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One of the busiest men in Hollywood last week was James ("Jimmy") Cagney, No. 1 portrayer of cinema toughs. The sympathy for the underdog which Actor Cagney developed in his youth on Manhattan's East Side was given point and direction by the late, crusading Lincoln Steffens. Long famed as one of Hollywood's brightest Pinks, Jimmy Cagney's public deeds have been nothing more daring than an occasional contribution to strikers and active leadership in the Screen Actors' Guild. But last week he and such other notably social-conscious cinemactors as Fredric March, Chester Morris, Franchot Tone, Joan Crawford, Jean Muir and Edward Arnold were debating something really big—a strike of the Guild which would shut every film studio down tight. While a committee headed by President Robert Montgomery negotiated the Guild's demands with representatives of producers, a hundred or more stars gathered nightly at the homes of March, Morris and Cagney to talk strike. Asking nothing for themselves, the Guild's 1,100 high-salaried contract players were out to improve the lot of their 4,500 low-paid associates—extras and bit-players getting less than $250 per week. For them it demanded a union shop, steadier work and better working conditions, minimum pay upped from a current low of $3.20, abolition of the Call Bureau.*
Every night producers and Guild officers talked until 2 or 3 a. m. While her husband, Franchot Tone, backed up President Montgomery with telling arguments, Second Vice President Joan Crawford knitted away like a Madam Defarge, occasionally stiffening the men's backbones with her cry: "We strike!" Meantime the Guild's senior members were being polled, voting overwhelmingly for a strike if negotiations broke down. In prospect was the extraordinary spectacle of the cinema's top celebrities marching in picket lines outside studios and theatres. Stuntmen and cowboy actors prepared to organize a troop of 300 horsemen for picketing, or for charges on producers if required.
At week's end negotiations were still deadlocked when an I.A.T.S.E. official telephoned the Guild's Founder-Secretary Kenneth Thomson, promised to call a sympathetic walkout of his 30,000 members if the Guild struck. At that, the producers' representatives knuckled under. On behalf of RKO, Paramount, MGM, Columbia, Universal and Twentieth Century-Fox, Twentieth Century's Chairman Joseph M. Schenck and MGM's Vice President Louis B. Mayer squeezed their signatures at the bottom of an agreement to the Guild's demands, scribbled on a sheet of foolscap. Prime points were granting of a Guild shop (virtually closed shop), extras' pay upped 10% with a null minimum, overtime pay for players in the lower brackets, revision of the Call Bureau.