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The proletarian music of his voice was also perfectly matched to the trademark settings of the Warner films of the 1930s--the working world, where it was a struggle to keep a firm footing, and the underworld that waited for those who wavered and fell. By the end of his first few months in pictures, Cagney had made a name for himself with The Public Enemy. It was the movie in which he concluded the most famous breakfast scene in cinema history by squashing a grapefruit in Actress Mae Clarke's kisser.
Throughout the '30s, Cagney enjoyed stardom in a series of feisty, defiantly urban parts: a street-smart swindler in Blonde Crazy (1931), a slum-bred cop in G-Men (1935), a ruined bootlegger in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). By late in the decade he was one of the highest-paid actors in the country, a status he achieved partly by walking out repeatedly on Warners to press for higher pay and protest its grueling working conditions and bumper-to-bumper production schedule. For all his fame, Cagney had little taste for Hollywood night life. He liked best the company of a permanent band of actor buddies, including Pat O'Brien, Spencer Tracy, Ralph Bellamy and Frank McHugh. In private he could be shy and gentle. O'Brien called him a "faraway fella."
Cagney's pugnacious, straight-from-the-shoulder style and his genuine modesty ("I was always a journeyman actor," he once said) belied both his professionalism and his artistic versatility. He could portray protean Actor Lon Chaney in the film biography Man of a Thousand Faces as easily as the irascible ship's captain in Mister Roberts. His performance as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream inspired Director Max Reinhardt to label him the "best actor in Hollywood." White Heat contains a typical bit of Cagney , business, less a trick than a nuance. He had the killer Cody Jarrett sit, for just a second, in his mother's lap. It was a gesture worth pages of exposition, mined from the same instinct that made Cagney what he would never admit he was: a consummate actor.
His own favorite film was Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), a black-and-white musical biography of George M. Cohan that seemed to pop into color whenever Cagney laced on his tap shoes. "Once a song-and-dance man, always a song-and- dance man," said Cagney, who won his only Academy Award for the role. "Those few words tell as much about me professionally as there is to tell."
He used the fast-changing rhythms of a hoofer to orchestrate a characterization. Like all the best actors, he always made it look easy. Like Spencer Tracy, he seemed a natural force: everything seemed to flow out without calculation. Tracy, however, made chamber music; Cagney was a marching band. It is probably this particular blend of effortlessness and theatricality that moved Orson Welles to marvel, "You're supposed to be scaled down and subtle in movie acting. But look at Cagney--he's big. Everything he does is big, and it works."
Cagney's own acting technique was not concerned with size or scale. "Want some advice from the old man?" he once inquired of a desperate newcomer. "Walk in, plant yourself, look the other fellow in the eye and tell the truth." That's big.