Displaying items by tag: Grant Withers

SINNERS’ HOLIDAY

US, 1930, 61 minutes, Black-and-white.

Grant Withers, Evalyn Knapp, James Cagney, Joan Blondel, Lucille La Verne, Noel Madison, Warren Hymer..

Directed by John G. Adolfi.

This film’s main claim to distinction is that it is the first film with James Cagney, immediately alive and energetic as in so many of his roles for the next 50 years (but actually winning his Oscar as song and dance man and composer, George M. Cohen in Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1942).

The film is a supporting feature of 1930, only three years after the introduction of sound, but very effective in its casting, performances and editing. The main star is Grant Withers, a bit over acting here as the hero with a prison past but in love with the daughter of the manager of the Penny Arcade. She is played by character actress Lucille la Verne who had the distinction of being the voice of the wicked stepmother in Disney’s Snow White. Evalyn Knapp Is the pleasant romance interest, while Joan Blondel, as often during her 50 year career, plays the wisecracking girlfriend.

The film is played on the boardwalk, lots of attractions, sideshows, but also clubs and gangsters. Lucille la Verne is the dominating and protective mother of the heroine, of James Cagney and another brother. She has faith in James Cagney who is mixed up with the gangsters, easy-going, lying without any problem, ultimately confronting the main gangster who has just been released from prison, guns pulled and the gangster dying, Cagney considering him in a store, covering up, getting Joan Blondel to corroborate a false alibi, but his sister having watched the whole thing, initially trying to protect him, but when Grant Withers is about to be arrested, her revealing the truth.

And in two years, Cagney would-be Public Enemy, and gangster film star, on screen for the next 50 years.