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Beer and Blood: The Birth of the Public Enemy
by Heather Babcock (copyright 2018)
THREE DETROIT GANGSTERS MASSACRED: DEAD VICTIMS STILL HOLD CIGARS THEY SMOKED WHEN GUNS SPOKE, screamed a rather poetic real life Globe newspaper headline on September 17th, 1931.
Prohibition, now over a decade old, had transformed ordinary citizens into lawbreakers and everyday hoodlums into wealthy, bloodthirsty demigods. 1931 could arguably be summed up as “the year of the gangster”: the newspapers were full of ‘em – stories of “bloody bootleg rackets” and “bootlegger bandit death trysts” dominated the headlines and, thanks to the Warner Brothers studio, the silver screen as well. The studio, which only a few years earlier had revolutionized the industry by ushering in sound (or “talkies”) with 1927’s The Jazz Singer, began 1931 with a bang when they released Little Caesar.
“Be somebody,” Rico, Little Caesar’s ambitious thug, played by the incomparable Edward G. Robinson, enthuses at the start of the film. To “be somebody” is to be rich but as Rico warns “Money’s all right but it ain’t everything. Be somebody. Look hard at a bunch of guys and know that they’ll do anything you tell ‘em. Have your own way or nothin’.”
In other words, to “be somebody” is to live the American Dream and in an America caught in the double fisted grip of Prohibition and the Great Depression, it was a dream gone dangerously delirious - a dream fueled by buckets of bathtub gin; a dream which could be poisonous if taken straight.
Little Caesar was a massive hit – so much so that theaters had to keep it running twenty-four hours a day just to satisfy audience demand; they had done the same thing almost four years earlier with Underworld, Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 gangland epic for Paramount Pictures. Underworld, a film dripping with both beauty and brutality, is considered by many to be the first successful gangster picture – the Grand Daddy of all gangster movies if you will – but it was a silent film; it wasn’t until the gangsters began to talk when the genre truly secured its choke-hold on the public’s imagination. It is a testament to the power and influence of the movies that when we picture Prohibition-era gangsters today it is not the real-life criminals, such as Al Capone or Jack “Legs” Diamond, who immediately come to mind but rather Edward G. Robinson, a cigar anchored between his lips, or James Cagney, shooting his words out quicker than bullets from a Tommy gun.
Riding the wave of gunfire, Warner Brothers followed Little Caesar with The Public Enemy, released in April of that same year. In The Public Enemy, James Cagney stars as the nasty break-your-word-and-I’ll-break-your-face bootlegger Tom Powers. One wonders if we would still be discussing this film eighty-seven years later if it were not for Cagney. I say that not to lessen the talent of the movie’s other stars, but there has never been any question that The Public Enemy is Cagney’s picture. Originally Edward Woods was signed on to play Tom Powers, with Cagney as his side-kick Matt. However when director William “Wild Bill” Wellman was viewing the early footage he realized that it was Cagney, and not the handsome but reticent Woods, who crackled with an almost frightening intensity. Wellman switched the actors’ roles and both a classic movie and a star were born.
He was beloved by both cast and crew as the nicest guy on the lot but onscreen Cagney could be as terrifying as he was captivating. Watch closely his movements in The Public Enemy – particularly his hands – his gestures are as sharp as a boxer’s jab yet as graceful as a ballet dancer’s pirouette. Indeed, the street smart Cagney had been both a boxer and a dancer. In his own words, from his 1976 autobiography Cagney by Cagney:
“I learned how to dance from learning how to fight. It was feint, duck, quick dance around your opponent on your toes mostly, then shoot out the arm like a bullet.”
Cagney ignores the rules of the early talkies – to speak slowly and to enunciate clearly – instead he spits words out at breakneck speed in his proud Lower East Side New York accent. As we follow Tom Powers’ rise from a young roller-skate snatcher to a vicious bootlegger, we can’t keep our eyes off of him. That is, until Jean Harlow shows up. There is a very good reason why Warner Brothers borrowed her from Hughes for The Public Enemy and for why she shares top billing with Cagney even though she has less than half of his screen time: in the 1930s, studios catered to a female audience and they undoubtedly knew that women would be more likely to buy a ticket to see a gangster flick if Jean Harlow, the original Platinum Blonde and most influential 1930s style and beauty icon, was in it. Just one year later, Harlow would come into her own both as an actress and a comedian: she would make them laugh in Red-Headed Woman (1932) and cry in Red Dust (1932). But her early acting, particularly in The Public Enemy, has always inspired negative criticism and cruel mocking. I for one though appreciate the glitter and grit that Harlow brings to the role of Gwen, Tom’s trophy moll. In Harlow’s hands, Gwen is not a society dame but a dame who craves society – like Tom and Rico she wants to “be somebody”. Working class audiences, the audience that Warner Brothers proudly catered to, adored Jean Harlow. Whiplash may be a viewer side-effect of watching Cagney and Harlow together on screen – it feels as though we are watching a game of ping pong but the ball is their fire. Make no mistake though – the passions that they unleash are at each other, not for each other; Gwen and Tom are not a couple mating but rather individuals fighting for their own place in the world. Their one love scene together is the only time in the film when Cagney appears truly vulnerable but when Harlow says to him “You don’t give – you take,” she could easily be talking about herself. That love scene goes unconsummated, ending with a frustrated Harlow smashing a champagne glass against the wall as Tom carelessly walks out with his friend Matt. Cagney didn’t do romance and The Public Enemy isn’t a romantic film – nor is it really a movie about guns and bootleggers. The Public Enemy is a film about family. The script was adapted from Kubec Glasmon and John Bright’s novel Beer and Blood and that title sums up all of Tom’s world: his “beer” family of bootleggers and his “blood” family, played here by Beryl Mercer as his naïve, loving mother and Donald Cook as his conservative big brother Mike.
