james cagney

One, Two, Three (1961)

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The morning after I saw The Roses in theaters, I texted Brandon to let him know that I had seen one of the least funny comedies of all time, but that I had followed that up with a screening of one of the most hilarious pieces of filmic art that I had ever been privileged to witness. Billy Wilder’s 1961 ruckus is entitled One, Two, Three, and by the end of it I was hoarse from laughter. Oddly enough, both this and The Roses contained a performance of the novelty song “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” a coincidence that made me feel a little bit like I was going crazy. 

“Mac” MacNamara (James Cagney) is an American abroad, a Coca-Cola executive living in West Berlin and trying to further the cause of democracy by working to get the beverage behind the Iron Curtain, or rather, he’s trying to leverage that major success into becoming the head of the London office. He gets a call from the home office in Atlanta and is told that he’s going to be responsible for his boss’s teenaged daughter for a few weeks while she’s traveling. Scarlett Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin) arrives drawling, dim, and charming, and her short time turns into two months, to the slight chagrin of Mrs. Phyllis MacNamara (Arlene Francis). Just as her parents are about to set out for Europe, Scarlett reveals that she’s spent the past six weeks sneaking over to East Berlin and meeting in secret with Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz), a handsome young communist. Worse—they’ve gotten married. It falls to Mac to figure out how to split them up, which he does by getting the boy arrested by framing him for anti-Soviet leanings. Then, when it turns out that Scarlett is pregnant, he has to figure out how to not only spring the kid from an East German prison but also to make him a socially acceptable husband for the genteel Hazeltines before their plane lands. 

The comedy comes at a breakneck pace. Cagney is absolutely fantastic here, delivering some very witty dialogue like he’s got only minutes to live, and at other times bellowing orders at a successive list of underlings, Soviets, and haberdashers like he’s running the navy. The rest of the supporting cast is also a delight, with particularly great performances from Hanns Lothar as Mac’s assistant Schlemmer and Liselotte Pulver as his secretary Fräulein Ingeborg. The fräulein is great fun, as it’s clear from very early on that she and Mac are having an affair of some kind, and when he stops appearing for their “German lessons” (with “special attention to the umlaut”), she threatens to quit, and he must subtly rehire her by asking her to draft up an advertisement that includes “fringe benefits” that she immediately accepts. One of said benefits is an outfit that she saw earlier in the day, and when we see her join him in his misadventures in East Berlin to liberate Otto from the German police, she’s wearing exactly the dress and hat described; still later, when he gives his Soviet “allies” the slip to return Otto to West Germany, he leaves Schlemmer behind in her clothing as a decoy. Schlemmer himself has a habit of clicking his heels together, revealing his former involvement in his nation’s activities in the previous war (he first claims to have been part of the “underground” before it is later clarified that he worked on the literal subterranean trains). 

Lots of the best comedy bits revolve around the supposed lack of ingenuity and progress behind the Curtain, but they become timeless because the film doesn’t rely solely on them. For instance, when attempting to bribe Mac to give them Fräulein Ingeborg, one of the Soviets offers him a “brand new” car that he then admits is exactly the same as a 1937 Nash; later, when a car chase to the Brandenburg gate involves the Soviet crew in hot pursuit of Mac and company, Mac’s chauffeur is surprised to see them being followed by an obsolete car, saying “It looks like a ‘37 Nash!” Said vehicle completely falls apart long before Mac makes it to the border, losing fenders and tires and arriving at the Gate rolling on one of its exposed axles. They still almost catch up, however, as Mac is detained before crossing, only for it to be revealed that the guards want to return the (now empty) bottles of Coca-Cola he had brought as proof of his profession (i.e., a bribe), which calls back to the beginning of the film, where one Mac’s complaints wasn’t that the East Germans were buying Coca-Cola in West Berlin and taking it across the border, not because he doesn’t want to sell to them but because their failure to return/recycle the empties was driving up bottling costs. It’s all very perfectly constructed, which only makes it funnier. 

The film isn’t jingoistic in its devotion to finding comedy only in mocking the film’s communists, however. Some of the jokes, like Otto being tortured by being forced to listen to “Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” over and over again, cut both ways, but there are plenty of jabs made at American foolishness, especially in Scarlett’s extreme naivete. When Mac tells her that she might be found guilty of spreading anti-American propaganda due to her possession of signage that says “Yankees Go Home!”, she’s insistent that it’s not anti-U.S. but anti-Yankee, drawling that, where she’s from, “everybody hates the Yankees.” She’s also adamant that she’s going with Otto to the U.S.S.R. (“That stands for ‘Russia’!”) and that she loves washing his shirts while “he broadens [her] mind.” There are also some great digs in at European aristocrat culture in general, as part of Mac’s attempts to make Otto appealing to an American parent involves getting Count Waldemar von Droste-Schattenburg to adopt the young man, as his title will give him prestige despite the fact that the count himself is working as a bathroom attendant. It’s all very, very good. 

