About Me
The opening scene pans and dissolves across views of 1909 (pre-Prohibition) Chicago. After images of a congested downtown area, there are views of the stockyard, the blast of a factory whistle, a brewery, crowded and dirty streets, saloons, and a Salvation Army marching band. In the brewery which plays a central role in the neighborhood, beer flows freely into large beer mugs, and buckets. Wooden barrels of beer are hauled by a horse-drawn wagon, and beer is hand-carried (in pails hanging from a long plank) from a saloon across the busy street.
Exposed to this sordid scene of life on the South Side of Chicago are two poor Irish boys: Tom Powers with his neighborhood friend Matt Doyle. Both boys act mischievously in a department store, and mean Tommy enjoys playing sadistic tricks on roller-skating Molly Doyle (Rita Flynn), Matt's sister and one of the neighborhood girls. She explicity states his well-known reputation: "You're the meanest boy in town...(Jail) That's where you'll be some day, Tom Powers!"
Tom is the son of a policeman, Officer Powers - a harsh, abusive father who often uses a wide leather razor strop to discipline his near-delinquent offspring. As Tom is belted across his behind by his half-uniform attired father, he resists crying and shedding tears, while maintaining a tough guy, hard attitude. At an early age, both boys turn to petty thievery and shoplifting to escape the drudgery of lower class life - and as a result of their upbringing and environment. They fence stolen items (watches) at a so-called boys' club, the Red Oaks Club (a glorified pool hall) through sinister, Fagin-like, piano-playing "Putty-Nose" - their mentor in the ways of crime. Other boys aimlessly loaf and lounge around at the club, or listen to Putty Nose playing dirty songs.
As they grow up, by 1915, they cross the same paths, but now they are graduating to more advanced, young-adult pursuits. [Cagney's entrance into the club is memorable - he spits, struts in, and tips his hat forward.] In contrast, Tom's straight, uptight brother Mike (Donald Cook) works as a street car conductor during the day and goes to school at night, "learnin' how to be poor," according to Tom. Putty Nose offers Tom and Matt a "sweet" opportunity - a larger, more profitable heist and crime. His offer is the gun-wielding armed robbery of a fur warehouse. As the camera pans backward, a group of young thugs sit on Putty Nose's bed (with Tom's feet not even touching the floor) listening to the plan. Putty Nose presents both Tom and Matt with guns: "A Christmas present from Santa Claus, with best wishes for a prosperous New Year."
During the robbery of the Northwestern Fur Trading Company, an inexperienced and shaky Tom is startled by the sight of a huge stuffed bear's head. He panics and impulsively fires several shots into it. A policeman, who has been alerted by the gunfire, shoots and kills one of the thieves on the street by the getaway vehicle. The robbers see their buddy's corpse lying on the dark street. To escape, they open a window and slide down a rain pipe to the street where Tom retaliates and shoots (off-screen) the police officer. After running back to the club, they find that two-timing Putty Nose has treacherously deserted them and "beat it." They are advised: "You'd better lay low for a while. The heat's on." [The closest Tom ever comes to saying "You dirty rat" (one of Cagney's fictional famous lines) is "Why, that dirty, no-good, yellow-bellied stool!"] He resolves to seek revenge: "I'm gonna give it to that Putty Nose right in the head the first time I see him."
By 1917, the US enters the Great War, and Tom and Matt are working as truck drivers. They seek other opportunities and join up with wheeler-dealer saloon owner Patrick J. "Paddy" Ryan (Robert Emmett O'Connor), whose voice of wisdom appeals to them. The fact of elder son Mike's noble enlistment in the war in Europe as a Marine upsets Ma Powers (Beryl Mercer), and she begs younger son Tommy not to abandon her: "Tommy, promise me you won't go. You're just a baby!" Since his father has died, the task of raising Tom has fallen to his pathetic, clinging mother and to his respectable brother.