The relationship between brothers Tom and Mike is interesting. It is complicated and intense in the way that relationships between real-life siblings often are. Tom Powers may thumb his nose at Mike’s responsible lifestyle (“He’s too busy going to school – he’s learning how to be poor”) but the hard-core gangster, who can literally shoot a man in the back before calling his moll for a date, doesn’t defend himself when his disapproving brother gives him a sock in the jaw (and the punch was reportedly real – Cook hit Cagney so hard that Cagney cracked a tooth). In one of the film’s best scenes, Mike picks up a keg and throws it across their mother’s kitchen, angrily accusing Tom that “there’s not only beer in that keg – there’s beer and blood!” Tom replies that Mike, who has just returned home from the War and is incidentally shell shocked, is a hypocrite. “You didn’t get them medals from holding hands with them Germans,” he sneers. “You killed and you liked it!” He is projecting in the way that siblings often do – for of course it is Tom, not Mike, who “kills and likes it.”
In the early 1930s, gangster movies used real bullets but the most explosive scene in The Public Enemy doesn't involve gun fire at all – yes folks, it's time to talk about the Grapefruit. The film's most notorious moment happens as Tom sits down to breakfast with his moll Kitty, played by the lovely Mae Clarke. They have obviously just had sex and Tom is acting more than a little cold and distracted. Kitty, looking fabulous in a pair of silk lounging pajamas, asks him if he has met someone he likes better. Cagney’s sneer curls up like a fist as he picks up a half grapefruit and smashes it in Mae’s face. It is a cruel scene which still shocks today and it confirms our suspicion that Tom Powers is a sociopath.
It seems that almost every man who had a hand in making the film has their own story of how this scene came to be shot; the most commonly accepted theory is also the most condescending - the belief that the scene was improvised by Cagney and Wellman, without Clarke's knowledge or consent and that her response was thus genuine. This assumption irritates me as it is dismissive of Clarke's admirable acting talents and relegates her to little more than a prop. Well, Clarke was no prop and she sure as hell wasn't a hack either: in 1931, in addition to the Public Enemy, she delivered strong performances in three important films: Waterloo Bridge, Frankenstein and The Front Page. As for that grapefruit, I'm going to go with Mae's version of the story, both because I trust her talent and because I like her better than all those other mugs: in a 1983 interview with American Classic Screen, Mae said that the script originally called for Cagney throwing the grapefruit at her and then storming out. Wellman and Cagney however felt that this wasn’t quite working so they took Mae aside and asked if she would be okay with Cagney pushing the grapefruit in her face. Mae didn’t like the idea but agreed to do it on the condition that the scene be shot once and with no retakes. Still, according to her close friends, Mae always hated the “grapefruit scene”. Viewers today may honor her talent by watching this great actress in the powerful role for which she would undoubtedly prefer to be remembered – as chorus girl turned prostitute Myra in James Whale’s Waterloo Bridge. Mae Clarke was much more than just “the dame who gets the grapefruit facial". The most criminal thing about the Public Enemy is that she did not even receive a screen credit.
Like the grapefruit scene, the film’s ending also packs a wallop with rival gang members tossing Cagney’s mummified corpse through his mother’s living room door. It is Cook’s nuanced performance though that makes this scene truly haunting – his slow, stunned lurch towards the camera to the tune of a broken phonograph record. Will Mike avenge his brother’s death, we wonder? Or will this be the final straw that breaks him? And how will he tell Ma that her baby is finally home but not in the way that she hoped?
Like other gangster films from this period, The Public Enemy is book ended by title cards warning of the dangers of a gangster lifestyle. Audiences accepted these admonishments as broccoli to the film’s ice cream dessert. “(Gangster pictures) are intended to point out the lesson that crime does not pay,” insisted Harry Warner and you can almost see Tom Powers sneer in response. “Crime doesn’t pay, does it?” I picture him saying. “Baby, these days it’s the only thing that pays.” The popularity of films like The Public Enemy is indicative of how most Americans really felt about Prohibition. Eighty-five years later the film’s heat remains as unquenchable as a forest fire. Who needs CGI when you’ve got James Cagney?
Copyright Heather Babcock, 2018
