OVP: The Public Enemy (1931)

Film: The Public Enemy (1931)
Stars: James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Edward Woods, Joan Blondell, Donald Cook
Director: William A. Wellman
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Story)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Jean Harlow-click here to learn more about Ms. Harlow (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

After the success of Hell's Angels, Jean Harlow would have been put in pretty much any high profile picture at another studio.  Warner, Fox, they would have quickly found roles for a woman that had been in such favor with the public.  Howard Hughes, though, was not a producer with a great sense for what to do with his contract players, and instead sent Harlow on publicity tours rather than capitalizing on her fame.  Thankfully for Harlow, in 1931 he began sending her out to other studios since he didn't have material for her, and one of the scripts that came across her desk was The Public Enemy.  The film would be a huge success, and would soon get Harlow into the sights of the most important star-making factory of the 1930's, MGM.  But we'll get to that next week-first, The Public Enemy.

(Spoilers Ahead) While Harlow secured top billing on the film, this is a James Cagney picture through-and-through.  The actor plays Tom Powers in the movie, a lowlife hood who is trying to make his way up the ladder in the Chicago crime world.  The film shows him in constant conflict with his brother Mike (Cook), an upstanding war veteran who is trying to find a way to provide for his mother reputably, even though his brother enjoys more success financially than Tom.  The film shows that Tom eventually becomes too big for his britches, and gets involved in a mob war that ends up taking his life.  Along the way, he meets a number of women, including Gwen (Harlow), a woman who "always falls for the bad guy," giving up more reputable options like Kitty (Mae Clarke).

The film is tough to judge in hindsight, because The Public Enemy is one of those movies that helped build a genre.  The gangster picture is in its shadow, and there are scenes of horror & violence that would become quintessential to the mobster pictures of everyone from Scorsese to Coppola in the decades that followed.  By far the most famous scene in the movie is when Tom & Kitty are having breakfast, and annoyed with a comment from her about him not having another woman who could take care of him, Tom shoves a grapefruit into Kitty's face.  Nearly 90 years later, it's still a shocking scene, considering Cagney's nasty twist of the grapefruit and the genuine look of surprise on Clarke's face.  Urban legend differs on whether that was genuine shock.  Clarke would claim in her memoir she knew it was coming, but reputable film figures still claim that it wasn't in the script.  Either way, it's an iconic moment in pre-Code cinema, and by-far what this film is most famous for.  The movie received an Oscar nomination for Best Story, and probably earned it, though there aren't as many inspired, memorable sequences like the grapefruit scene as the picture becomes somewhat repetitive in the back half.

Harlow gets a throwaway part as Gwen, basically just playing the "tart" to the other character's (like Kitty's) more reputable women for Tom to romance.  Unlike Hell's Angels, she doesn't make the most of some of the later, saucier scenes, instead playing them with dryness, as if she doesn't understand the character she's playing.  One wonders if the filmmakers, so obsessed with the impressive feat that Cagney was pulling off as Tom, simply didn't care to push Harlow in this role.  Her final two features for us, though, she's the main event in the movie, and are considered two of her best parts (one of which is in one of her best movies), so hopefully we'll get some of the promise we saw last week with a character that is worthy of her.