Following the war in 1920, on the eve of Prohibition, the storeowner of the Family Liquor Store has painted a sign on his window: "Owing to Prohibition, Our Entire Stock Must Be Sold Before Midnight." The liquor store shelves are emptied as staggering party-goers on foot stock up with brown paper-wrapped packages. Some of the purchases fall to the ground and smash on the sidewalk. People load up a limousine and a flower delivery van with bottles. Even a baby carriage is filled with booze, displacing the infant of a young couple.
In the next remarkable scene, the potato chip scene at Paddy's bar counter, Paddy informally tells Tom and Matt that the coming of Prohibition will bring other financial benefits - multi-million dollar profits for illegal bootleggers. As Tom and Matt quietly lean against the counter, drinking coffee and eating food, Paddy (in a zooming closeup) quickly and greedily shoves handfuls of potato chips into his mouth, with the excess crumbling out, as he lures them into the lucrative liquor business. Paddy wants them to keep on the look-out for federal stashes of impounded liquor that can be stolen:
In their next gasoline "delivery" job to a U.S. Bonded Warehouse, Tom and Matt actually drain beer from impounded beer barrels into their gasoline tank, and soon share a generous cut of the profitable proceeds. Paddy encouragingly prods them: "I'll make big shots out of you yet." After the two enterprising young men acquire new-found wealth, they outfit themselves with smart-looking, tailor-made clothes - amorally enjoying life's pleasures. With fast money comes a flashy roadster car and the fast life, and they celebrate at an extravagant swanky nightclub. As they enter, a brass orchestra plays Toot Toot Tootsie, and they soon find themselves dancing with attractive fast women: Matt with blonde floozy Mamie (Joan Blondell) and Tom with Kitty (Mae Clarke).
The two acquire a new crime boss named Samuel "Nails" Nathan (Leslie Fenton), who has plans to manufacture illegal booze (through the Lehman Brewing Company) and distribute it. Tom and Matt, as feared criminals, are "the official signers and sealers," forcing and terrifying speakeasy owners into buying their illegal booze (rather than from rival competitor Schemer Burns), as Nathan explains to them:
When Tom's brother Mike returns home as a wounded veteran of World War I, Mike learns from Officer Pat Burke (Robert E. Homans) that Tom has moved out of the house and is "runnin' around with a couple of gals at the Washington Arms Hotel. Well, the worst part of it is that he's been lyin' to his mother. He's leavin' her think that he's made an honest success. Why, sure it's only a question of time when he's gonna be caught...Beer, bootlegging, he's one of Paddy Ryan's gang...A wicked business." Tom's mother is naively unaware of her son's criminal activities.
For the welcome home dinner, Tom and Matt thoughtlessly contribute a huge keg of beer for the occasion and place it in a central, conspicuous place on the dinner table where it blocks the characters' views of each other. Mike, who appears emotionally impaired by his war wounds, refuses to share in the beer drinking (even Ma has a beer). In an outburst, Mike criticizes his brother's illicit activities during the "swell celebration": As Tom departs, he tells his good-hearted mother to send his clothes (after laundering) to the Washington Arms Hotel, where he has moved into an apartment with Matt and his girlfriend.
In one of the most vividly remembered and vicious scenes in film history, the breakfast scene in Tom's apartment the next morning, he walks sleepily to the breakfast table in his striped pajamas. He is in a foul mood, bored, grouchy and irritable after a demanding phone conversation with Nails Nathan. (Matt and Mamie can be heard dallying in bed in the adjoining room.) In contrast, Tom has grown tired of his relationship with moll girlfriend Kitty. At the table, she greets him without a smile. He asks her for a beer for breakfast and she talks back: He looks down, makes a nasty grimace, and then impulsively picks up a grapefruit half from his plate and contemptuously pushes it into her face to end their relationship. She looks down, physically and painfully hurt and emotionally embarrassed by his crudeness. It is one of the single-most cruel acts ever depicted in a film. His life of crime has made him cruel and hardened.
