Moment Out of Time: G Men (1935)

[Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy created the "Moments Out of Time" concept in 1971 for Movietone News; it had a long run at Film Comment and can now be found on the Web. It is a lovely critical technique, with a wider applicability than just film.]

James Cagney came to sound movies from vaudeville and the Broadway stage when he was 30; he was already a fully formed performer and didn't need to learn his craft on-screen. With his trademark vitality in full evidence, he routinely played ten years younger than his age for the first decade of his film career, but the fact that he was no callow youth and had actually lived quite a bit also enabled him to use his technique to deepen the generic and mundane nature of many of the films he was asked to played in. G Men (1935), directed by William Keighley, is better than most, a crackling good FBI vs. gangsters picture, but still a strict genre film. It is extremely well shot (as Leonard Maltin's guide rightly points out) by cinematographer Sol Polito, whose night scenes are gorgeously "proto-noir." Cagney is on the right side of the law in this one, as a lawyer turned G man, though (believably) with contacts on the wrong side as well.

The something extra that Cagney brings to the table is apparent in the film's handling of death. Four people close to the Cagney character die during the course of the brisk film, nothing too unusual for the genre, but he makes you feel the weight of that -- and therefore deepens the film beyond the expected. When the college buddy who had been trying to convince him to join the FBI is taken out by gangsters whom Cagney knows, he sees the coffin onto a train and, with the merest flicker of his eyes, says good-bye and a good deal more; the coffin, by virtue of being looked at like that, becomes an immensely expressive presence as well.