A couple of nights ago, I was on telly riffing on Joe Biden's pledge to keep punching and punching and punching at domestic violence. I concluded by suggesting he promise to smash a grapefruit in the face of domestic violence - and I was immediately barraged by emails from viewers who had no idea what I was talking about, and thought I'd flown the coop of whatever sanity remained. Alas, my cultural references are increasingly incomprehensible to those under, say, 112 years of age, but this particular one was once universally known: Jimmy Cagney shoving half-a-grapefruit into the kisser of Mae Clarke in The Public Enemy (1931).
It occurs about halfway through the picture - if you want a more precise timing, you should have asked Miss Clarke's ex-husband, Lew Brice (brother of Fannie), who knew exactly where it came down to the second and would buy a movie ticket, enter the theater moments before, watch the scene and never fail to delight in it, then leave and have a cheeseburger and fries at the diner across the street before returning to enjoy his ex-beloved getting the grapefruit all over again at the very next screening.
The Public Enemy belongs to that brief period between the introduction of talking pictures in 1927 and the enforcement of the new Motion Picture Production Code in 1934. Within three years, almost all the most memorable features of the film would have been forbidden, including not only the fruity tailor measuring Cagney's inside leg, and his seduction by the wife of his boss, but the grapefruit scene itself in all its essentials. The year before James Cagney had been on Broadway, opposite Joan Blondell in a play called Penny Arcade. It flopped, but by then Al Jolson had snaffled up the film rights and, when he sold them on to Warner Brothers, it was with the proviso that the stage principals recreate their roles in the movie version. So Cagney and Blondell were brought out to Hollywood as a kind of team, and for a while were paired together in this and that. Cagney became a star - a legend, one that every nightclub impressionist felt obligated to keep in his repertoire until the guy's death, even if only for the "you dirty rat" line; Miss Blondell remained a supporting player, a mainstay of Warner Bros than whom no one was better at batting hardboiled dialogue back and forth with cops and punks, cynical backstage producers and addle-pated sugar daddies.
It was The Public Enemy that set Cagney on his path. Two Chicago newspapermen had written a bootlegging novel, but couldn't get it published. So they offered it to William Wellman at Warners, and he liked it. The plot's simple enough - two Irish New York kids start bad and get worse - but the local color, the sense of time and place, the bars and clubs and hot-sheet hotels, is very strong. The director cast Edward Woods as aspirant hoodlum Tom Powers and James Cagney in the best-pal role. They shot all day Thursday, Friday, Saturday - and on the Sunday Wellman looked at the rushes and realized they'd made a terrible mistake: Cagney had star quality, and Woods didn't.
So he told the two they'd be switching parts and re-shooting. Woods balked, and the director told him he was lucky to be offered that, and he could take it or leave it. Woods took. Within a few years he was out of Hollywood, and for the last half-century-plus of his life never made a single movie. However, Warners didn't want to re-film the kid scenes, so the first ten minutes of the picture can be rather confusing: the boy who looks like Jimmy Cagney grows up to be Edward Woods, and vice-versa.
Still, you can't argue with the soundness of Wellman's decision. The Public Enemy is the film where Cagney's core persona - the stylized roughneck, the mannered mobster - got its first workout. Public Enemy was one of the first gangster flicks, and it was Cagney's cocksure swagger that endeared them to the public: look at the song'n'dance man's hop and a skip he does back to the car after his first encounter with Jean Harlow. He brought high style to lowlifes: "He's too busy with school work," he sneers of his goody-two-shoes sibling, "learning how to be poor." Later, he scoffs to his brother: "I suppose you want me to go to night school and read poems..."
But the Cagney trick is to turn threats and menaces into a kind of poetry. "You taught us how to cheat, steal and kill," he taunts an old mentor, "and then you lammed out on us." "Yeah," agrees Woods in the pal role, "if it hadn't been for you, we might have been on the level..." We know Cagney's going to kill the terrified mentor, but he's waiting for the right moment, and when the old guy starts in on the song he used to play for them as kids (the "Hesitation Blues") we know what's coming.
