| Warner Bros. | Release Date: May 15, 1931 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
16
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
There’s little denying the power of Cagney’s presence, from the first moment he’s on screen, he radiates such a brash Fenian cockiness you can imagine kids at the time flocking out of the theater and cocking their caps just like him. It’s a performance so perfect in its intensity that any other quibbles about the film ultimately recede into insignificance.
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James Cagney, wielding gats and grapefruit, became a star playing the murderous young Irish-American hood Tom Powers, a character modeled on Capone rival Dion O'Banion, in this classic, grim, unusually violent gangster film. [26 Jun 2009, p.C5]
Director William Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931), which was billed at the time of its release as being "devastatingly real," was the first film to seriously examine the causes of criminal behavior and to portray the gangster as a product of his environment. [22 Aug 1999, p.60]
Time hasn’t been terribly kind to this 1931 gangster drama, which suffers more than it should from the glitches of early sound. But James Cagney’s portrayal of a bootlegging runt is truly electrifying (he’d already made three films, but this one made him a star), and Jean Harlow makes the tartiest tart imaginable.
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A good picture, even if the theme music is "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles."
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