BEFORE: I was e-mailing someone at the Kansas City Film Festival yesterday, and I asked about BBQ. If you want to talk about BBQ, talk to someone from KC. Or Texas. And of course that got me hungry for BBQ today, but we just went out for BBQ last Wednesday, and I had some BBQ chicken for lunch Tuesday. So I was going to pass, but then my boss had a lunch meeting at a midtown BBQ place, and I needed to drop something off there for him, so I figured it was fate.
However, when I looked at their menu, there were no good combo platters! What kind of self-respecting BBQ restaurant doesn't offer me the opportunity to order three meats together, along with 2 sides and cornbread! Perhaps I've become a BBQ snob, but I just couldn't resign myself to ordering just one type of meat from a BBQ restaurant. All of the places I frequent - Hill Country and Virgil's in Manhattan, Mabel's Smokehouse in Brooklyn, and Smokin' Al's and Famous Dave's on Long Island - all offer similar combo deals. They're all so good, I can't go backwards on this, so I bailed on BBQ today, I believe in taking a stand and making a point with my purchasing power.
Jeez, even the Kansas City BBQ in San Diego and the Dallas BBQ chain here in NYC let me order combos. Get with the program already! I won't say the name of the offending restaurant, but until they can offer me an appropriate combination of meats and sides, they're out of the rotation. One must have standards, after all.
Linking from "The Big Heat", Glenn Ford was also in "The Redhead and the Cowboy" with Edmond O'Brien.
THE PLOT: A psychopathic criminal with a mother complex makes a daring break from prison and leads his old gang in a chemical plant payroll heist.
AFTER: I haven't seen many (OK, any) James Cagney movies, so I didn't really know what to expect with this one. He seems to have this big mythology built up around him, and since he's a relatively small guy, his character here comes off like a Napoleon of crime. Adding in the "mama's boy" dynamic, I just sort of feel like he's always over-compensating or something. When you toss in these mysterious headaches, however, things got more confusing - they said something about how they were a cry for attention when he was a small boy, but then they later became real? Is that even a thing? An ironic twist of fate, or a medical anomaly?
The story was relatively straightforward, the mail train robbery reminded me of a similar sequence in "The Newton Boys", perhaps it was more groundbreaking back in the 1940's. What interested me more was the depiction of police techniques used to track the gang down. We tend to take our GPS devices and cell phones for granted these days, it was a little disconcerting to see cops back then using a crude homing device and triangulating its location again and again to track it down. And they way they talked about fingerprint evidence made me feel like this technology was very new to people at the time.
That being said, I wonder how accurately this was depicted. Some directors (then and now) have a bad habit of making tech devices work the way they want them to, or the way the plot needs them to, as opposed to the way they really work.
Also starring James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Margaret Wycherly, Steve Cochran, John Archer.
RATING: 5 out of 10 vaccinations
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ReplyDeleteWow! (Surprise to hear you haven't seen any James Cagney films before!) I am a fan of James Cagney, both of his films and some of his personal quotes, and I just happened to watch this film a the same time you did.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was all in all a good film, but the ending was less than satisfying, especially with the girl joining in with him at the last minute.
I haven't brought myself to watch the film "Yankee Doodle Dandy" as it seem so out of character for James Cagney. I think he may have fallen subject to the Hays Code.
One of his best films was perhaps "Angels with Dirty Faces". Check it out if you get a chance.