A Lion Is in the Streets (William Cagney; Warner) follows the jaunty rise of Jimmy Cagney from a backwoods peddler of kitchenware to his near triumph as a statewide peddler of political buncombe.
Based on Adria Locke Langley's 1945 bestseller, the film is laid in an unspecified "cotton-growing state" that is readily identifiable as Huey Long's Louisiana. Demagogue Cagney, married to a Yankee schoolteacher (Barbara Hale) and deep in an affair on the side with a swamp siren (Anne Francis), mounts the first rung of the political ladder by accusing a wealthy cotton-ginner of...
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