James Cagney specialized in playing brutal criminals. He completely dominated such pictures as The Public Enemy and White Heat. His characters in those were completely despicable, but fascinating to watch. But those can’t hold a candle compared to how much of a louse he is in 1950’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.
What’s novel about this picture is every other person I can think of in this is also deplorable, even if none are so much so as the lead. I could appreciate that better if any of these characters were believable as human beings.
As I write this, there is the possibility a certain former president could achieve that office again. To the best I can tell, the entirety of that person’s motivational toolset is to yell at people until they bend to his will. That is more or less what Cagney does here, yet I understand neither why the fictional people here nor people in the real world submit to these monsters.
The most pathetic of these sycophants to bow before this psychopath is Barbara Peyton. When we first see her, she is fatally shooting a prison guard during an effort to break Cagney and her brother (Neville Brand) out of prison. Brand died in the escape attempt, but what Peyton doesn’t know yet is the shot that took him down was from Cagney.
Once free from prison, Cagney gets civilian clothes quickly and, with assistance from a couple of minor crime figures (Steve Brodie and Rhys Williams), is soon walking around town like an upstanding citizen. He immediately goes to Peyton’s apartment, shoves his way in, demands she make him a sandwich, blackmails her into helping him in his schemes and towel-whips her. To her credit, she throws a knife at him though, admittedly, anybody serious in such an attack would instead grab the knife tightly as possible, run up to him and stab him as fast and hard any many times as one can. That’s what I would have preferred she had done but, don’t worry, she’ll grow a spine eventually. At this point, however, she collapses into his arms in regret for half-heartedly trying to attack him and she immediately falls in wuv (it’s like love, only ickier). She develops Stockholm Syndrome so fast that I wondered if she had already applied for dual-citizenship with Sweden.
Cagney’s impulsiveness would make me want to stay miles away from him, yet people just keep coming into his circle. People who should know better, such as a lawyer (Luther Adler) who helps Cagney blackmail two detectives (Ward Bond and Barton MacLane) into turning a blind eye to the ensuing crime wave. Even these allegedly hard-skinned, corrupt detectives seem a bit too willing to assist Cagney, such as their minimal resistance to a plan to steal from the city’s mob boss. In that operation, Cagney kills the boss’s money couriers, and I wondered why he didn’t just yell at and hit them until they complied. It seemed to work on everybody else.
I need to call out something about how Cagney and Brodie blackmail those detectives. Before the cops arrive at an apartment for what they think is meeting to discuss planning a heist, Cagney asks Brodie what they would need to record that conversation. I would have thought a reel-to-reel tape recorder and microphone would suffice, but the man rattles off a long list of equipment that had me stupefied. Maybe the time the film was made in predates tape, but I was still surprised he chose to record to acetate. In fact, so much equipment is utilized one would think they should have gone ahead and opened a recording studio. I wonder if this is how Sun Studios got its start?
The film has too many plot threads as it is, but then it piles another on with the introduction of Helena (middle name not Bonham) Carter as a highly impulsive rich girl. She and Cagney elope, and daddy tries cutting a check to the gangster to get the marriage annulled. Cagney surprises her father by not accepting the money, which convinces the father this dodgy guy is actually principled, and blah blah blah I don’t care.
The weirdest element of this picture is the flashback structure it employs. While that is common for noir, the wraparound bit in court left me baffled, because I couldn’t figure out whose murder these seven people were on trial for. Cagney is dead at the end, so I would have thought they were being tried for that. But, no, in the opening, the prosecuting attorney is telling jurors there was an eighth man, the worst of the lot, who should have been alongside the seven. And I won’t get into the minutiae, but I can’t figure out how any one of the remaining defendants would be liable for any of the deaths in this film.
And there is a surprising amount of death and violence for a film made in the Production Code era. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye was even banned in Ohio, though I can tell you from experience, it doesn’t take much to make that big of a ruckus there. Today, the movie seems to be regarded as a bit of a lost classic, one that was unjustly in the shadow of the previous year’s White Heat. I’m not convinced of that, and found this film wanting. Maybe I just need somebody to yell in my face long enough and pistol whip me until I acknowledge it is.
Dir: Gordon Douglas
Starring James Cagney, Barbara Peyton, Helena Carter
Watched on Olive Films blu-ray