I have watched this movie a few times. When Cagney gives the long speech where he's giving everybody their orders in the rapid fire style it always just cracks me up and amazes me how great he was.
shareI said this in another post - Cagney was fantastic in this film! Full of energy and wit. An award-worthy performance.
"I don't mind a parasite. I object to a cut-rate one."
Agree, his performance was brilliant.
Can you imagine ANYONE else in the role?
I know in the trivia section it says that his bad experience on the shoot drove him into retirement for twenty years. I had the feeling while watching this movie that he may have made his mind up before hand and was in a way saying "goodbye". The Yankee Doodle Dandee, the grapefruit, the bow to Edward G as well as a few other things I caught but couldn't hang on to(those who have seen the movie will understand).
shareI just watched this a coupla days ago, and the performance is on an energy level with some of his earliest flicks like TAXI, JIMMY THE GENT and PICTURE SNATCHER, but with added nuances that came with 30 years of film acting.
shareHow about that speech he made in "Double Indemnity", about the different kinds of suicide?
shareEdward G. Robinson, as Barton Keyes, makes a speech about suicide in DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Cagney isn't in the movie. Here's the speech, from the University of California Press screenplay:
(Keyes is reacting to Mr. Norton's suicide theory in the death of Mr. Dietrichson):
NORTON: I was raised in the insurance business, Mr. Keyes.
KEYES: Yeah. In the front office. Come on, you never read an actuarial table in your life. I've got ten volumes on suicide alone. Suicide by race, by color, by occupation, by sex, by seasons of the year, by time of day. Suicide, how committed: by poisons, by firearms, by drowning, by leaps. Suicide by poison, subdivided by types of poison, such as corrosive, irritant, systemic, gaseous, narcotic, alkaloid, protein, and so forth. Suicide by leaps, subdivided by leaps from high places, under wheels of trains, under wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from steamboats. But Mr. Norton, of all the cases on record there's not one single case of suicide by leap from the rear end of a moving train. And do you know how fast that train was going at the point where the body was found? Fifteen miles an hour. Now how could anyone jump off a slow-moving train like that with any kind of expectation that he would kill himself? No soap, Mr. Norton. We're sunk, and we're going to pay through the nose, and you know it. ....
"That wasn't very sporting, using real bullets."