A LION IS IN THE STREETS: Blu-ray (Warner Bros., 1953) Warner Archive
Warner dynamo, James Cagney, throws
everything but the proverbial kitchen sink into a very Shakespearean-esque
performance, full of sound and fury – signifying nothing, in director,
Raoul Walsh’s A Lion is in the Streets (1953). Alas, it is a rather
forced and pedestrian tale about a little man with a booming desire to exploit
the great unwashed for his own means and be an obnoxious nuisance, railing
against ‘his betters.’ Cagney is peddler-man, Hank Martin (a character loosely
based on Southern politico, Huey Long). Martin is loud. And, superficially at
least, this gets him what he wants – a devoted wife in schoolmarm, Verity Wade
(Barbara Hale as the sweet Polly Purebred), a gangly mistress, Flamingo
McManamee (played with bizarre adolescent venom by Anne Francis), and a
rip-roaring snort against cotton ginny businessman, Robert L. Castleberry IV
(Larry Keating), whom Martin erroneously assumes is cheating the sharecroppers
out of their rightful lolly to fatten his pockets.
A Lion Is in the
Streets was a production personally supervised by Cagney’s brother, William who
also cast another member of the family, sis’ Jeanne in the role of Jennie Brown
– the gal who eventually puts a period to Martin’s bombastic grandstanding. Luther
Davis’ screenplay (very loosely based on a 1945 novel by Adria Locke Langley),
is thinly shaded in references to 1949’s Oscar-winning Best Picture, All the
King's Men. But this is where any similarities between the two movies ends
and an increasing ennui begins to set in. It isn’t that Cagney falters in his
performance, or that the resultant hour-and-a-half does not pass effortlessly,
splashed in garish hues of Technicolor, expertly lensed by cinematographer,
Harry Stradling. Rather, it is that a little of Cagney goes an awfully long way
and there is just too much Cagney here to go around. Hank Martin is a windbag,
his noisy diatribes dominating to the point of abject tedium. There are no
silent – even quiescent – respites to pause and appreciate the otherwise
affecting turn Cagney offers in boatloads of bombast. Rather, the movie devolves
into one tiresome assault on the senses as Cagney’s Martin, like a runt heifer masquerading
as a blue-ribbon Holstein, chews up, then regurgitates the scenery until there
is nothing left to digest but Martin’s enterprising demand to be liked, just
because he says so.
Cagney’s Martin is not charismatic.
He is a boor with a brashness that wears out its welcome almost from the moment
he sets out to conquer an opportunity for greatness he barely understands. A
Lion is in the Streets opens with that proud-mane Leo roaring at the foot
of the Lincoln Memorial. We meet Hank Martin in a torrential downpour, carrying
his wares on his back as he picks up a poor girl, fallen in the mud and carries
her into the classroom of schoolteacher, Verity Wade. With little time to
waste, the naïve Verity and Martin are wed. Martin takes his new bride to the
stately abode of his lawyer/friend, Jules Bolduc (Warner Anderson) – then, to
his own dilapidated shanty. Ashamed of his digs, Martin cajoles the local
rabble into a sort of bridal house-cleaning, confiding in Verity that anyone
can be made to do anything if the right heartstrings are plucked on cue; a
foreshadowing of Martin’s brewing desires to manipulate the masses to become ‘a
somebody’ in these backwater parts. The real problem here is Martin’s grasp
exceeds his reach and, secretly, he knows it. Martin picks a fight with local
cotton gin owner, Robert Castleberry – Jules’ godfather – accusing him of
shortchanging the sharecroppers in their hard-won harvests of cotton. Castleberry
forewarns he will swear out a warrant for Martin’s arrest on a charge of
slander. Martin practically goads him into following through on this threat in
Jules and Verity’s presence.
Fleeing jurisdiction, Martin and
Verity attempt to find solace in the bayou with the Brown family, Jeb (John
McIntire) and Jennie, and Spurge McManamee (Lon Chaney Jr.). Problem, Martin
promised Spurge’s pert and pubescent daughter, Flamingo he would one day marry
her. Realizing Martin has wed Verity instead, Flamingo flies into an adolescent
rage, humiliating Spurge. Forcing Flamingo to apologize, this briefly
reconciled entourage embarks on two separate skiffs for an undisclosed rendezvous.
But Flamingo, now alone with Verity, seizes the opportunity to steer her skiff
into a steamy grotto populated by alligators, overturning the boat in an
attempt to murder her rival. Mercifully, Verity swims ashore and keeps the alligators
at bay, sustaining a cracked rib and wounded shoulder in the process. The
tragedy here is that Martin has already made promises he cannot keep, either to
Flamingo or his wife. After Martin sends Verity home to recover, he and
Flamingo become lovers. Now, Martin sets about to prove Castleberry is a crook.
Alas, when Martin exposes that the weights used by Castleberry’s overseer,
Frank (Frank McHugh) to determine the price of cotton are seriously inaccurate,
chaos ensues between Castleberry’s men and the mob Martin has assembled to keep
them at bay. In the ensuing struggle, Deputy Wilbur Lewis (William 'Bill'
Phillips) is shot and killed by Jeb Brown. To avoid rabble-rousing publicity,
Castleberry has Jeb's trial repeatedly postponed.
