Cagney Quotes

A James Cagney love scene is one where he lets the other guy live.

I used to think Romeo and Juliet was the greatest love story ever written. But now that I’m middle-aged, I know better. Oh, Romeo certainly thinks he loves his Juliet. Driven by hormones, he unquestionably lusts for her. But if he loves her, it’s a shallow love. You want proof?” Cagney didn’t wait for Dr. Victor to say yay or nay. “Soon after meeting her for the first time, he realizes he forgot to ask her for her name. Can true love be founded upon such shallow acquaintance? I don’t think so. And at the end, when he thinks she’s dead, he finds no comfort in living out the remainder of his life within the paradigm of his love, at least keeping alive the memory of what they had briefly shared, even if it was no more than illusion, or more accurately, hormonal. “Those of us watching events unfold from the darkness know she merely lies in slumber. But does he seek the reason for her life-like appearance? No. Instead he accuses Death of amorousness, convinced that the ‘lean abhorred monster’ endeavors to keep Juliet in her present state, her cheeks flushed, so that she might cater to his own dissolute desires. But does Romeo hold her in his arms one last time and feel the warmth of her blood still coursing through her veins? Does he pinch her to see if she might awaken? Hold a mirror to her nose to see if her breath fogs it? Once, twice, three times a ‘no.’” Cagney sighed, listened to the leather creak as he shifted his weight in his chair. “No,” he repeated. “His alleged love is so superficial and selfish that he seeks to escape the pain of loss by taking his own life. That’s not love, but obsessive infatuation. Had they wed—Juliet bearing many children, bonding, growing together, the masks of the star-struck teens they once were long ago cast away, basking in the comforting campfire of a love born of a lifetime together, not devoured by the raging forest fire of youth that consumes everything and leaves behind nothing—and she died of natural causes, would Romeo have been so moved to take his own life, or would he have grieved properly, for her loss and not just his own?

I apologize, Miss Dylan.' Cagney said. 'During the night, all of my lord's stupidity rushes to his head.

You dirty rat...

I’m told that Sherlock Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson” (at least in the Arthur Conan Doyle books) Jimmy Cagney never said, “You dirty rat”; and Humphrey Bogart never said, “Play it again, Sam.” But they might as well have, because these apocrypha have firmly insinuated themselves into popular culture.

Back at home, days later, feel cranky and tired. Sit on the couch and tell him he's stupid. That you bet he doesn't know who Coriolanus is. That since you moved in you've noticed he rarely reads. He will give you a hurt, hungry-to-learn look, with his James Cagney eyes. He will try to kiss you. Turn your head. Feel suffocated. (from "How")

Mind your borders, Lord Dooley.' Cagney said. Dooley gave her his mournful eyes. 'But I'm trying to expand them.' 'Careful, they will shrink,' Cagney promised. Dylan shook her head. 'What?' Callan asked her. Dylan hesitated a moment before writing out, I'm glad I don't own land. Callan started laughing so hard he had to sit on a bench to recover.

Spencer Tracy, when asked for advice on acting, said, “Know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.” James Cagney said, “Walk in, plant your feet, look the other fellow in the eye and…tell the truth.” With all due respect to both of these giant talents, I would have to say there’s something more. The true creation of a being, a character other than one’s self, for me is comparable to a mystical or spiritual experience. To stand in another person’s shoes. To see as he sees, to hear as he hears. To know what he knows, and to do all this with a sense of control, a mastering of the dramatic moment, there must be more than a “natural talent” at work.

I`m sick of carrying guns and beating up women.

Where once was a vertebrae is now a tangle, from constant kissing at an awkward angle.

But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not from The Home, or The School, or The Church, but from that fourth and other great moulder of social conscience, The Movies. From all those movies that had begun to come out when Roosevelt went in. He had been a kid back then, a kid who had not been on the bum yet, but he was raised up on all those movies that they made then, the ones that were between '32 and '37 and had not yet degenerated into commercial imitations of themselves like the Dead End Kid perpetual series that we have now. He had grown up with them, those movies like the every first Dead End, like Winternet, like Grapes Of Wrath, like Dust Be My Destiny, and those other movies starring John Garfield and the Lane girls, and the on-the-bum and prison pictures starring James Cagney and George Raft and Henry Fonda.

