Steineded How sad is this?

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Onlinewsma Absolutely Brilliant!

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

vincentlynch-moonoi I wasn't expecting much out of this film because I grew tired of all the cops-n-robbers flicks that Warner Brothers pumped out with stars such as James Cagney. In fact, I almost didn't watch it all. But I'm glad I did, because this film stands out over many other such WB films of the era.Cagney plays a truck driver here, who also fools around with amateur boxing...and has a life-long girlfriend played by Ann Sheridan. Cagney also has a brother, a sort of musical prodigy, and Cagney turns to professional boxing in order to help his brother pay for music school. Meanwhile, however, Sheridan falls for a dancer -- Anthony Quinn -- who helps her professional aspirations to be a dancer on the stage. Sheridan and Cagney drift apart. During a title fight, an opponent makes Cagney go nearly blind by putting rosin on his gloves, which he then rubs into his eyes during the fight. After the prognosis of the blindness is permanent, Cagney operates a newspaper stand, while his brother becomes a successful composer. Of course, in the end, Sheridan and Cagney are reunited.There are a number of nice touches which make this film enjoyable for many types of viewers. While it's about boxing, there isn't so much of it in the film that if you dislike boxing that you won't want to watch. It's a nice period piece in terms of the music and dancing of the era. Cagney, Sheridan, and Arthur Kennedy (as the brother) all have their own stories to tell. Years ago a Thai friend was visiting my home and one evening we watched some James Cagney movie, and when it was done my friend said, "Americans think James Cagney could act?" And, Cagney did have a bit of an unreal style of acting, which is more restrained here. I think he was maturing as an actor in this phase of his career, and it wasn't long after this that he starred in "Yankee Doodle Dandy".So, this is a good starring vehicle for James Cagney. Ann Sheridan shines here as Peggy Nash, and it reminded me that she was very pleasing on the big screen, and is not remembered as well as she should be. I've never been impressed with Arthur Kennedy, but he's satisfactory here. Frank Craven as the "Old Timer" is interesting...he sort of narrates, much as he had done very recently in "Our Town". Anthony Quinn is not very pleasant as the dancer...but handsome...and of course, this was in his phase as a bad guy. Interestingly, Elia Kazan is here as a gangster-type. And venerable character actor Donald Crisp shines as a boxing promoter; what a versatile actor he was! Even Frank McHugh, whom I often find irritating, was pretty good here.I enjoyed this film a lot, and I recommend it.

Bill Slocum Late in the film, our hero Danny Kenny (James Cagney) tells us he "don't like that tear-jerking sob stuff." No doubt he would have winced sitting through "City Of Conquest." I did, a lot of the time.A tough but amiable West Side kid, Danny is a skilled amateur boxer who doesn't like fighting. He cares more about his love for the girl who lives up the stairs from his apartment. But when she grows up, Peg (Ann Sheridan) wants more out of life than to be the wife of a truck driver. She has aspirations to be a big-time dancer. To keep up, Danny takes his chances in the professional ring, with hard results."City For Conquest" is a film that wants to hit a home run every inning. To the extent it relies on Cagney, it delivers more than it fails. Cagney is in great form, dialing down on his trademark bantam ambition and commanding the screen in his unaffected way. Other pictures make you fear or admire Cagney; here you just really like him and enjoy his easy charm.Alas, the film uses this to shoehorn a lot of melodrama. In addition to Danny, you get the story of his musical brother Eddie (Arthur Kennedy) and Peg's struggle for success as the partner of headcase-on-the-make Murray Burns (Anthony Quinn). Quinn and Kennedy would go on to score nine Oscar nominations between them and co-star in "Lawrence Of Arabia," a film as epically ambitious as "City For Conquest" but much more successful.There's a lot of talent in evidence here, both on screen and behind the camera. Maybe too much. Elia Kazan's performance as Danny's loyal gangster pal Googi is rightly praised for its naturalism, which is easy to notice in a film where so much of the supporting cast plays their one-note parts with such over-revved gusto. Googi is an interesting character, but his scenes, like Kennedy's, too often stretch the narrative more than it can afford. Third-billed Frank Craven jumps in and out of the movie as the same kind of narrator he played in "Our Town," offering a lot of folky, overwritten nonsense he insists is true because "I got clothes on my back."I guess they wanted to make a point about Manhattan as dream-weaver and back-breaker, but instead of just letting the characters breathe and develop in a natural way you get a kind of big-studio meat-grinder effect, a pushed-up drama with tears and big speeches of the kind Holden Caulfield complained about in "Catcher In The Rye." I like that artificiality in other movies, but here the emotions are played a little too strong and too quick. Poor Sheridan seems lost alternately playing a hustling heel and a loyal girlfriend.Director Anatole Litvak delivers some interesting setpieces, and he is handsomely supported by the cinematography of Sol Polito and James Wong Howe, wizards of black-and-white and the best thing about "City For Conquest" after Cagney. One amazing shot of a street dance zooms out from Cagney watching Sheridan to swoop under a line of lights and up over the adoring crowd. How they did that I have no idea. You get shots like that throughout the film, pieces of artistry that call no attention to themselves.Most everything else does, though. Sometimes it works, like the Max Steiner score. Sure, it's Gershwin-lite and played up too much, stopping the film dead near the end when Eddie introduces his "Magic Isle Symphony." Still, it's a great number.Too often, though, you get another close-up of Sheridan in tears, or Craven smirking up a storm as he grandiloquently lights into another quandary posed by the big city. A better script, with a tighter focus on Danny the fighter, and "City For Conquest" could have been up there with Cagney's best. Instead, it's a worthy depiction of how well Cagney could hold up a lesser film with sheer acting power and finesse, something to see for his many fans but a missed opportunity for the rest of us.

