Created by Laird Doyle
“Blondes…Brunettes…And Their Bankrolls! He makes ’em!… Takes ‘Em and Tosses ‘Em Away! Wild Jimmy in a Knockout riot of Laughs!”
— slug line on original poster.
Jimmy Cagney plays JIMMY CORRIGAN, the scrappy, strutting operator of a missing heirs bureau, out to win the heart of the beautiful Joan (Bette Davis) in 1934’s Jimmy the Gent.
But it ain’t easy. Jimmy may know every trick in the book, but Joan’s the assistant of a rival heir hunter, who happens to be one smooth, suave dude. To win her back, Jimmy’s willing to do almost anything, up to and including (GASP!) becoming respectable.
It’s a pretty good flick, a screwball-dusted rom-com with some great, zippy dialogue between Cagney’s cocky bantam rooster and Bette Davis’ wise-ass blonde, who thinks the runt’s “the greatest chiseler since Michelangelo.”
But wait minute!
Sure, at first glance, it’s simply a fluffy piece of lightweight entertainment, but this was considered some pretty gritty stuff for its time. As Tom Howard in the August 2001 issue of Crime Factory pointed out, the film is “laced with bribery, corruption, double-dealing, racketeering, fraud, ratting and selling out (and) comes across even today as an extremely bitter expose of the self-seeking underbelly of human society. No heroes or heroines here. Few sympathetic characters at all. Just about everyone is out there pitching strictly and ruthlessly for number one.” There’s also some pretty tough and surprisingly earthy dialogue, and even a scene where the cops pay off a stool pigeon with a shot of dope.
Maybe that’s why some much of the promotional artwork at the time of its release made Cagney look so demonic.
By the way, the heir hunter racket popped up seventy years later in Chris Larsgaard’s Shamus-nominated The Heir Hunter (2000).
FILMS
- JIMMY THE GENT | Buy the DVD | Watch it now!
(1934, Warner Brothers)
Working titles: “Always a Gent,” “The Heir Chaser”
66 minutes
Black and white
Based on the story “The Heir Chaser” by Laird Doyle
Screen story by Ray Nazarro
Screenplay by Bertram Millhauser
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Produced by Jack L. Warner
Supervising producer: Robert Lord
Starring James Cagney asJIMMY CORRIGAN
Also starring Bette Davis, Allen Jenkins, Alan Dinehart, Alice White, Arthur Hohl, Philip Reed, Hobart Cavanaugh, Mayo Methot, Renee Whitney
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