As they drive by in their open roadster down Michigan Avenue, Tom finds a new girlfriend walking down the street. She is a flashy and glamorous but mysteriously cool blonde named Gwen Allen (Jean Harlow). She hesitates about entering his car and his offer of a ride: "I'm not accustomed to riding with, uh, strangers." Tom assures her: "We're not gonna be strangers." In the back seat, they share their first discussion: After they drop her off at her destination, she asks for Tom's phone number. [Jean Harlow's other sensational film at the time, Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels (1930), was released only a few months earlier.]
In a celebration at a nightclub for Matt's marriage to Mamie, attended by natily-attired gang members, Tom escorts his new voluptuous girlfriend Gwen. Matt tells Mamie that Tom "ain't the marryin' kind." During the party, Tom spots his former, double-crossing crime guide "Putty Nose," and is goaded on by Nails to show his toughness: "He thinks you're soft." Matt and Tom excuse themselves "for a little job" and Tom pulls his pal away from Mamie so they can trail Putty Nose in the dark shadows to his apartment. They offer their boyhood mentor, who taught them how to "cheat, steal, and kill," an ironic compliment: Then, in a cold-hearted murder scene to settle the double-cross from the past, after Tom cruelly plays cat-and-mouse with his prey, Putty Nose pleads for his life: "I don't wanna die." On his knees, he begs for Matt to protect him: "I'll do anything for ya from now on. Ain't ya got a heart, Mattie boy? Don't you remember how I used to play for ya, and didn't I always stick up for ya? I ain't got this comin'. Please, Matt. Matt, don't let him. Don't. I ain't a bad fellow, really." Putty Nose attempts to bring back boyhood memories by moving to the piano and playing one of the songs they used to laugh at in the club. Offscreen, Tom sadistically murders Putty Nose at point-blank range with two shots at the keyboard, all the while with a big smile on his face. Mute from the side, Matt observes helplessly with a stunned look as Putty Nose's body is heard collapsing on discordant piano keys.
Later, in a visit to his mother in her kitchen, Tommy offers her a thick wad of bills, but she refuses: "Mike wouldn't like it." From behind, Mike appears, telling his brother to leave and never again to offer "blood money" to them: As icy-cool Gwen flamboyantly lounges in expensive clothes in her apartment at The Congress Hotel, Tom admits that he first thought she was "on the make" and "different" from the kind of girls he was used to. He proposes that since they are mis-matched romantically, and he feels destined to never have her, his frustration makes him announce his decision to leave her: In a steamy, seductive love scene, to the tune of I Surrender Dear on the radio, Gwen mothers him and tells him why she is attracted to him: Tom is interrupted, at this significant point in his life, by Matt's intrusion at the door. He is informed that "Nails" Nathan has been accidentally thrown by his horse in the park and killed - his head kicked in. Tom immediately leaves Gwen standing poised at the door - forever. She slowly walks back into the room and shatters a glass in the fireplace. In a chilling scene following the funeral, a tux-attired Tom buys the spirited horse Rajah (the "bad animal - terrible, terrible," according to the stable man) for its value of $1,000 and then heartlessly executes the horse dead in its stall, to avenge the fatal fall of their beloved boss. The savage act is heard off-screen. Gang warfares heat up - "the death of 'Nails' Nathan is said to have weakened the mob headed by Paddy Ryan Patrick J. Ryan's Bar is bombed by a rival gangster roadster that passes by, and the brewery is torched. Although Paddy believes: "They've got us on the run," Tom barks: "Not me. I ain't runnin'. I ain't yella." Paddy orders all the gang members to go into hiding: "I'm gonna need you. And you won't be no good to me when you're in the cemetery. Now I've got to have a couple of days to get the boys lined up again. When I'm done with that, you're gonna be where nobody knows to find ya except me."
