The Public Enemy: Cagney and the Grapefruit

A film can be eaten by one shot. The Public Enemy (1931) runs eighty-three minutes, contains four or five murders and one of the two or three most important performances in the history of American screen acting, and the thing everybody knows about it is that James Cagney pushes half a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face at breakfast.

The gesture deserves its fame. It takes two seconds, it is done without heat, and it is domestic in a way that gangster violence almost never is — a man silencing a woman with a piece of fruit because she has spoken at the wrong moment and he cannot be bothered to hit her. What has been lost under the anecdote is the film around it, which is stranger, better and considerably more brutal than its reputation, and which is built on a principle that most modern crime cinema has abandoned entirely: it does not show you the killings.

The swap that made a career

Cagney was cast as Matt Doyle, the sidekick. Edward Woods was cast as Tom Powers, the lead. A few days into shooting, William Wellman had them switched.

There is no better piece of casting folklore in the studio era, because the evidence is right there on the screen. Watch Woods in the finished film — perfectly adequate, pleasant, entirely forgettable — and then watch Cagney do anything at all, and the swap stops looking like a decision and starts looking like a correction. Warner Bros. had a contract player who moved like a boxer, talked like a machine gun and had come out of vaudeville with a physical vocabulary nobody else in pictures possessed, and for four days they had him standing behind somebody else.

What Cagney does with Tom Powers is invent a register. Before this, screen villains were theatrical: size, menace, a voice that filled a hall. Cagney is small, fast and delighted, and the threat comes from unpredictability — the sense in every scene that he might do something, right now, for no reason he would be able to explain afterwards. He hits people the way you would swat a fly, without a backswing. Half a century of screen acting comes out of that.

Wellman looks away

The craft argument for The Public Enemy is a negative one, and it is extraordinary. Wellman keeps the violence outside the frame with a discipline that would look radical in a film made this year.

Putty Nose, the fence who set the boys on their way, is killed at a piano. Tom walks him to the instrument, has him play, and the camera stays on the faces of the other men in the room while the piano stops. Nails Nathan is killed by a horse; Tom goes to the stable to settle accounts with the animal, and we wait outside the door and hear it. The film’s central massacre is transacted entirely in the reactions of people who are not in the room.

The masterpiece is the rain sequence. Tom goes alone into a rival’s headquarters to finish the war, and Wellman parks the camera in the street. Rain. A wet pavement. A door. Gunfire inside, muffled and ugly and going on for longer than you want it to. And then the door opens, and Wellman keeps the camera in the street for what comes through it. The whole sequence is a doorway and some weather. It is more frightening than any amount of squibs, because your imagination has been asked to do the work and your imagination is not restricted by the Hays Office or the budget.

The family is the point

The structure people underrate is the domestic one. Tom has a mother who cannot see him, played by Beryl Mercer as a woman with an almost pathological need to believe her son is a good boy, and a brother, Mike, a decent man home from the war who can see him perfectly and cannot do a thing about it. The film keeps returning to a dinner table where one son is lying, one son is furious, and the mother is serving food.

That is where the picture’s real cruelty lives. The gangster material is exhilarating; the family scenes are where it costs something. Mike’s accusation that the beer on the table was bought with blood is the film’s one moment of explicit moralising that actually works, because it is delivered by a man who has been in the trenches and knows exactly what he is talking about.

Jean Harlow arrives as Gwen, and she is a curiosity — nineteen years old, still some way short of the technique she would later command, and already unmistakably a star. Joan Blondell gets less to do and does more with it.

The afterlife of a piece of fruit

The origin of the grapefruit has never been settled. Competing accounts have circulated for ninety years — that it was scripted, that it was improvised, that it was a prank on the actress that Wellman kept because the reaction was real, that it was suggested by a story someone had heard about an actual gangster and an actual omelette. The participants told it differently at different times, and the folklore has long since outrun whatever the truth was.

What is beyond dispute is the cost. Mae Clarke was a working actress with a real career, and she spent the rest of it attached to two seconds of screen time in which somebody did something to her face. That is the part of the anecdote nobody repeats. A gesture that made Cagney permanently famous made his co-star permanently a punchline, and the asymmetry says more about how the studio system distributed the proceeds of a hit than any contract dispute.

The Warner Bros. house style

The Public Enemy is a Warner picture in a way that matters. Under Darryl F. Zanuck the studio had built a production line for exactly this: fast, cheap, contemporary films that read the morning’s headlines and had them in cinemas before the year was out. The story came from Kubec Glasmon and John Bright, who had known Chicago, and the film carries the texture of reportage — the beer trade, the ward politics, the specific mechanics of how a neighbourhood boy gets recruited.

The economics produced the aesthetic. Warner’s programmers were shot on standing sets by directors who had one take in them, and the resulting films move at a clip that the more prestigious studios could not manage and would not have wanted. The whole tenement world here is conjured with a doorway, a staircase, a saloon interior and rain. Poverty of means, allied to a director who had flown in a war and had no patience for decoration, is what makes this thing look the way it looks.

The case against

The moralising frames are dishonest and everyone involved knew it. The film opens with a card announcing its intention to depict a problem in order to condemn it, and closes with another one urging the public to do something, and neither of them has any relationship to the eighty minutes in between, which are having a tremendous time. Warner Bros. bolted them on to keep the picture releasable. They are the price of admission and they are worth skipping.

The first reel is clumsy. The film insists on showing Tom and Matt as children — already thieving, already unrepentant — in a stretch of exposition that establishes nothing the adult scenes do not establish better. Beryl Mercer’s Ma Powers is pitched at a level of saintly obliviousness that curdles into comedy she was not being asked for. And the pacing sags whenever Cagney leaves the screen, which is a structural problem the film never solves because it never noticed it had one.

The real ancestor

Little Caesar (1931) opened first and set the template: the rise, the swagger, the fall. This one, released months later, found the star. Scarface came the following year and found the style — Hawks’s film is faster, wittier and much more perverse, and it is the one the censors could not forgive. Together the three of them constitute the entire grammar, invented inside about eighteen months.

The direct line runs to White Heat (1949), where Cagney came back to the genre after a decade away and played the mother-fixation as full psychosis, turning Ma Powers’s blindness inside out into Ma Jarrett’s complicity. And the tradition’s cool, procedural correction is The Asphalt Jungle (1950), which stripped out the swagger and left the labour. Black Caesar (1973) took the shape and gave it a politics.

Restorations are widely available and the transfer quality is far better than a 1931 Warner programmer has any right to expect. Watch it for the rain.

Spoilers below

The last twenty minutes are the reason the film survives, and they have nothing to do with grapefruit.

Tom, shot to pieces in the street, survives. He is in hospital. Wellman gives him the scene the whole picture has been withholding: a broken man, bandaged, telling his mother he is going to come home and be good, and meaning it — Cagney playing sincerity, which is more shocking in this performance than any violence. The mother believes him. She has been waiting eighty minutes to be told this. She goes home to make up his bed.

And then the rival gang takes him from the hospital.

The final shot is the coldest ending in the cycle. The family are at home. The record player is going. There is a knock. Mike opens the door, and Tom is standing there — trussed, wrapped, dead, propped upright like a delivery — and he falls forward into the hallway on his face. The camera holds. The record keeps playing, because nobody has gone to stop it, and the last sound in a film about the most electric physical performer in American cinema is a needle going round on a sentimental song in an empty room while his mother sings to herself upstairs.

The closing moralising card comes up after that. It is an insult to the shot it follows, and it is the best evidence available of how completely the studio failed to understand what Wellman had delivered.