I hate the word superstar". I have never been able to think in those terms. They are overstatements. You don`t hear them speak of Shakespeare as a superpoet. You don`t hear them call Michelangelo a superpainter. They only apply the word to this mundane market

It seems whenever we get too high hat and too sophisticated for flag-waving some thug nation comes along and decides we're a pushover all ready to be blackjacked. And it isn't long before we're looking up mighty anxiously to be sure the flag is still waving over us. Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy

My childhood was surrounded by trouble, illness, and my dad's alcoholism, but as I said, we just didn't have the time to be impressed by all those misfortunes. I have an idea that the Irish possess a built-in don't-give-a-damn that helps them through all the stress.

The years were never an element, because my parents didn’t age, they simply sickened. My father was mean and cocky like Cagney all the way to the dump. Flat on his back, his bones poking this way and that like the corpses in the camps, he still had a fiery eye, as though, but for those two coals, the grate held ash. There’s no easy way out of this life, and I do not look forward to the day they put those tubes up my nose, and a catheter shows my pee the way out like some well-trained servant. I saw how my father’s body broke his spirit like a match; and I saw how my mother’s broken spirit took her body under the way a ship stinks after being disemboweled by an errant bag of ice.

Don't cry, there is enough water in the goulash already

How is it possible, in this wondrous land where the relics of genius and enterprise confront you at every step, where every realm of human possibility has been probed and challenged and meticulously extended, where many of the very greatest accomplishments of industry, commerce, and the arts find their seat—how is it possible in such a place that when at length I returned to my hotel and switched on the television, it was Cagney & Lacey again?

The only way to conquer Barbara Stanwyck was to kill her, if she didn’t kill you first. Lynn Bari wanted any husband that wasn’t hers. Jane Russell’s body promised paradise but her eyes said, “Oh, please!” Claire Trevor was semi-sweet in Westerns and super-sour in moderns. Ida Lupino treated men like used-up cigarette butts. Gloria Grahame was oversexed evil with an added fey touch—a different mouth for every role. Ann Sheridan and Joan Blondell slung stale hash to fresh customers. Ann Dvorak rattled everyone’s rafters, including her own. Adele Jergens was the ultimate gun moll, handy when the shooting started. Marie Windsor just wanted them dead. Lucille Ball, pre–Lucy, was smart of mouth and warm as nails. Mercedes McCambridge, the voice of Satan, used consonants like Cagney used bullets. Marilyn Maxwell seemed approachable enough, depending on her mood swings. And Jean Hagen stole the greatest movie musical ever made by being the ultimate bitch. These wonderwomen proved that a woman’s only place was not in the kitchen. We ain’t talkin’ Loretta Young here.

We worked so hard,” [Joan Blondell] said, “and hardly ever had a day off . . . Saturday was a working day and we usually worked right into Sunday morning.” Joan’s good nature may have worked against her in the long run. While fellow Warner Brothers workers Bette Davis, James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland and Humphrey Bogart fought like lions for better roles and more creative input, Joan took things in stride, at least through the early 1930s. “I just sailed through things, took the scripts I was given, did what I was told. I couldn’t afford to go on suspension—my family needed what I could make.

It's imposible to even imagine Lucy Ricardo without Ethel Mertz, and because of that, this dynamic duo set the bar for future female friendships on TV. Consider Laverne and Shirley, Kate and Allie, Mar and Rhoda, Wilma and Betty, and Cagney and Lacey - where would they have been without Lucy and Ethel.

It's imposible to even imagine Lucy Ricardo without Ethel Mertz, and because of that, this dynamic duo set the bar for future female friendships on TV. Consider Laverne and Shirley, Kate and Allie, Mary and Rhoda, Wilma and Betty, and Cagney and Lacey - where would they have been without Lucy and Ethel.