Wilder considered this to be one of his lesser films; I read an interview with him later in life in which he expressed that he didn’t think it was actually all that funny or that it worked, but it’s just as much an overlooked classic in his canon as Ace in the Hole. People may remember him best for Sunset Boulevard or Some Like it Hot, but every time I dig further into his backlog, I love everything that I find. Track this one down if you can.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

White Heat (1949)

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I’m only a few episodes into my first-time watch of the HBO series The Sopranos, and I already see why it became a pet favorite among cinephiles.  Not only is it one of the first watercooler shows that nudged the TV drama format towards the more cinematic anti-hero era of so-called “Peak Television” (I’m more of a sitcom guy personally, don’t shoot), but it also constantly references the exact kinds of Italo-American gangster dramas that turn pimply college freshmen into cinephiles in the first place.  In just the first few episodes of the show, characters have already made multiple references to the Godfather trilogy and to Goodfellas; there’s even a brief appearance from a Scorsese lookalike, coked out and ducking into a trashy nightclub.  It’s safe to assume, then, that the Sopranos writers’ room was well versed in the rich history of the American gangster picture, so I’m also going to assume it was no coincidence that I was thinking a lot about Tony Soprano while recently watching the 1949 James Cagney noir White Heat (also for the first time).

Like The Sopranos, White Heat is also specifically about the pathological neuroses of the American mobster archetype. James Cagney’s Cody Jarrett is an unhinged sadist of a mob boss with a “psychopathic devotion” to his mother and not much affection for any other living being.  Despite ruling over his goons with an iron fist, Jarrett frequently suffers intense (possibly psychosomatic) migraines that require that his mother remain on standby to coddle him back to good health.  At the start of The Sopranos, James Gandolfini’s New Jersey mafia don Tony suffers similar spells.  Stressed to the brink by the various pressures of his job as the local head of “sanitation,” Tony Soprano starts experiencing panic attacks that cause him to faint, inspiring him to take up regular sessions with a psychiatrist (Lorraine Bracco) that provide the show with a convenient episodic narrative structure.  Tony also has a remarkably evil mother whom he loves dearly, but that parallel appears unrelated.  Most mafia media centered on a mob boss in crisis tracks the way these anti-hero archetypes must delicately balance the necessary brutality of their jobs with the vulnerability of becoming so brutal that it inspires mutiny (whether among members of their own crew or among the cops on their payroll).  What makes White Heat & The Sopranos stand out in that genre is in their Freudian interest in those powerful brutes’ troubled psychology, an interest that places the 1940s Cagney picture decades ahead of the curve.

Cagney was enough of a studio star by the time he made White Heat that he had a sweetheart deal to develop his own projects as a creative voice.  Already having set the high standard for the American gangster picture in 1931’s The Public Enemy, he wasn’t particularly interested in returning to the genre until he was inspired to push his character’s psychology to shocking extremes.  One way you can tell Cagney gives an all-timer performance in White Heat is that he manages to make a character named “Cody” genuinely intimidating, scary even.   He’s described as “inhuman” by the cops on his tail, shooting lead into their bellies with reckless abandon – sometimes to cover his tracks, sometimes just because.  The film’s opening train heist is particularly brutal, with Cagney’s stunt double hopping onto a moving locomotive and shooting every cop, conductor, and railway worker who gets a good look at him dead, just in case.  When one of his most trusted goons accidentally has his face melted off by the train’s furious steam, Cody cruelly leaves him for dead, writhing in pain under his bandages.  Cody’s boyishly sweet to his mother but an absolute terror to everyone else.  He grinds his teeth.  He strangles his moll.  He’s little more than an excuse for Cagney to run wild as a murderous psychopath, more Norman Bates than Vito Corleone.

White Heat is not as iconic of a Cagney mobster picture as The Public Enemy, which is more directly referenced in episodes of The Sopranos that I have not gotten to yet.  This later work from Cagney is a little too tardy & bloated to register as the height of classic-period American noir.  The opening train heist and subsequent fallout is shocking in its brutality, but that effect slowly dulls in the lull leading up to the second heist in the final act, which is delayed by a largely uninteresting plot involving a voluntary jail stint and an undercover cop.  Cagney’s feverish performance keeps the energy up in the meantime, though, as you immediately get the sense that there’s no other way for a character so psychotically chaotic to meet his end than in a storm of bullets; all of the tension is just in waiting for that storm to approach and worrying about who he’ll hurt before it arrives.  Cagney never takes his foot off the gas, delivering his final “Made it ma! Top of the world!” line readings as if he’s winning the lottery instead of being shot to death.  I haven’t yet spoiled myself on how Tony Soprano’s going to go out six seasons of television from where I am now, but I assume it’s going to be just as tragic of an end, just likely without Cody Jarrett’s celebratory zeal for violence.  Tony may be suffering a mental health crisis, but he’s not nearly as violently, manically crazed as Cody; few characters are.

-Brandon Ledet