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Public Enemy

Crime

Decade 1930

1931

Warner Brothers

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022286

James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Edward Woods

William A. Wellman

The Public Enemy (Warner Brothers, 1931). One Sheet (27 X 41) Style B. , The screen play for this classic film, which made a star of James Cagney and gave Warner Brothers another massive hit in their series of social problem films - a series inaugurated with the release of Little Caesar earlier in 1931 - was based on an unpublished work entitled Beer and Blood by John Bright, one of the screenwriters who worked on the picture. Brights story revolves around real-life Chicago gangster Hymie Weiss, who succeeded the assassinated North Side kingpin Dion OBanion, and was himself gunned down by hitmen from the South Side mob run by Johnny Torrio and Al Capone. In The Public Enemy, Tom Powers (Cagney) follows a similar trajectory to that of Weiss, in his meteoric rise and subsequent fall at the hands of the very system he helped to build. America in the early 1930s was a country in turmoil. At the lowest point of the Great Depression, audiences had little patience for wealthy and virtuous heroes who had little to do with the realities of bread lines, poverty, Hoovervilles, and unemployment. As such, anti-heroes like Tom Powers, who follows the code that all who live within the law are suckers, were uniquely fascinating to audiences who saw themselves as increasingly powerless in the face of reckless government and oppressive law enforcement. If they themselves could not take the law into their own hands, they could live such a dream vicariously through Cagney and other silver-screen gangsters. Unlike such slick and well-groomed actors as Lew Ayres and Ricardo Cortez, whose tough guy characters never seemed to quite ring true, Cagneys real-life streetwise persona brought a sense of electrifying reality to the characters he played, an electricity that caught on with Depression Era viewers. The result was one of the most important and indelible films of the decade. Still grittily satisfying, it set the standard for virtually all gangster pictures to come. As such, it

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