Johnny Come Lately (United Artists). When Actor James and Producer William Cagney quit Warner Bros., a year ago last March, and sank $750,000 in a new, independent production, plenty of Hollywood's bigwigs wished them all the bad luck in the world. In trade jargon, the Cagney brothers were dealing "a blow to the industry." If they succeeded, there were plenty of other stars, directors, writers and producers itching to try their own hands at independent production. And not even their worst wishers doubted that the Cagneys would succeed.
The Cagneys' first independent film suggests that their worst wishers were dead right. Johnny Come Lately stars the man who was a top Warner's moneymaker in a role he likes and to which he gives everything he has. It introduces to the screen Grace (Kind Lady) George, luminous in a role which should so endear her to U.S. cinemaudiences that she may well become overnight on the screen what she has been for years on Broadway — the official quintessence of elderly? femininity. The film it self is rich nostalgic fare, elegantly dished out, about small-town politics at the turn of the century.
The story, which manages to be popular and literate at the same time, tells of the efforts of a gallant old lady of reduced means (Grace George) to fight the local political octopus (Edward McNamara) through her newspaper. It also reports the help she gets, in dire extremity, from a hobo ex-journalist (James Gagney). En-route to victory the hobo develops an interest in the old lady's niece (Marjorie Lord), makes a useful friend of the whooping, plume-clad matron of the local sin hall (Marjorie Main), and punches his way through enough physical obstruction to appease those cinemaddicts who like James Cagney chiefly for his fleet footwork and persuasive paws. As a period document, Johnny Come Lately bogs down neither in history nor documentation. Its historicity is chiefly an excuse for an unusual amount of pleasure in human beings, their relationships, the clothes they wore, the homes they lived in.
These pleasures would have been all but impossible to manufacture in any of the large studios, for they are given their warmth and life by the pleasure that the Cagneys' large cast and the whole production outfit obviously took in doing a job as they wanted to do it. Bit players who have tried creditably for years to walk in shoes that pinched them show themselves in this picture as the very competent actors they always were: there has seldom been as good a cinematic gallery of U.S. small-town types. Grace George seems effortlessly to have learned what so many transplanted Broadway actors ache over —how to project her touching elegance in a medium new to her.