He is the energetic center of all the in­credible wheeling and dealing, as Mervyn LeRoy (1900-1987) was a paragon of the fabulous early sound period of Warner Bros., with six films in both 1931 and 1932 and five in 1933, including Hard to Handle. It is a relatively unknown and un­noticed film (missing, for instance, from Wikipedia’s selected filmography) preced­ed by I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and followed by Gold Diggers of 1933, two great Depression tableaux. So Hard to Handle begins with what is for the collec­tive memory the paradigmatic spectacle of hard times: the marathon dance, in all its profound obscenity and inhumanity. LeRoy shows more in 15 minutes than the famed 1960s film version of Horace McCoy’s masterpiece, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, in its entirety. The stars of the time could usually re­place each other without difficulty, but it is impossible to imagine Hard to Handle without its energetic center. James Cag­ney is a con man for all time, with a strange streak of innocence in his activi­ties that grows in widening circles into an ironic image of the whole economy: we are watching the workings of the system, and even reluctantly admiring the human tricks, wheeling and dealing, that lead the whole country to bust. It’s a total stab at publicity and cheap forms of entertain­ment, never moralizing but presenting a tough overall view of society where values are going downhill (or the excesses of the 1920s are still operative), the products are just an opportunity to fool and fake, advertising inseparable from swindling; the public is like a cow ready to be milked. It’s a great story of rise and fall (with the difference that the fall never comes) in the absurd money-obsessed society, cov­ered all over, high and low, by foul game, one of the delicious outcomes of which is the honorary doctorate in literature for one Myron C. Merrill, Cagney’s character. The years 1932-1935 gave birth to one-third of James Cagney’s life work (by a title count); those films form a totality where the name of the director, whether Del Ruth or LeRoy or even Wellman, is usually not important – they are all out­standing. Yet, Mervyn LeRoy created this unknown jewel with his own unmistakable handwriting, a surrealist energy which makes us sad to think that in only a few years he would emerge as his much slower self in his later MGM days, even if those years included fine things like producing The Wizard of Oz or directing the famous version of Waterloo Bridge.