(1953)

James Cagney, Barbara Hale, Anne Francis; dir: Raoul Walsh

This is moonshine as only Hollywood can distill it. A Lion Is In The Streets is by turns both compelling and ridiculous. The ‘fake weights’ setpiece is very strong in the classic Hollywood tradition of building the tension remorselessly to a final, audience-pleasing release. Yet the ‘dead defendant’ courtroom sequence that follows is so absurd it becomes comedy of the blackest, unintentional kind.

We know this is the second biopic of 1930s demagogue Huey Long, after 1949’s All the King’s Men, where Broderick Crawford essayed the Louisiana governor, senator and presidential aspirant as a sweaty, lecherous thug. Long was a populist who rode the Depression’s anti-big business tide almost to the White House. It was a time when radical – some would say crackpot – ‘saviours’ like Long and Upton Sinclair with his EPIC (End Poverty In California) scheme were taken so seriously they threatened the established political order. FDR described Long as ‘the most dangerous man in America’.

Lion plays, oddly, as a quasi-hagiography, as if the filmmakers really admired this huckster but know they need to ultimately condemn him. (Shades of the 1930s Production Code battles over sin and censorship!) None of the ominous suggestions of a duplicitous character sprinkled throughout the script are ever developed, nor even recovered. The end result is the effervescent Cagney coming across as a lovable rogue, albeit certainly a flawed one. The real Long’s admirable obsession with improving educational outcomes certainly comes through, unlike much else of the Cagney character’s actual historical basis. The actor’s own backstory is explicitly referenced at one point when his wife compares him to a ‘gangster’.

A Lion Is In The Streets reteamed the star with action director Walsh after their epochal comeback vehicle White Heat (1949), which saw Cagney reluctantly return to his gangster persona after taking Oscar with Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) where his hoofer origins could shine, but which led to his private production company going belly up. The climax to Lion, where he starts climbing onto a cart as he is dying from gunshot wounds, seems to consider reprising the unforgettable ‘Top of the World, Ma!’ scene from White Heat but soon thinks better of it and crashes into the mud. It seems a fitting ending to this unevenly satisfying throwaway.