Jimmy the Gent (1934)

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

best movie i've ever seen.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

. . . "I'd do my best." This exchange early on between "Jimmy" (James Cagney) and "Mabel" (Alice White) is about as witty as JIMMY THE GENT gets. Since Michael Curtiz directed this rather than IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT's Frank Capra, Jimmy is a gent without a heart. A dishonest current runs through every scene, even when Jimmy and "Joan" (Bette Davis) are together again at last. There may be no honor among thieves, but sometimes there's not much humor, either, as JIMMY THE GENT proves. Perhaps best classified as an early effort at screwball comedy which falls flat, the Warner Bros. funny bone seems broken from the opening montage of this flick, in which five millionaires die without legitimate wills in freak accidents. (This may smack of that old saw, "What do you call 83 Nazis on the bottom of the sea?" "U-Boat 377," but the attempts at humor just get darker from here.) I'm not saying that JIMMY THE GENT is as unpleasant as a root canal, but if you have one of those modern "relaxation" oriented dentists who screen movies during extended procedures, I would NOT recommend this one.

Whew" - here's the kind of early Jimmy Cagney picture where he pulls out all the stops as a fast talking con man, and even if he has an ultimately noble intention of winning back his girl in the end, you're never really quite sure how things will work out. Bette Davis is that girl by the way, and she shares the kind of snappy dialog with Cagney that was honed to a razor wit by the time of 1940's "His Girl Friday" with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Joan Martin (Davis) once worked for Jimmy Corrigan (Cagney) in the 'Personal Contacts' business, but left for competitor Charles Wallingham (Alan Dinehart) who runs a more refined enterprise, including daily tea breaks with the staff. But no matter which way you slice it, both operators are in it for the money, tracking down wealthy patrons who have passed on leaving sizable fortunes.You'll have to be really attentive to stay on top of the main plot involving a two hundred thousand dollar inheritance from a deceased heiress. The only problem is, Monty Barton (Arthur Hohl) is on the run from a murder rap, and Cagney's character has to come up with a way to make the will stick until he can get his share of the dough. Getting his former gal pal back would be a bonus, and if you can keep things straight, the final payoff is a winner. I've seen Allen Jenkins in enough Cagney films now to actually expect him to be there, so I wasn't disappointed this time. He's around as Corrigan's right hand man, but the first time they come in contact on screen you'll want to consider how political correctness wasn't a factor in films of the Thirties. When Lou (Jenkins) enters Jimmy's office he's greeted with "You dumb Guinea dope, you silly lookin' ape"! It's the kind of stuff that makes you go for the re-wind button on your remote.As for Miss Davis, I kept looking for those Bette Davis eyes but they hadn't quite matured yet. Her performance here wasn't that exceptional, but what a difference a couple of years made; her role as the wistful dreamer Gabby Maple in the 1936 movie "The Petrified Forest" was remarkable. Cagney of course started right out of the gate in roles that featured him as a con man or gangster and this was no exception. He plays a similar fast talking character in 1933's "Hard To Handle" where he's quick to turn a buck from a gullible public. Unfortunately a lot of his earliest films aren't available commercially, so you have to be in the right place at the right time to catch them on one of the classic movie cable channels. For my money, Cagney found just the right tempo and pacing in a few more years to portray Rocky Sullivan in one of my all time top ten films - "Angels With Dirty Faces".

I'm not convinced that comedy was Warner Brothers' forte at this period; or maybe it's fast-paced humorous gangster movies starring Bette Davis that aren't quite my thing. At any rate, this film reminded me rather of "Satan Met a Lady", the last Warner comedy I'd seen (remembered today chiefly for the fact that it was their second version of "The Maltese Falcon", one of the few films where the remake was better than the original... but that, alas, was not to be until the third version!) To be fair, "Jimmy the Gent" is cleverer and funnier on the whole than "Satan Met a Lady"; but Bette Davis is equally uninspiring in it (one wonders how much effort she put into these supporting roles), and it isn't really my sort of film. Cheerful, generic stuff with a fair proportion of laughs and cringes (the mounting catalogue of implausible disasters at the beginning had me in hysterics), but I didn't find the hero as lovable as the film thinks he is, or the quickfire dialogue as funny as the scriptwriters presumably hoped.It was reasonably enjoyable, but not really worth the entrance fee as a rarity.

This pre-code film starring James Cagney has him playing Jimmy Corrigan who is a private detective specializing in finding heirs to large fortunes. He's in competition with Alan Dinehart who calls himself a "geneologist" and has just about the same set of ethics Cagney has. The only difference is Cagney lacks the polish of Dinehart and is less a hypocrite.Now no one ever confused James Cagney with Ronald Colman on the screen and I daresay they probably were never up for the same parts, but Cagney dumbs it down to Leo Gorcey levels in order to contrast himself with Dinehart. It's effective though.What makes this film special is that the leading lady is Bette Davis who was a year away from finally getting Jack Warner to give her a role with substance in Of Human Bondage. Speaking of class, you can see that Ms. Davis has it in abundance and that she wasn't going to be held down with supportive leading lady roles. Later on Cagney and Davis were given The Bride Came COD when both were big box office names.Cagney is quite the operator here and I won't tell you exactly what he does, he does bend our legal system over backwards though. And if he's not exactly reformed, he does learn the difference between class and manners.