News

Song and dance man or gangster? Few stars of Hollywood’s Golden Era could claim they were equally well known for two such diverse genres. Yet, the legendary James Cagney worked hard to be able to make such a claim.

He was born on July 17, 1899, in New York City. His family was poor, and Cagney was sickly as a child. While growing up in a rough neighborhood, he learned a variety of skills, including tap dancing, street fighting, baseball and boxing. When he was 19, his father died, and he took odd jobs to help support his mother and siblings. On a whim, he auditioned for a role of a chorus girl in a local production. Although he had never had professional training, he landed the role and learned the dances from watching the other performers – and it never bothered him to dress as a girl and perform. Despite his mother...

As the coronavirus pandemic still rages on, precious few remain skeptical about going to the movies. But while your AMCs and others claim some godlike safety from Covid, there remains a chunk of people still uncomfortable hitting up theaters. To them, we bring you the September 2020 Criterion Channel lineup.

It starts off with quite the swath of content too. Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó hits the service on September 1, and its seven-plus hours should take up a large chunk of your day. Coming soon after is a collection of more than a dozen Joan Blondell starrers from the pre-Code era, including Howard Hawks’ The Crowd Roars, three collaborations with Mervyn LeRoy, and Ray Enright & Busby Berkeley’s Dames.

For some stuff released almost a century later, the service also sees the addition of documentary bender Robert Greene. His Actress, Kate Plays Christine, and Bisbee ’17 join soon after. Janicza Bravo, director of Lemon,...

James Cagney in Blonde CrazyBefore sound came into film, no one had ever moved like James Cagney, and no one has since. Like the face of Jerry Lewis, Cagney’s puppet limbs, his slashes of feet and gorilla-woodpecker hoots, are “where the height of artifice blends at times with the nobility of true documentary.”1 The arms move centrifugally away from the torso in a kind of dance for the rebel spirit, yet the body remains intact; take any of his body’s continuous moments and you could frame them in the Fraenkel Gallery for photographic prosperity, a tribute to an urban dandy. Cagney’s performances in his earliest and best pictures are of a piece with the contemporaneous film landscape, spiked (as we now know) with a surfeit of mutt landmarks. The Marx Brothers’s jabber, Mae West’s pimp-walk, her sass, Raoul Walsh’s Me and My Gal (1932), the...

What does a working girl have to do to get ahead, when all she has in her favor is an incredible face, a lavish wardrobe, and a pair of legs to make any executive wolf howl? Loretta Young juggles two egotistical swains, while Joan Blondell shines as an enticing all-pro homewrecker.

Big Business Girl

DVD-r

The Warner Archive Collection

1931 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 74 min. / Street Date September 14, 2017 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Loretta Young, Frank Albertson, Ricardo Cortez, Joan Blondell, Frank Darien, Dorothy Christy, Oscar Apfel, Judith Barrett, Mickey Bennett, George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, Virginia Sale.

Cinematography: Sol Polito

Film Editor: Pete Fritch

Written by Robert Lord, story by Patricia Reilly & H.N. Swanson

Produced and Directed by William A. Seiter

Let’s hear it for the Warner Archive Collection’s voluminous vault of early ’30s Warners, MGM and Rko entertainments, which has given us a real education about this era of filmmaking.

Tod Browning’s “Freaks”

Before R-ratings, anti-heroes and gratuitous violence and nudity in mainstream Hollywood movies, there was the Hays Code. As a form of self-policing the industry, virtually every movie released up until 1968 needed that stamp of approval if it wanted distribution. And while it helped produce all of Old Hollywood’s true classics for several decades, it often included ridiculous rulings like not being able to show or flush a toilet on screen, not allowing married couples to be shown sleeping in the same bad or always making sure criminals, even protagonists of the movie, got punished in the end.

But before the Hays Code was nothing, and it was a gloriously weird, scandalous time for the movies. Certain Hollywood films in the early ’30s as “talkies” were rapidly taking hold have since been labeled “Pre-Code” films that never received Hollywood’s stamp of approval.

Every Friday in September,...

Bombshells, showgirls, gold-diggers, gangsters' molls, platinum ice queens, pouting, sun-kissed sex kittens: the full, gilded spectrum is on display throughout March in Blonde Crazy, a season celebrating the species at the BFI Southbank. Part of the Birds Eye View festival of women's cinema, it arrives hard on the high heels of Birds Eye View's 2009 retrospective devoted to the formidable femme fatale. But what is in this year's thematic role model for women? Should we be embracing these blonde moments; or are we to be embarrassed by them?...

Bombshells, showgirls, gold-diggers, gangsters' molls, platinum ice queens, pouting, sun-kissed sex kittens: the full, gilded spectrum is on display throughout March in Blonde Crazy, a season celebrating the species at the BFI Southbank. Part of the Birds Eye View festival of women's cinema, it arrives hard on the high heels of Birds Eye's 2009 retrospective devoted to the formidable femme fatale. But what is in this year's thematic role model for women? Should we be embracing these blonde moments; or are we to be embarrassed by them?...