Late in the film, our hero Danny Kenny (James Cagney) tells us he "don't like that tear-jerking sob stuff." No doubt he would have winced sitting through "City Of Conquest." I did, a lot of the time.
A tough but amiable West Side kid, Danny is a skilled amateur boxer who doesn't like fighting. He cares more about his love for the girl who lives up the stairs from his apartment. But when she grows up, Peg (Ann Sheridan) wants more out of life than to be the wife of a truck driver. She has aspirations to be a big-time dancer. To keep up, Danny takes his chances in the professional ring, with hard results.
"City For Conquest" is a film that wants to hit a home run every inning. To the extent it relies on Cagney, it delivers more than it fails. Cagney is in great form, dialing down on his trademark bantam ambition and commanding the screen in his unaffected way. Other pictures make you fear or admire Cagney; here you just really like him and enjoy his easy charm.
Alas, the film uses this to shoehorn a lot of melodrama. In addition to Danny, you get the story of his musical brother Eddie (Arthur Kennedy) and Peg's struggle for success as the partner of headcase-on-the-make Murray Burns (Anthony Quinn). Quinn and Kennedy would go on to score nine Oscar nominations between them and co-star in "Lawrence Of Arabia," a film as epically ambitious as "City For Conquest" but much more successful.
There's a lot of talent in evidence here, both on screen and behind the camera. Maybe too much. Elia Kazan's performance as Danny's loyal gangster pal Googi is rightly praised for its naturalism, which is easy to notice in a film where so much of the supporting cast plays their one-note parts with such over-revved gusto. Googi is an interesting character, but his scenes, like Kennedy's, too often stretch the narrative more than it can afford. Third-billed Frank Craven jumps in and out of the movie as the same kind of narrator he played in "Our Town," offering a lot of folky, overwritten nonsense he insists is true because "I got clothes on my back."
I guess they wanted to make a point about Manhattan as dream-weaver and back-breaker, but instead of just letting the characters breathe and develop in a natural way you get a kind of big-studio meat-grinder effect, a pushed-up drama with tears and big speeches of the kind Holden Caulfield complained about in "Catcher In The Rye." I like that artificiality in other movies, but here the emotions are played a little too strong and too quick. Poor Sheridan seems lost alternately playing a hustling heel and a loyal girlfriend.
Director Anatole Litvak delivers some interesting setpieces, and he is handsomely supported by the cinematography of Sol Polito and James Wong Howe, wizards of black-and-white and the best thing about "City For Conquest" after Cagney. One amazing shot of a street dance zooms out from Cagney watching Sheridan to swoop under a line of lights and up over the adoring crowd. How they did that I have no idea. You get shots like that throughout the film, pieces of artistry that call no attention to themselves.
Most everything else does, though. Sometimes it works, like the Max Steiner score. Sure, it's Gershwin-lite and played up too much, stopping the film dead near the end when Eddie introduces his "Magic Isle Symphony." Still, it's a great number.
Too often, though, you get another close-up of Sheridan in tears, or Craven smirking up a storm as he grandiloquently lights into another quandary posed by the big city. A better script, with a tighter focus on Danny the fighter, and "City For Conquest" could have been up there with Cagney's best. Instead, it's a worthy depiction of how well Cagney could hold up a lesser film with sheer acting power and finesse, something to see for his many fans but a missed opportunity for the rest of us.
A tough but amiable West Side kid, Danny is a skilled amateur boxer who doesn't like fighting. He cares more about his love for the girl who lives up the stairs from his apartment. But when she grows up, Peg (Ann Sheridan) wants more out of life than to be the wife of a truck driver. She has aspirations to be a big-time dancer. To keep up, Danny takes his chances in the professional ring, with hard results.
"City For Conquest" is a film that wants to hit a home run every inning. To the extent it relies on Cagney, it delivers more than it fails. Cagney is in great form, dialing down on his trademark bantam ambition and commanding the screen in his unaffected way. Other pictures make you fear or admire Cagney; here you just really like him and enjoy his easy charm.
Alas, the film uses this to shoehorn a lot of melodrama. In addition to Danny, you get the story of his musical brother Eddie (Arthur Kennedy) and Peg's struggle for success as the partner of headcase-on-the-make Murray Burns (Anthony Quinn). Quinn and Kennedy would go on to score nine Oscar nominations between them and co-star in "Lawrence Of Arabia," a film as epically ambitious as "City For Conquest" but much more successful.
There's a lot of talent in evidence here, both on screen and behind the camera. Maybe too much. Elia Kazan's performance as Danny's loyal gangster pal Googi is rightly praised for its naturalism, which is easy to notice in a film where so much of the supporting cast plays their one-note parts with such over-revved gusto. Googi is an interesting character, but his scenes, like Kennedy's, too often stretch the narrative more than it can afford. Third-billed Frank Craven jumps in and out of the movie as the same kind of narrator he played in "Our Town," offering a lot of folky, overwritten nonsense he insists is true because "I got clothes on my back."
I guess they wanted to make a point about Manhattan as dream-weaver and back-breaker, but instead of just letting the characters breathe and develop in a natural way you get a kind of big-studio meat-grinder effect, a pushed-up drama with tears and big speeches of the kind Holden Caulfield complained about in "Catcher In The Rye." I like that artificiality in other movies, but here the emotions are played a little too strong and too quick. Poor Sheridan seems lost alternately playing a hustling heel and a loyal girlfriend.
Director Anatole Litvak delivers some interesting setpieces, and he is handsomely supported by the cinematography of Sol Polito and James Wong Howe, wizards of black-and-white and the best thing about "City For Conquest" after Cagney. One amazing shot of a street dance zooms out from Cagney watching Sheridan to swoop under a line of lights and up over the adoring crowd. How they did that I have no idea. You get shots like that throughout the film, pieces of artistry that call no attention to themselves.
Most everything else does, though. Sometimes it works, like the Max Steiner score. Sure, it's Gershwin-lite and played up too much, stopping the film dead near the end when Eddie introduces his "Magic Isle Symphony." Still, it's a great number.
Too often, though, you get another close-up of Sheridan in tears, or Craven smirking up a storm as he grandiloquently lights into another quandary posed by the big city. A better script, with a tighter focus on Danny the fighter, and "City For Conquest" could have been up there with Cagney's best. Instead, it's a worthy depiction of how well Cagney could hold up a lesser film with sheer acting power and finesse, something to see for his many fans but a missed opportunity for the rest of us.