsters. Crime classics Angels with Dirty Faces (16 Feb) and The Roaring Twenties (18 Feb, GFT) also screen, two of several Cagney films that co-star Humphrey Bogart. Last but not least is the iconic White Heat (19 Feb, GFT), from which the retrospective’s subtitle “Top of the World, Ma!” is derived. Outside of the films, Andy Dougan, lecturer in the Screen Department at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, will, in illustrated talk James Cagney: Top of the World (16 Feb), examine the career and iconic roles of this great performer. [Josh Slater-Williams]

James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy