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| Lobby Card for HE WAS HER MAN Year: 1934 |
James Cagney dime-novel-style programmer has his character Flicker Hayes, newly released from prison,
dangerously double-crossing the hoods who'd double-crossed him as two more goons plan to keep on
his trail...
Beginning in San Fransisco where he meets Joan Blondell, as a prostitute
setting her mind on marrying a simple fisherman in a John Steinbeck
Monterrey style seaside town. She has a seemingly benign passenger
in Cagney's Hayes, both hiding out in completely different ways. Cagney's surprisingly soft-spoken here, but not nearly as much as dutiful
Victor Jory as the fisherman who doesn't
care about Blondell's racy past. This is merely a distraction to Cagney's
story that, in itself, distracts from what the movie, HE WAS HER MAN, is
leading to — with armed goons on the way, it doesn't look likely he'll
survive...
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| Lobby Card for HE WAS HER MAN Rating: ***1/2 |
Veteran
(even at that time) character-actor Frank Craven fits nicely into the
mellow pre-Noir — in one of Cagney's more artistic ventures at the end
of the decade, CITY FOR CONQUEST, he played a happy-go-lucky bum who
provides the roman chorus narration — here he's
a con man "rat" with a trick up his sleeve, ultimately at Cagney's expense: our previously selfish crook is headed toward a crossroad since Blondell loves him madly.
The fishing village connected to
the passage seaward is like a dream milieu to the first early Cagney
programmer that's more of a crime-related fable than his usual crook and/or con artist heist thriller. What it lacks in edgy excitement or the usual hyperactive,
spontaneous, sarcastic humor is made up for within the creative storyline in this
page-turning melodrama with a more poetic than satisfying, Noir-esque
conclusion.
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| James Cagney in the opening credits of HE WAS HER MAN |
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| Joan Blondell in the opening credits of HE WAS HER MAN |
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| James Cagney and Joan Blondell in HE WAS HER MAN |
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| James Cagney as Flicker Hayes in HE WAS HER MAN |
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| James Cagney and Victor Jory in HE WAS HER MAN |
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| James Cagney and Sarah Padden in HE WAS HER MAN |
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| James Cagney and Joan Blondell in HE WAS HER MAN |
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| James Cagney and Joan Blondell in HE WAS HER MAN |
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