Beginning with "The Public Enemy", produced by Warner Bros in 1931, James Cagney established a new cultural type on the American screen and in the world's imagination. That "type", later developed by Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield, was the urban tough guy - small, wiry, savvy and street-smart. Often presented as a gangster, newspaper reporter or private eye, the "city boy" seemed the quintessential product of urban America, although he was more a model for his audience than a mirror of social actuality. While blending the stories of the professional and political lives of Cagney, Bogart and Garfield into one narrative, Robert Sklar probes the cultural forces that produced this cultural icon and examines its power over masculine self-definition. Cagney and Bogart, whose legends have grown over time, and Garfield, whose work has been unfortunately neglected, are portrayed here in relation not only to their films and their screen personnas but also to their working environment. Sklar gives a real sense of the intensity with which each of them struggled to control his own work in the face of the power of Warner Bros, whose effort to produce socially conscious movies did not prevent it from exploiting its stars. The book also describes the involvement of the three stars with political causes and their response to attacks mounted by powerful right-wing elements against "leftists" in the entertainment industry.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
This is less an account of the lives of these three actors than it is a "biography" of their screen personas. In alternating segments, Sklar (cinema studies, New York Univ.) compares and contrasts the careers of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and John Garfield. They were the archetypes of the "city boy"; i.e., rebellious, individualistic, sometimes antisocial if not criminal, and rooted in modern big cities. All three were nurtured, sometimes mishandled, by Warner Brothers and at times felt they were being exploited. However, they probably could not have achieved the same level of fame at any other studio. Sklar effectively details the evolution of their personas against the background of the momentous social and political events of their era. Sklar's accessible style recommends this for most libraries.
- Roy Liebman, California State Univ. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Roy Liebman, California State Univ. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Solid cultural and political history of film icons James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and John Garfield--and how, through their performances, they achieved their images as explosive, larger-than- life Manhattan city boys. This time out, Sklar has narrowed his focus to three brilliant actors and proves himself a livelier writer than in his good, clear, thoughtful earlier books (Prime-Time America, 1980, etc.). The liveliness doesn't come so much from the Warner Brothers studio history that fills many pages here--since Warner's was the studio for big-city social dramas in the 30's--or from the actors' battles with the studio for fairer wages and stronger scripts. It's more from Sklar's eye for the telling detail in the actors' styles and in variations of style throughout their careers. He takes smoldering Method-actor Garfield's later roles in Force of Evil and We Were Strangers and finds them wanting in ``psychological dimension--the sense that what was being communicated through repression was a complex inner life,'' which at that time was forcefully communicated by up-and-coming Method actors Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. Following Bogart's acting style from juvenile to heavy to his restrained humors as romantic hero, then to comic actor (The African Queen) and to later tries at widening his image, Sklar skillfully contrasts the star's two portraits of paranoid characters, Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, and finds the much- praised Queeg far less complex or convincing than Dobbs, and in fact excruciating. And Cagney ``does not merely inhabit or present [the figure of Tom Bowers in The Public Enemy]...he creates it...His short, quick movements, his clipped diction, his mobile eyes and mouth, are counterpointed with...an almost sultry languor.'' Very rare--a movie book really about acting. Worthwhile and serious. (Forty b&w illustrations--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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