
Australian premiere of restored sound era film.
With soundtrack, 85 minutes.
Tickets: $25/$20
General seating - not reserved or numbered
(T 0419 267 318)
The Public Enemy still roars with vitality – all thanks to Cagney and director Wellman’s feral energy and a strong support cast that includes Jean Harlow and Joan Blondell. Drawing a link between a life of crime and a climate of social disenfranchisement, it remains the film that firmly established the genre template. Ripping the gangster from the headlines, The Public Enemy casts him squarely into the realms of myth as his criminal ambitions lead to an inevitable downfall.
Cagney’s ferocious star power here as the rising gangster delivers cinema for the ages as Wellman’s visual inventiveness matches the lead’s dynamic and kinetic performance. A great box office success! Critics state, “..there’s a sly coyness about the film and that’s why it picks a forbidding and impersonal title when it really wants to offer us the gutter charms of James Cagney as gangster Tom Powers. There had never been anything as cheerful and dangerous before.”
Unlike other similar films of the period, this one examined the social forces and roots of crime in a serious way. Shot in less than a month, its impact hastened the introduction of Hollywood’s self-imposed Production Code. Since the 19th century, crime as a theme has attracted the attention of literature and cinema. In the silent era, the character of Sherlock Holmes and superb directors such as D W Griffith, Maurice Tourneur and Josef von Sternberg were connected to the exploration of the underworld. In the early sound era this fascination coincided with the force of the Great Depression to deliver such masterpieces as Mervyn Le Roy’s Little Caesar (1931), Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932) and this Wellman diamond.
This short, sharp masterpiece is a pre-code film that avoids simplistic moralism as it navigates vivid realistic slices of the underworld. The protagonist is a magnetic character: cocky, amoral and lethal. In short Cagney was the ideal engine for this powerhouse movie. Ironically, near the end the song, I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, plays on the Victrola phonograph. Nemesis looms.
Crime does not pay but this seminal cinema piece wryly illustrates the opposite: it pays you good and hard!
Contact Details
Location
State Library NSW
Metcalfe Auditorium, Macquarie Street
Entrance is via rear of the cafe
Sydney NSW 2000