FAQ

"It was just four years ago, when I hadn't been going to the movies very much, that I stopped around to see Footlight Parade and made the happy discovery of James Cagney. He had been known to almost everybody else before that in heavier roles (The Public Enemy (1931), for instance), and before he was well known at all he had been doing bits in pictures. But in this one he happened to be cast as the original Cagney, the hoofer and general vaudeville knockabout. The story had him drilling a line of girls, stomping out routines and cracking around like the end of a whip, and even the presence of Dick Powell could not dim that vitality and flow of motion, and a grace before the camera that puts him in the company of the few who seem born for pictures.

"It was a sunny introduction: seeing him you couldn't help feeling better about the industry--or the state of the nation for that matter. Because through this countrywide medium and in spite of whatever its story was about, the half-pint of East Side Irish somehow managed to be a lot of what a typical American might be, nobody's fool and nobody's clever ape, quick and cocky but not too wise for his own goodness, frankly vulgar in the best sense, with the dignity of the genuine worn as easily as his skin."

From: Robert Wilson (ed.), "The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson," Philadelphia, 1971