New Picture

Strawberry Blonde (Warner Bros.) answers James Cagney's constant prayer. It keeps him out of crime pictures. It puts him into a fragrant, funny picture of Manhattan of the '90s, when birch beer was a dandy drink and if you had a black eye you went to a barber shop and got a leech.

Mostly one long flashback, the picture begins with Cagney bawling out a noisy party in the next yard, whereupon a turtlenecked Yale man of the Bum McClung era, with a Y as wide as his chest, rears above the garden wall and shouts: "I'd like to give him a taste of the good old flying wedge!" Whereupon a street band blares into The Band Played On, which plumps Cagney into such a mood of reminiscence that it is a full hour until he returns to test, and best, the good old flying wedge.

One of the liveliest cinema flashbacks on record reveals Cagney as an East Side student dentist with a mooching Irish father (Alan Hale) whose philosophy is: "I was never in the world cut out to be a street cleaner and there's no use reaching for the stars." Cagney loses the neighborhood strawberry blonde (Rita Hay worth) to a chiselling contractor (Jack Carson) and on rebound marries her girl friend (Olivia de Havilland). Later they visit the contractor, grown rich, where they dine under newfangled electric light. "Isn't it dangerous?" asks Olivia. Says Carson: "Not if you pay the bill."

Offered a job by the contractor, Cagney is made the stooge for the firm's corruption, goes to jail for five years. Out again he rejoins his wife, and when the contractor appears for emergency dentistry with his strawberry consort, Cagney plans to bump the villain off with dentist's gas. But on seeing the jaded pair, Cagney realizes that he has had very much the best of life. So he merely rips out the contractor's tooth--without gas.

Adapted by Hollywood's Brothers Epstein (Julius & Philip) from James Hagan's 1933 Broadway hit One Sunday Afternoon* directed by Raoul Walsh, Strawberry Blonde is a blithe, sentimental, turn-of-the-century buggy ride. Cagney makes the hero a tough but obviously peachy fellow. But the strawberry humdinger, Rita Hayworth, takes the picture away from him, and dark-eyed Olivia de Havilland, with her electric winks, each followed by a galvanizing "Exactly!" takes it away from both of them. The Warners' lot reports that the de Havilland winks shattered Cagney's control a dozen times during production.

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