Jay Raskin This is a very well done melodrama. Unfortunately, James Cagney was in so many great movies, such as "Public Enemy," "the Roaring Twenties," "Footlight Parade," "Yankee Doodle Dandy," and "White Heat," that a movie that is not quite as dazzling as those, but just a notch below, tends to get overlooked.The cinematography has that great New York Lower East Side-Warner's Brothers look (see Dead End" for example). The editing of the montage sequences are delightful. We get to see both the rise of Danny as a fighter and Peggy as a dancer through quick shots of Theater headliner Marquee Lights, cheering fans and newspaper headlines interspersed with shots of action from weird camera angles. Max Steiner's score avoids the usual wall to wall Mickey Mousing and is quite effective, one of his best.Ann Sheridan, Anthony Quinn, Arthur Kennedy and Elia Kazan provide Cagney with excellent support too. They seem to be real characters, leading independent lives and are not just props for the lead character to play against. Sheridan is especially impressive, stealing several scenes from Cagney, and making her character's complex motives and thoughts clear.The one major problem with the film is the general conservative ideology in the script. We have five rags to riches characters in Cagney, Sheridan, Quinn, Kazan and Kennedy, and one character, "the Old-timer" as the "rags to rags" counterbalance. It seems that New York is a city where anybody who has a desire to succeed can do so, and only those without such a desire fail. While this kind of idealism isn't quite reactionary ideology (the rich succeed because they have the superior will power), it is awfully close to it. It does also push the idea that one can be happy or perhaps even happier by not being rich, which does redeem it somewhat. Still, the movie misuses its theatrical realism only to push its unrealistic bourgeois idealism.The other thing that is missing is Cagney dancing. The film sets up the perfect opportunity for us to watch Cagney dance and then cops out inexplicably. Maybe the message was supposed to be that Cagney is such a nice guy that he didn't want to upstage Quinn and Sheridan, but it is a missed opportunity to see Cagney dance, and for anyone who had seen "Footlight Parade" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy," we have to feel let down.Despite these flaws, the film is fun and holds up well 70 years later.

Michael O'Keefe A very memorable role for James Cagney. As a youngster he makes Ann Sheridan his girl and they promise to be together forever. Cagney grows to be a hard working truck driver that has to turn to boxing to make real dough. Another reason for quick bucks is that his girl has grown to be an award winning dancer, but with a scoundrel for a partner(Anthony Quinn). Cagney ends up blind from a beating in the ring; and to make ends meet he operates a newspaper stand. His girl gives up her dancing to take care of him. Elia Kazan turns in a marvelous death scene; my favorite of the movie. Also in the cast: Donald Crisp, George Tobias, Arthur Kennedy and Frank McHugh.