I enjoyed this film even more than I expected to. You really can't go wrong with either Jimmy Cagney or Joan Blondell, and together they're even greater than the sum of their parts. This doesn't get great reviews elsewhere, the general consensus being that the plot is hackneyed but elevated by the great chemistry of the leads, and while I agree with the latter part, I actually really enjoyed the plot, too. Perhaps it's because this kind of plot, about grifters grifting during the Depression was played to death at the time, but it's certainly not boring when watched from a 2020 perspective. The film starts with Blondell's Anne Roberts arriving to interview for a job (in "linens") at a hotel. Cagney's Bert Harris spots her walking through the lobby, and though he knows the job's been filled by another bellhop's girlfriend, he convinces the woman in charge (sweettalking her along the way) that this is actually the person she hired, then goes to the bellhop and pays him enough so that he'll tell his girlfriend that the hotel changed its mind. Anne is cautious about Bert, as he's super slick and cocky (and soon deals him the first of the many mighty slaps she administers throughout the film), but she obviously also finds him appealing, in part because they're both smart and ambitious and chafing at the bit in the hotel. He wins her over by ripping off a pervy customer who was trying to hit on her (and got slapped and pearls stuffed down his trousers (you'll have to watch it now) for his trouble)
in the first of his many schemes. So many schemes has he that he keeps a scrapbook of them, and pastes new ones out of the paper every time they're reported.
After making some money off his hooch-selling business, and much more out of a scam where a co-conspirator dressed as a cop helps them chisel a cool $5000 out of a married man the cop catches with the hooch and Annie in an illegally parked car, they're off out into the world. Bert thinks they'll be sharing a train car, but Anne has planned ahead and booked her own berth, once again thwarting Bert's advances. Next we see them, they're in the big city, living high, but keeping an eye out for scams. Bert thinks he's identified a fellow scam-artist when he sees "Dapper" Dan Barker (played by the very familiar-looking (presumably because he's in a bunch of films we've seen, including The Asphalt Jungle) Louis Calhern) hanging around, and pretty much immediately Dan invites him in to a scheme involving counterfeit $20 bills. Anne isn't so sure about Dan, and it turns out she's right, as Dan and his own blonde accomplice Helen trick Bert out of the $5000. Too ashamed to tell Anne about it, Bert cooks up a rather ingenious scheme of getting a jewelry store to deliver a diamond bracelet to the fancy house of a family whose daughter is getting married to some other bigwig, and then telling the butler that it's been delivered by mistake and giving him the card he got off the jewelry store employee as identification. He then pawns the bracelet for $5000. But he plots revenge, and knowing that Dan is headed to New York, he and Anne head off there. However, on the train, Anne bumps into a very young Ray Milland, who is in some fancy Wall Street job and has a cultured family and reads poems, and is a pathway to a better life.
Bert pouts, but Anne helps him scam Dan for much more than he ever took off them after having bumped into Dan and convinced him that she and Bert had parted company (which prompts Dan to boast about tricking Bert, which in turn causes her to grill Bert about how he really got the $5000). Anyway, the scheme that tricks Dan involves a reverse grift, where he is made to think he's scamming, but is in fact himself getting fleeced.
And at the end he finds a note that the scheme he fell for was in Bert's scrapbook, something he'd been shown but had only mocked. Bert is overjoyed at their haul and decides that now is the time to visit Europe and finally learn what life is like for swells. He proposes to Anne, but she rebuffs him. She says she would have married him if he'd asked earlier (what, when she was slapping him all the time?) but all he cares about is the money, and now she's fallen for Ray Milland. So she marries him, an event Bert watches from a cab across the street, before heading off to Europe on his own. However, it bores him and he's back in under a year, and is seen moping around in New York, his former associates trying to persuade him to get back in the game, a game for which he's lost the taste. But then Anne shows up again and reveals that Ray Milland has got into trouble. He took money from the company's safe to "invest" in a scheme, and has lost it all, and an audit is coming in a couple of days. Bert takes a certain amount of bitter satisfaction from the fact that Mr. Goody-two-shoes poetry-lover is just a cheap embezzler, and offers to help the couple out by "robbing" the safe so nobody will ever know that the money had already been taken. But all is not as it seems in a tense final ten minutes-or-so. Will Anne realize she should've been with Bert all along? Will Bert survive and stay out of prison? You'll have to watch it and see. Top entertainment, and as always, Cagney is just a magnetic screen presence. He almost literally crackles with energy, and all the little faces he makes and dance steps he throws in just make him an utter joy to watch. (The way he says "Honey", his pet name for Anne, is completely infectious - you'll never be able to say it otherwise afterwards.) He is what they used to call a "pistol". Oh, and this film features one of his most oft-imitated lines: "That dirty double-crossin' rat!" Oh, and this is definitely a pre-code film: you get to see Joan Blondell in the bath, and Bert has to root around in her bra to get the money he needs to borrow off her.
And despite some reviewers pooh-poohing the quality of the material, there are some truly great lines in this film. Bert says that it's not the age of chivalry, it's the age of "chiselry", for example. Really, you can't go wrong with this film.
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