Showing posts with label James Cagney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Cagney. Show all posts

Best Actor, 1949

Awards presented March 23, 1950
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Crawford inherited the "big lug" stereotype of his fellow Oscar winners Wallace Beery and Victor McLaglen, though with somewhat less success than theirs. He is chiefly known for two film roles -- this one and Judy Holliday's junkyard-millionaire sugar daddy in Born Yesterday -- and for "Highway Patrol," the late-1950s TV series that seemed to run forever in syndication. He was the son of two vaudevillians, Lester Crawford and Helen Broderick (best-known for her wise-cracking sidekick roles in the Astaire-Rogers movies Top Hat and Swing Time), and dropped out of Harvard to become a stevedore. He got his first big break when he was cast in the role of Lenny in the 1937 Broadway adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. He went to Hollywood on the strength of his New York success, but was passed over for the part of Lenny in the film version in favor of Lon Chaney Jr. He found regular work, mostly as a B-picture heavy, until Robert Rossen chose him to play the charismatic Willie Stark -- a role that had been offered first to John Wayne. He landed his other major film role, in Born Yesterday, after Paul Douglas, who had played the part on Broadway, decided not to reprise it in the film. Although he also starred in one of the early films of Federico Fellini, Il Bidone (1955), he failed to find satisfactory work in movies, and turned to TV, where in addition to "Highway Patrol," he had a long career, mostly in guest appearances. Despite severe alcoholism, he managed to work regularly until his death in 1986.    

... when it should have gone to ...  

James Cagney and Margaret Wycherly in White Heat 
If Cagney's Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy, in which he played the ultimate song-and-dance man, honored one side of his career, then he certainly should have won for White Heat, which is his gangster apotheosis, a Gangsterdämmerung. He pulls out all the stops and throws them away as Cody Jarrett, the gangster with a fixation on his mother (Margaret Wycherly), who is as ruthless and loony as he is. Directed by Raoul Walsh, everyone in this film noir with a fiery finish gives a terrific performance, even Virginia Mayo, so often the epitome of bland blondness, as Cody's moll, Verna. The movie deservedly made the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2003, but it received only one Oscar nomination, for the story by Virginia Kellogg on which it was based. 

"Made it, Ma! Top of the world!" Cagney's immolation scene in White Heat



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Best Actor, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 


George M. Cohan himself had proposed the idea of a film about his life, starting with his years performing with his family in vaudeville and following his rise to become a major songwriter, playwright, and performer. He took the idea to Sam Goldwyn, who talked to Fred Astaire about playing Cohan. Astaire, whose style as a performer was worlds away from Cohan's, quite sensibly turned it down, so Cohan went to Warner Bros., pitching it as a movie for Cagney.  Like most Hollywood biopics, Yankee Doodle Dandy sentimentalizes and sanitizes its subject, glossing over, for example, Cohan's acrimonious battle with Actors Equity, which as a rich and powerful producer he tried to block in its struggle to become a Broadway bargaining agent. But thanks to Cagney, who sings, dances, and acts superbly, it's one of the great Hollywood musicals, with marvelous re-creations of Cohan's routines. As a boy he had seen Cohan on stage, and he shared Cohan's Irish roots, modeling his own style as a dancer on Cohan's stiff-legged strut. Cagney called it his favorite film, as well he might, for he dominates it as few performers have ever dominated a movie. He's on screen virtually throughout, blazing with energy. 
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Best Actor, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
... and the Oscar went to ... 
Tracy plays Father Flanagan, the founder of an orphanage and school for what were then called juvenile delinquents. The real Flanagan complained that the movie made the real Boys Town look so clean and well-run that he was having trouble raising money. It made Tracy the first person to receive consecutive best actor Oscars, a distinction that would stand for fifty-six years, until Tom Hanks was honored for Forrest Gump a year after his win for Philadelphia. Tracy was flabbergasted when MGM announced that he was going to donate his Oscar to Boys Town, something he had no intention of doing unless he was given a duplicate statuette. The Academy complied. Tracy received six more nominations, the last one posthumously for his work in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, but never won another Oscar. 

... when it should have gone to ... 


Sheer, wonderful hokum, the Warner Bros. studio machine at its most efficient. Cagney plays a mobster who comes back to his old neighborhood to settle scores with crooked lawyer Humphrey Bogart. Cagney's boyhood friend, Pat O'Brien, has become a priest who works with the neighborhood toughs, played by the Dead End Kids -- Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, et al. O'Brien tries to get Cagney, whom the Kids idolize as the ultimate tough guy, to go straight, but he kills Bogart and is sentenced to be executed. O'Brien persuades Cagney to feign cowardice on his way to the chair so the Kids will be disillusioned. Some think this is Cagney's greatest performance, and it won him the New York Film Critics Award. It's certainly one of them: Only a great star could have pulled off the walk-to-the-chair scene. 
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