As a young man Mannix was disgusted to see his cousin John Cagney take off his cap to Robert Sanders. ‘I always do that to my superiors,’ Cagney explained. ‘Well, my advice to you is to go about bald-headed,’ Daniel retorted.8

Only so much can be learned from books. The rest must be learned from practice. It's as if one were instructed in the fundamentals of carpentry and let it go at that. He may know "how" to build, but he won't be any good at it unless he does build, again and again, to achieve the type of perfection that comes only from continual performance.

I didn’t have to psych myself up for the scene in which I go berserk on learning of my mother’s death. You don’t psych yourself up for those things. You do them. I knew what deranged people sounded like. As a youngster I had visited Ward’s Island. A pal’s uncle was in the hospital for the insane. My God, what an education that was. The shrieks. The screams of those people under restraint. I remembered those cries. I saw that they fit the scene. I called on my memory to do as required. No need to ‘psych up.’” JAMES CAGNEY, Cagney by Cagney

You dirty double crossing rat

While timing was only part of the issue with Doris Day, it would be a key reason why, from the mid-1950s onward, good people were unable to appear in good musicals. An original like Never Steal Anything Small was unsuccessful on every level—and heinous in its waste of Jimmy Cagney’s talent—while skillful adaptations like Silk Stockings and Bells Are Ringing flopped resoundingly. As fewer opportunities arose, they were sometimes attended by the questionable notion that dubbing solves all problems. This is why Rossano Brazzi and Sidney Poitier could look great, in South Pacific and Porgy and Bess, and sound ostensibly like the opera singers who were doing the actual vocalizing. While dubbing had been present from the very beginning, it achieved some kind of pinnacle from the mid-fifties to the late sixties. Hiring nonsinging names like Deborah Kerr and Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn, even nonsinging non-names like Richard Beymer, was viewed as a form of insurance, conviction be damned.8 Casting for name recognition instead of experience has long been part of the film equation, and it cuts both ways. It may, for example, have seemed more astute than desperate to put Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood into Paint Your Wagon, despite the equivocal results. Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge! was far less a musical player than a photogenic, aurally enhanced artifact, and many people left Mamma Mia! wondering if Pierce Brosnan’s execrable singing was intended as a deliberate joke. In contrast with these are the film people who take the plunge with surprising ease.

In fact, it wasn’t Cagney so much as Richard Widmark that he secretly imagined himself as, especially in the part of  Harry Fabian in Night and the City, which he had seen four times and

Gable suited MGM because Gable was larger than life. Cagney suited Warner Brothers because Cagney was life.

Ozzy asked, tilting his head back and peering at Heather and Tammi-Jo down his long, crooked nose. “Is this a Cagney & Lacey reboot? If

Seeing the placenta as nebula a star-field of skin a chandelier from which we're all suspended flaring out from the same light.

those days, some stores sold broken chips of Nabisco cream crackers at a penny a bag. Quite a bargain. Bill got a sack of these chips with one of his pennies, and my sweet tooth

The foundries were vast, dark castles built for efficiency, not comfort. Even in the mild New England summers, when the warm air combined with the stagnant heat from the machines or open flames in the huge melting rooms where the iron was cast, the effects were overwhelming. The heat came in unrelenting waves and sucked the soul from your body. In the winter, the enormous factories were impossible to heat and frigid New England air reigned supreme in the long halls. The work was difficult, noisy, mind-numbing, sometimes dangerous and highly regulated. Bathroom and lunch breaks were scheduled down to the second. There was no place to make a private phone call. Company guards, dressed in drab uniforms straight out of a James Cagney prison film [those films were in black and white, notoriously tough, weren’t there to guard company property. They were there to keep an eye on us. No one entered or the left the building without punching in or out on a clock, because the doors were locked and opened electronically from the main office.

Jack Warner had trouble with all of them: Flynn, Cagney, Bogie, de Havilland, Davis. He drove actors crazy.

An actor’s value in pictures was measured strictly by the amount and character of his fan mail and the reports from exhibitors throughout the country. This was a response to personality rather than a recognition of talent. If some technical facility went with it, then so much the better. These were the Gables, the Garbos, the Cagneys, the Crawfords, and the Davises. The legends.