Had the roles remained as originally cast, Cagney would have romanced yet again Joan Blondell. Instead, he wound up with Harlow, and, before that, with the uncredited Mae Clarke. They meet in a nightclub:
"Hello, baby. What are you gonna have?"
"Anything you want, big boy."
"You're a swell dish. I think I'm gonna go for you."
She's the kind of swell dish who rooms at the Washington Arms Hotel, and pretty soon he's hanging out there, too. Which is how they come to be breakfasting together in pajamas and robe - a scene the Hays Code would never have permitted, because of the obvious implication that they had woken in the same bed. So no breakfast, no grapefruit scene.
Mae Clarke's character has done nothing to warrant Cagney's displeasure: He's bored by her conventionality, her lack of imagination, that's all. The viciousness of the act is such that for nine decades there are those who say the actress had no idea it was coming. Miss Clarke, on the other hand, said she knew about it, but assumed it was a joke for the amusement of the crew: It didn't seem the sort of thing you'd put in a movie.
But Wellman had his reasons. As the much-married director told Scott Eyman many years ago, "This one particular wife, whenever there was any anger (and you've got to have a few rows, for Christ's sake), this beautiful face would just freeze and wouldn't say a word. It used to just kill me. You're whipped, you're licked before you start. Anyway, I like grapefruit halves and when we used to eat breakfast I often thought of taking that goddamn grapefruit and just mushing it right in that lovely, beautiful, cold face." Instead, he put it in the picture.
1931 was a grand year for Mae Clarke. Later that year she starred in Waterloo Bridge, and opposite Boris Karloff in Frankenstein. Two years on, a car crash left her with a broken jaw and facial scars, and out of the starring roles. The last two decades of her career were spent back in uncredited parts, from Singin' in the Rain (1952) to Watermelon Man (1970), her final film. There are not many actresses whose oeuvres are bookended by fruits, first citrus, then non-.
Cagney was more consistent. Billy Wilder's One-Two-Three (1961) was a great actor's last film for two decades - until his final screen appearance in Ragtime (1981). In One-Two-Three, he threatens Horst Buchholz with a grapefruit to the puss ...but then decides against it. It was thirty years after The Public Enemy, and everyone got the joke.
~Kathy Shaidle, a big hit as our summer movie columnist, will be resuming this beat next month. She is one of the very best writers on classic cinema, and we are honored to publish her. Kathy is facing some tough health challenges at the moment, so we hope, even as you celebrate her return to our motion picture department, that you will also keep her in your prayers.
As we always say, membership in The Mark Steyn Club isn't for everybody, but it does support all our content, on everything from civilizational collapse to our Saturday movie dates. What is The Mark Steyn Club? Well, it's a discussion group of lively people on the great questions of our time; it's also an audio Book of the Month Club, and a live music club, and a video poetry circle (our latest poem airs tomorrow morning). More details here.
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No doubt, former VP Biden is a fan of Mark's reference to the grapefruit scene in The Public Enemy. After all, he recounted with much pride his take down of Corn Pop by referring to him as Esther Williams!
Not to be so immature and petty as to cherry pick my favourite phrase from an altogether stellar essay instead of offering a measured, intellectual comment, but "much-married" ==> dying!!
HAHAHAHAHA!
Thanks for explaining the grapefruit reference. But what about the column title, "Grapefruit of Wrath"? Is that some sort of cultural reference too?
I'm kidding, I'm kidding! Just giving your blood pressure a healthy little jolt. Never watched the movie TGOW and never will, but did read the book when I was young and thought it was profound. Then I turned 14 and it seemed much less profound. My daughter read it when she was about the same age and it did give us one reference we use a lot: "Killin' pigs AND goin' to California!"
Understanding cultural reference is one of life's pleasures. Mark made laugh out loud with the grapefruit reference. My kids would be so annoyed with me whenever we watched "The Simpsons" together. It would take me 5 minutes to explain a 5 second cultural reference. Glad to hear Kathy is returning. I have missed her excellent columns and will keep hr praying in my prayers.
