Jimmy Cagney — or Does the Way We Fight Make Us Strong or Weak?

A Good Fight

Aesthetic Realism explains what Jimmy Cagney was desperate to know: that his acting came from an entirely different source in him than those street fights, including the many roles in which he played a tough guy.

In his great 1965 lecture "What Does a Fight Mean?" Eli Siegel explains a tremendous thing about the self, and, I believe, the reason people love to see Cagney on the screen:

We are looking for a good fight because if there isn't a good fight which makes for a conclusion, things in us will be annoying each other perpetually. There are two phases of conflict. One is the possibility that conflict changes into a fight which shows something. The other is that conflict go on like a tired worm on a hot day, dragging itself across Fifth Avenue.

Jimmy Cagney was, in my opinion, a great artist. In many of his more than 60 films, Cagney's acting illustrates Eli Siegel's mighty principle: "All beauty is a making one of opposites and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."

Cagney did something new in cinema's portrayal of the "bad guy" who until then had been two-dimensional and flat—only sinister and dark. He put opposites together: good and evil, dark and light, toughness and something unsure. You heard his wisecracks and you felt his depth. Said one critic:

He is all crust and speed and snap on the surface, a gutter-fighter with the grace of dancing, a boy who knows all the answers...But always this, always: if as a low type he is wrong, you are going to see why.

This audiences saw in the film that first made Cagney a national name, 1931's The Public Enemy. Cagney plays Tom Powers (left in photo), who "graduates from juvenile delinquency to gangland rum-running." Never before had people seen such brutality on the screen. In one close-up, as he seeks revenge on his enemies, there is a look on Cagney's face of the pleasure of contempt so sheer, it terrifies. He showed outwardly the savage thing in the self most people hide, and this showing was useful.

In Angels With Dirty Faces, as Rock Sullivan, Cagney is in a fight throughout—will he lead a good life, or will he be a gangster? He is tough, and all the while you feel a sense of depth.

In The Strawberry Blonde Cagney was not a criminal. He plays Biff Grimes, a dentist. Biff is pugnacious, but also has sweetness and wonder. For instance, when he gets his first kiss from The Strawberry Blonde—Rita Hayworth—he "turns ecstatically, vaults into a handspring and kisses a nearby horse."

These opposites in Cagney's roles, the "nobody's going to make me a sucker" and honest wonder, I was so fortunate to learn about in an Aesthetic Realism class. Miss Reiss saw they were fighting in me, and she asked:

Do you have a hard time putting the two together? Your toughness, street-wiseness and calculation is not at one with your sense of wonder, the grand feeling?

"No, it isn't," I said. I am so grateful for what Miss Reiss explained as the discussion continued: this split in me between having honest wonder and also wanting to be a sharp, tough person interfered with my whole life—including how I saw love.

Article Sections
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8