alexanderdavies-99382
"Jimmy the Gent" was the first teaming of James Cagney and Bette Davis. The film is what is known as a "screwball comedy" but the plot is a bit contrived and weak. The running time is only 67 minutes bit it felt longer somehow. Michael Curtiz made far better films than "Jimmy the Gent" but still he does a good job of the direction. The leads are absolute dynamite though. You get two actors who are both strong, both as performers and in their screen presence. They light up the screen as you can feel the tension as neither character will back down from the other, in Cagney's attempts to win back Davis after she has ditched him.
Edgar Allan Pooh
. . . "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.
bkoganbing
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.
sideways8
I loved this amazing movie. I can't believe the amount of plot and dialogue weaved into 67 minutes by Cagney and Curtiz.Cagney just does not shut up, thankfully. He is brilliant. The idea that he was a shady geneologist who goes semi-straight and that Bette Davis was his foil was interesting. Lots of lauggh out loud scenes in this movie.
AD