It seems to me that the Hays Office was the first attempt at Hollywood's self-administered spine-otomy, which they later fully accomplished in the Blacklist. Both were performed under severe pressure from the outside--after Fatty Arbuckle had been accused of rape, in the case of the former; after several actors, writers, and directors had been outed as Communists, in the case of the latter--but both, it seems to me, far exceeded their goals. In the case of the Hays Office, we can borrow from Oscar Levant and say we knew Hollywood before it was virginal. Those of us raised on post-Hays pablum can still be shocked by some of the scenes that preceded it or slipped through its cracks. The Hollywood Blacklist is a knottier problem. Stalin was as nasty a beast as ever walked the earth, whose only contribution to humankind was to help engulf Hitler in a morass of Soviet blood. (Lenin and the other Bolshies were no saints, either.) I can't see how sympathy with the Soviet Union--and the Communism it espoused--survived the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact of 1939. Frankly, the blood-thirst exhibited in the murder of the Czar and his family would have been too much for me, but then I've been sensitized by Mark's reading of The Scarlet Pimpernel. But any movement that shaded the careers of Yip Harburg and Zero Mostel has something to answer for.
I have to take exception to your view of the Hays Code and the Blacklist. The movie Code of Conduct came about through pressure from the Catholic National Legion of Decency and the church ladies from what we now call flyover country. The church ladies were the same bunch that brought us Prohibition and were the nemesis of H.L. Mencken.
The Blacklist is another matter. In those days Hollywood, Washington and even urban society in general had plenty of Communists. When Poland was attacked by both Germany and the Soviet Union, only Germany was reviled because of Communist influence. There were plenty of Bolsheviks in Hollywood as many had fled Germany to escape the Nazis. Gregory Peck's first movie in 1944, Days of Glory the plot had young Peck playing a Soviet guerrilla fighting the Nazis after Operation Barbarossa. The U.S. was trying to whip up sympathy and educate the public as to why they should buy War Bonds to send Lend-Lease to the Soviets. I am not calling Gregory Peck a Commie but he worked for a studio that were sympathizers.
The Blacklist came about after WW2 when so many servicemen returned with knowledge of Stalin and a dislike for the Communists. They then began to root out their influence and spies and the Blacklist was part of that effort. While Joe McCarthy's name is now reviled I do not believe that he targeted anyone who was "innocent."
It's interesting to see the evolution of organized crime, at least according to what's visible. In the foreword to this film, it is said the ambition was to accurately portray how things were at the time. It hadn't seemed to have changed all that much by the time James Cagney closed out his career and Rudy Giuliani started cleaning up the streets of New York, of roughly the same sorts of crimes. Since then, that kind of organized crime has apparently greatly diminished, but there has developed a different kind of public enemy: the public-money enemy.
The vital difference is a layer between the businesses that used to be shaken down. It's as if taxes are an insurance policy. Businesses write the checks, hoping the government will go away, and perhaps aren't plagued directly by extortion schemes like the old days. But the public pool of money gets tapped into in an entirely different way, which comes with a mechanism for distributing costs that puts perpetrators out of reach of accountability like never before.
In short, it's the legalizing of crime: rule-breaking according to the rules; the rules being the outward impeccable attention to detail; with the appearance of propriety concealing the wrong underneath. Rudy Giuliani is leading the way, starting with the Bidens, to uncover this systemic corruption. As things have developed over time, persons in greater and greater numbers have wanted - and gotten - in on the Biden-type action to monetize government "service". They find strength and protection in numbers, and the hornet's nest is buzzing.
"... the appearance of propriety concealing the wrong underneath."
Very true. Increasingly, wrongs are disguised in this way (and not limited to the type of scenario you describe).
Mark, I just saw Mae Clarke's performance in the 1931 Waterloo Bridge. Unlike the Vivien Leigh version, Mae's character is a hard-bitten prostitute from the beginning. She doesn't give her character Vivien Leigh's beguiling innocence and desperation. But Mae's Myra is tough, complex and sympathetic. Mae Clarke should be remembered for more than having that grapefruit in her face.
Mark replies:
Agreed, Robert. But, in fairness to Vivien Leigh, the Mae Clarke version would have been impossible once the Code was in place.
