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Oct 20, 2020 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay

By 1959, James Cagney and the genre he loved so well were both on their way out. Exploding onto the screen in William Wellman’s 1931 gangster classic The Public Enemy, Cagney would build his breakout role into an iconic career playing fast-talking tough guys and vicious criminals. But thanks to his roots on the vaudeville circuit, Cagney’s true love was musicals. He won his first and only Academy Award for his portrayal of song-and-dance man George M. Cohan in the 1942 hit Yankee Doodle Dandy and as he aged out of gangster roles, he leaned more heavily into films such as The West Point Story, The Seven Little Foys and Love Me or Leave Me. Much like Cagney, musicals were facing changing times as well. The early sixties would see the classic incarnation of the genre go out with a bang, with big hits like West Side Story, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. But the New Hollywood movement of the late sixties and the seventies would transform the genre into something darker and less whimsical, with off-beat hits like Cabaret and All That Jazz.

Never Steal Anything Small would be Cagney’s final musical role and one of his last roles overall; he retired from acting in 1961, with the exception of a role in Ragtime two decades later. It’s an interesting one to go out on, combining his facility for carnival barker comedy with his devilish mean-streak into a film that is a tonal, narrative and political mess, but also pretty fun. Cagney stars as Jake McIlaney, a longshoreman running for union president using every dirty trick in the book. The simplicity of the film’s politics - unions protect the working man from the rich, but require a crook in charge to do so - are simultaneously corny as well as far more left-leaning than anything a mainstream comedy would tackle today. The film opens with a written dedication to the labor movement, combining some surprisingly progressive politics with the corny earnestness of a 1950s crowd-pleaser. That said, the film is bizarrely mean-spirited, even beyond the zaniness of Jake’s campaign schemes which involve trapping his rival in an iron lung, knocking out opposition voters and throwing them down a chute, and force feeding another opponent a bottle of booze to render him insensate. 1959 was apparently a big year for that last one - the same thing happens to Cary Grant early on in North by Northwest.

Worse than all that, the main plot of the film involves Cagney allowing his straight-laced lawyer to take the fall for his crimes so he can woo his attractive young wife, played by singer Shirley Jones, who would win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar the following year for her role in Elmer Gantry. Adding to the general sleaziness of this is the 35 year age difference between Cagney and Jones, generously reduced to a 25 year gap in the film itself. If anyone could pull off playing such a despicable protagonist in such a light-hearted movie, it’s Cagney. Even at the age of 60, his loose-limbed marionette physicality is fully present, his idiosyncratic hand movements and machine gun diction marking him as one of the great screen presences of all time. His rubbery face and ability to be simultaneously good-natured and sinister makes it a shame he never got the play the Joker in a Batman adaptation. His performance as McIlaney synthesizes his classic gangster roles with his musical ones. The script leans into this as well, evoking his past roles; in the 1939 classic The Roaring Twenties, Cagney had a girl Friday named Panama. Here he has another one named Winnipeg played with charm and gusto by Cara Williams.

The oddest part of this musical - beyond a cockamamie plot that, among other things, involves a scene with Cagney in a scuba suit - is how few musical numbers there are in it. Setting aside the title song that plays over the Saul Bass-aping opening credits, there are only three musical numbers in the whole film, two of which really don’t have much to do with the plot. The second one is by far the best, in which Williams tries to convince Cagney to buy her a new Ferrari for the outlandish price of $14,000. Fans of the genre will likely find the movie disappointing, but Cagney completists will find a lot to love.