I stumbled on this 1938 film by accident (my son started looking at it in the video store because he liked the cover), but I've been thinking about it now for two days.
It can either be taken straight (the ending is very good) or as a campy period piece. I'd always assumed James Cagney played the same person in every film: He shot at everything up and down the avenue, wore his hat cocked a little and did a great James Cagney impersonation. The movie proved I was right and the dialogue did not disappoint:
Soapy: Hey! Call a fair game or I'll slap you right in the kisser!
Rocky Sullivan: You'll slap me? You slap me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize.
But still, somehow, it worked for me. (It could be that my reaction was colored by my wife being out of town or the mood I was in, because you have to be in quite a mood to accept the way Cagney fires a revolver. He looks like he's trying to skip a stone across the lake. Maybe the bullets move faster if you wing 'em like that.)
If Cagney played to type, Bogart did not at all. He plays Cagney's weasel lawyer, sweating, darting eyes and making a lot of short-breathed promises. He doesn't play the tough guy. It shows he had great range.
Cagney is befriended by a band of dirty faced Hell's Kitchen kids who are at the moral center of the movie. They are hysterical with their nicknames, tackle basketball and Three Stooges slap fights. They're all like mini-Cagneys who've been given too much soda pop and yet they're crucial to the lovely ending.
Michael Curtiz directed (he went on to make Casablanca)
So just go rent it.
UPDATE: A sharp reader writes in to point out that there's a nod to the film in the movie Home Alone.
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