Enter, shady powerbroker, Guy Polli
(Onslow Stevens) who offers Martin a means to get the case on the docket. Castleberry’s manager, Samuel T. Beach (James
Millican) mortally wounds Jeb in his cell as he awaits trial. Determined at all
costs to wreck Castleberry, Hank persuades the fast-fading Jeb to appear in
court anyway. Jeb dramatically expires in the courtroom, leaving Martin to
persuade the jury of his innocence, declared posthumously before the judge
(Charles Meredith) by the jury’s foreperson. The
scandal and Martin’s subsequent grandstanding forces Castleberry to sell his holdings
to Polli, enabling Martin to launch his campaign for governor. The wrinkle:
Martin knows it was Beach, not Castleberry who cheated the sharecroppers and
murdered Jeb. But his campaign – nee, his reputation – has been built on Castleberry’s
ruin. To admit he was wrong now would derail Martin’s own political
aspirations. Hence, he goes on with the charade.
As another torrential downpour
prevents the rural folk from voting, Martin now appeals to Polli to buy him the
necessary votes in the city precincts he controls in exchange for a signed
affidavit stating Beach was with him at the time Jeb was murdered as Beach’s
conviction would otherwise destroy Polli’s investment. The election is a tie
and Martin, knowing the judiciary is in the tank for Governor Charles Snowden
(Fay Roope) now attempts to incite a violent uprising amongst his poor
constituents to march upon the capital, demanding Martin as their victor. Jules
intervenes with definitive proof Beach murdered Jeb. Alas, the mob, including Jeb’s
wife, Jeannie, refuse to believe this until Verity, newly to have delivered
Martin a baby girl, confirms Jules’ findings to be true. An enraged Jeannie guns down Martin with her
husband’s double-barrel shotgun. As Martin expires in Verity’s arms, he confides,
the mob is smarter than he ever gave them credit. The lion at the foot of the
Lincoln Memorial rolls over and dies as the epitaph appears, “You can fool
some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time. But
you can’t fool all of the people all of the time!”
A Lion is in the
Streets was meant to reinvigorate Cagney’s trademarked presence at the studio,
then on the wane. Cagney, a spry 54 – but looking it – is ill at ease playing
opposite the more youthful Barbara Hale (23 years his junior) and Anne Francis
(31 years younger than he). At one point, Hale’s Verity discloses in Martin her
belief he is no gangster – a laughable moment, since nearly all of Cagney’s tenure
at Warner Bros. was built upon characterizations to the contrary as one of the
studio’s most celebrated thugs in their murderer’s row. William Cagney
Productions paid $250,000 for the rights to produce this film – the last indie venture
and the final collaboration between James Cagney and director, Raoul Walsh. It
also ended Cagney’s eleven-picture working relationship with co-star, Frank
McHugh, begun in 1932. A Lion is in the Streets badly suffers from Wiard
Ihnen’s stagnant, in-house production design. Although some location work was
done to mimic the Florida bayou, the rest is an assemblage of backdrops, rear
projection and free-standing sets built for other movies on the Warner backlot.
No attempt has been made to convince us otherwise. The result is a sort of
stilted embalming almost from the moment the main titles, with Franz Waxman’s
nondescript orchestral arrangement, a very conventional piece of underscore, running
counterintuitive to the earthier elements in the storytelling.
A Lion is in the
Streets was not a hit for Cagney or the studio and generally received negative
reviews, judged as a wan ghost flower to All The King’s Men, while charging
Cagney’s performance as a ‘shallower’, ‘ranting imitation of political psychosis’.
The central difficulty, however, is that at barely an hour-and-a-half, the
picture has no time to establish any of the subtler nuances that might have
made it a more engaging piece of entertainment. Martin and Verity’s whirlwind romance
is nonexistent. They meet ‘cute’ in the classroom for barely three minutes after
which Martin departs in the rain, singing about having met the girl he will
marry. And ‘boom’ – in the next scene Verity and Martin are wed and off to his
shack in the sticks. The emphasis on Cagney’s caustic charm to carry Martin’s
meddlesome rage weighs the picture down instead of invigorating it. And Cagney
has trouble sustaining a Southern drawl. In some scenes it’s there, and in
others, he seems to be falling back on his early thirties’ grit and gall to
carry Martin across the threshold as a bitterly beguiled man of the people. It does not work and the movie ends as a whimper
rather than a winner.
The Warner
Archive (WAC) delivers the goods, mostly, in another hi-def remastering effort
that has taken years off the old careworn Technicolor elements. A few brief
inserts appear as though authored from less than stellar surviving materials,
with a sudden lapse in overall density and anemic contrast to boot. But, on the
whole, this 1080p Blu-ray gets the gold star. Colors are robust. Flesh tones
teeter toward an orangey cast. Fine detail is exceptionally realized, again –
with a few minor exceptions. Contrast is admirably achieved. The 2.0 DTS mono
is adequate for this dialogue-driven movie. Apart from a cartoon and theatrical
trailer, there are NO extras. Bottom line: A Lion is in the Streets is
not an exceptional movie in the Warner Bros. pantheon. Nor does it represent
the finest in Cagney’s achievements at that studio – many of which have yet to
materialize on Blu-ray via WAC. It is rather odd that this is one of the movies
chosen to mark the month in which Warner Bros. – currently celebrating its 100th
anniversary – became a studio, as there remains a colossal embarrassment of
riches that would have better sufficed: Captain Blood, The Roaring Twenties,
Johnny Belinda, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Humoresque, My Reputation, Old
Acquaintance, The Man Who Came To Dinner, among them. The Blu-ray here is,
of course, solid and up to WAC’s usual standards. Judge and buy accordingly.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
2
VIDEO/AUDIO
4
EXTRAS
0
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