Anyone remember a reality TV show hosted by Don Adams in the 70s? Contestants were called upon to recreate famous movie scenes. I recall the grapefruit scene was one.
I remember, it was called "Don Adams' Screen Test."
The only episode I remember anything of is where a guy had to do a swordfight, leaping around the set for the action.
Nobody was greater, more talented and had more of a screen presence than Cagney. If I had to live on a desert island for the rest of my life with videos of one actor and one studio it would be all of Cagney from Wadner Brothers. There was nothing the gytky couldn't do - sing, dance, act and carry himself with the grace of a skilled middleweight. How could so much energy, talent, craft and moxie be stuffed into one package? There is no such thing as a bad (or uninteresting) Cagney performance. And dont get me started on Joan Blondell- Tough, beautiful,smart and always alive - For me the ideal woman. "Footlights Pzrade" of 1933 is practically the perfect film experience. Sorry to sound like a gushing fan.
The famous, now apparently invisible, line from Mae West,
"I never vote, it just encourages them",
has always seemed both ageless and profound, but it has a real stinger in it these days.
.
KS, the indifference by the average person to our present version of reality is also beyond bizarre.
Mark,
I am 42 years old but immediately understood the reference to The Public Enemy. And, it was a perfect line for the braggadocio of Biden!
Then again, I had an unfair advantage as I saw the file many times when I was growing up as my father was huge Cagney fan. He actually visited Cagney several times at his farm in Connecticut in the 1980s after he and his friend begged the actor's manager. According to my pops, Cagney was a true gentlemen with a strong handshake but sweet as can be in person (unlike his screen persona). After their initial visit, Cagney told them they were welcome to visit anytime they were in the area. Those visits were wonderful highlights for my Dad. O his last visit to see him, my father gave Cagney a shawl my mother had knitted. Cagney cried upon opening his gift.
One of the most overlooked aspects of The Public Enemy is that all of the killing occurs off screen. The scene where Putty Nose is killed is the best example. As Tom Powers pulls the gun to kill him, the camera pans to see Wood's reaction to the murder. Bravo review and reference, Mark!
The great humourist, S.J. Perelman, mentions a visit by Cagney to HIS Connecticut farm, in 'Acres and Pains'. He was discussing some alterations to the house with an architect when Cagney dropped in:
'The architect kept staring suspiciously at him while I was posing my problem. "I've seen that man somewhere before," he said accusingly.
"Yes, yes," I murmured. "Now if we extend this wing to here--" Suddenly I realized I had lost my audience; he had sneaked up the slope and was peering narrowly at Cagney from behind a syringa bush.
"Listen," he whispered excitedly, clutching my arm. "I can't place this bird, but he's wanted by the police! I got a hunch I saw his picture in a post office-- I never forget a face." All at once his jaw dropped and he uttered a squeal. "It's Cagney!" he shrilled. "James Cagney!" Before I could intercede, he had pinned his quarry to the fence, and was re-enacting his favorite scenes in the latter's movies. I fought my way in between them, vainly attempting to restore the architect to his senses.
"I want the master bedroom facing north!" I shouted desperately. "Then we can put the kitchen in the cellar--I mean, the cellar in the attic!" The architect tried to shake me off, but I clung, and we rocked about the lawn like three dancing bears.'
Perelman was one of my dad's favourite author's and I inherited both his books and his taste for the man's writing. Now, THAT would be a fun Tales for Our Time: Mark Steyn reading S.J. Perelman! His descriptions of re-watching old silent movies and reading potboiler novels that he'd remembered from his youth are hilarious; kind of like MST3K for an earlier generation.
PS: My sincere gratitude to everyone for their well-wishes. I just got home from the hospital today so of course my first stop was to SteynOnline.com
That's great to hear Kathy. Try to take it easy and watch lots of movies, especially racy pre-code ones. You should know that we ex-pat Canadian Michiganders (via Macedonia?) are pulling for you big time.
..I was immediately barraged by emails from viewers who had no idea what I was talking about..."
The ignorance of the average person depresses me.
The pre-Hays era had some evening gowns that might as well have been invisible and Jane swimming naked with Tarzan. I am less than 112 years old but I wish you would speak up, Sonny.