G Men (1935)

Directed by William Keighley. Starring James Cagney, Robert Armstrong, Ann Dvorak, Margaret Lindsay, William Harrigan, Barton MacLane, Lloyd Nolan, Edward Pawley, Russell Hopton, Harold Huber, Regis Toomey, Addison Richards, Noel Madison.

One of Cagney’s crime pictures, but this time he’s on the law-abiding side; he plays an attorney who decides to join the Department of Justice after a friend gets bumped off by mobsters. Solid entertainment camouflaging a blatant attempt to combat the “romanticization” of the criminal lifestyle in the gangster pictures of the early 30s, with Cagney as tough a hero as he was a villain—his hardest battle is trying to win the heart of nurse Lindsay in an underdeveloped sub-plot. Second half is propelled by exciting action and contrivances, all in the name of a good show. Harrigan plays just about the gentlest gangster to ever appear in a movie like this; his cohorts are nastier, but none are particularly memorable. Reprints include an added prologue that amusingly makes the whole thing a movie-within-a-movie being shown to FBI recruits.

71/100