This is the ultimate confidence-man movie, or, according to Andrew Bergman, “simply the Great American Comedy”, where the breathtaking James Cagney forages ahead “like a hungry wolf”. Knowing Curtiz’s broken and summary knowledge of Eng­lish, he probably couldn’t understand one-tenth of Cagney’s rapid fire talking, but that must have contributed to the trade-off for language: Curtiz was exactly the right person to get the pan­tomime of corruption right, as well as the graphic gestures and tough body language of the street. The milieu he creates already has everything The Godfather could give us, most evident in his observation of the non-existent line between crime and dishonesty on one side and big business on the other, or class barriers within the criminal world.

James Cagney plays a small-time hoodlum whose social rise is a lesson in the culture of manners and in the details of the mechanics of swindling within the spitting image of capitalist society, that is, its jungle version and the sovereignty of its way of life. Still, as dark as the subject might be, especially about the ethical level of society, the movie is full of light, practical wisdom, energy, and invention. People in different walks of life might be cogs in the big machine, but they still have a lively rhythm and movement all their own, in a way that would become almost impossible to imagine after the privileged, brief pre-Code moment when the film was made.

Peter von Bagh