In their new hideout where they are forced to remain, Paddy confiscates all their guns and money: "Come on, shower down...This won't be for long, boys. I'll have the mob lined up again in a couple of days." They are to be kept "comfortable" (with drinks and food) by an aging whore named Jane (Mia Marvin). An ominous camera angle captures an underneath shot of Paddy's car leaving the hideaway. An informant reveals their location to a rival gang by telephone. Later that evening, Tom peers through an illuminated opening in a black curtain, viewing a noisy coal delivery outdoors (sounding like machine-gun fire). Schemer's thugs set up a machine gun ambush nest in a second-story window directly across the street. In a groggy, drunken stupor, Tommy is seduced by Jane when she puts him to bed. As she loosens his clothes, she cooes at him and pampers him in a motherly fashion: The next morning at breakfast while serving him black coffee, Jane alludes to her seduction of him the previous night:Disgusted with her deceitfulness, he hatefully slaps her, and then marches out of the apartment to go home, thereby defying Paddy's orders. He tells Matt: "I don't care what Paddy said. I'm gettin' out of this dump!" As they both leave the building, the coal delivery noise startles them while the machine-gun from across the street traces their steps, from the rival gang's point of view. When they get to the edge of the building, long-time partner Matt - who has followed Tom into the street - is viciously gunned down.
Foreshadowing his own death and with time running out, Tommy seeks to avenge his friend's death. He robs two .38 calibre pistols from a pawnshop and marches heavily armed to the Western Chemical Company, the headquarters of the rival Schemer Burns gang. Standing in the pouring rain on a rain-swept street, he watches the gangsters assembling inside.
In a horrific, climactic shoot-out scene in which Tom slaughters and eliminates his rival gang, the camera remains on the outside of the building as a barrage of shots and moaning screams of the wounded and dying are heard from inside. He single-handedly (but suicidally) manages to kill or seriously wound most of his enemy rivals, but he is also shot and wounded. He emerges from the building, stumbling, and then falling face down in a rain gutter on the torrential rain-soaked street. [The bizarre scene oddly prefigures Gene Kelly's joyous Singin' in the Rain (1952) number.] He tosses his two guns through the building's windows. From a low-camera angle, he again reels into the gutter, coughing and bleeding from a head wound. He utters an epitaph-like set of memorable words and ends up in a drain:
Taken to an emergency hospital to recover, Tom is immobile, and bandaged from head to toe on a hospital bed. There, he is reconciled with his brother and mother. He apologizes to Mike and makes peace with him to renew their friendship: "Just sorry, you know." His mother clasps his hand - "so happy" that Tom is penitent - a lost child that will bring the family together again: "You're my baby." Affectionately, he gives her a soft fist tap to her chin. He promises her that he will come home - to stay: "Sure, coming home. If I can ever get out of here." Ma Powers is happy once more that he has apparently decided to go straight: "Both my boys back, all of us together again. I'm almost glad this happened." [Tommy's 'mamma's-boy' complex is more evident in Cagney's later gangster film, White Heat (1949).]
Paddy reports to Mike that Tom was helplessly kidnapped by his rivals from the hospital, and then resolves: "I'll bring Tom back if it's the last thing I do...I sent word to Burns that if he'd bring Tom back here tonight, I'd, I'd quit the racket. He could have it all. I'd leave town and I won't come back...It's a sweet offer."
The song, I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles, plays on the Victrola phonograph when a phone call to the Powers home reports that Tommy is coming home. His mother cheerfully goes upstairs and hums to herself as she prepares his room for his home-coming: "Oh, it's wonderful. I'll get his room ready. I knew my baby would come home."
In the rival gang's gruesome plan, Tommy's bullet-ridden, rope- and blanket-wrapped 'mummified' corpse/body is gift-delivered by a knock on the door. When Mike answers the front door, Tommy appears alive, bound from head to foot except for his exposed, bandaged and bloody face. It is the film's final memorable bone-chilling image - he tetter-totters on the doorstep, and then his mummy-body falls and crashes with a dull thud - face-first onto the floor. The needle on the revolving phonograph record becomes stuck, sounding like a heart-beat.
Mike examines the body of his brother - and then stares into the camera. Filmed from ground level and from the waist-down, he slowly and steadily walks toward the stairs in the interior of the house, presumably to tell Ma. The needle reaches the end of the record. The film's somber message appears over the image:
