"Some Kind of Genius"

By R. S.

He was the Caliban of the concrete wilderness, a tough-minded, quick-fisted, devilishly engaging city sprite, the first such in movie history and still, a half-century later, the best. One minute he would be walking the dark side of the mean streets, personifying the gangster as a tragically overreaching hero (The Public Enemy); the next he was to be found quickstepping on his jaunty dancer's pins along the sunny side, tapping out a dandy Yankee Doodle up tune. But it made no difference where he traded slick jabs and smart-mouthed gibes, for he always made it clear that though he could be touched, he could not be trifled with or, at his core, changed.

Later, when the world changed, he permitted his tough guy to give off the rancid odors of psychopathy, notably in White Heat. But his actor's integrity remained unsullied. He would make us understand his characters, but he would never seek pity for them.

Now 82, and returning to the screen in Ragtime, his 65th film, after a 21-year absence, James Cagney is unchanged at heart.

Though slowed by diabetes, he is a cherubic figure, a twinkly-eyed grandfatherly sort, full of benign anecdotes about his past (and a convenient lack of memory for past frictions). The old attack is still there. Indeed, the cunning professional is more than ever capable of playing games with the audience, using his softened image for deceptive purposes. Until he whispers his last devastating line in Ragtime, the audience is likely to think of Police Commissioner Rheinlander Waldo as an agreeable authority figure, when he is actually the picture's symbol of evil genius.

Not that Cagney would ever admit to doing anything all that complicated or rationally thought out. His strongest admiration is for people who make things look easy. Packey McFarland, a prizefighter from his youth, comes to mind:

"He was my idol, because he did it all and never got a black eye." Of his own acting, he says: "My roles may have been comparatively easy, because I was generally the hoodlum, and I understood that type perfectly well. No strain."

No strain. It is a phrase that has been recurring to Cagney for as long as people have been trying to inquire into the nature of his gift. "Just a job" is another one, used to describe almost any role anyone asks about. Says Ragtime Director Milos Forman: "At first I was suspicious, but no, it is absolutely genuine. His humility toward work--that is just him. I know the word is abused, but I really think James is some kind of genius. His instincts are phenomenal. As a director, I don't have to tell him a thing. Could stay home."

Despite Ragtime (made at his doctor's suggestion and Forman's urging), Cagney, too, could stay home. He has never enjoyed self-promotion, preferring the quiet of his 800-acre farm near Amenia, N.Y. The comfortable stone house is as simple and solid as he is. He and his wife of 58 years, Billie, occasionally entertain friends like Mikhail Baryshnikov but venture forth only rarely. They journeyed to the White House when Ragtime was screened for the President, and this week at the New York Press Club, Cagney will memorialize his old friend Robert Montgomery, who died in September. He is also considering another movie role, as an aging Bat Masterson.

Mostly, though, Cagney reads, watches television and occasionally goes for a spin in an antique carriage, of which he has an extensive collection.

If he does decide to act again, he will, as always, trust his first, simplifying instincts, a gift he has relied on since he went into show business 63 years ago as a self-taught dancer ("It was just a question of grabbing at something, to be something") out of the rough Manhattan neighborhood where he grew up. "That's the essential thing," he says, "to know what you want to do and then go at it with everything you've got." When he speaks that line, his eyes glint hard, his jaw juts forward, and the years seem to drop away. He is no longer the "faraway fella" of his old pal Pat O'Brien's description (Ragtime is the ninth film in which they have appeared together), no longer the "country boy" he aspired to be before he took up acting. Instead, he is the tough, confident young actor who, as O'Brien says, "always knew what he was going to do--and every director in Hollywood knew that he knew."

This, one knows, is the face of a man who would draw on his own memory for bits of business--a gesture, a line of dialogue--that would add authenticity to his roles ("Doesn't matter what it is, just so long as it's something particularly personal, a kind of stamp, that the audience walks out of the theater with"). It is the face he showed recently to a young admirer who asked Cagney for some advice on how to manage a star career. "I said, 'Start with one thing: they need you. Without you, they have an empty screen. So, when you get on there, just do what you think is right and stick with it.' " And what about all those helpful voices nagging at someone like John Travolta, telling him what the shrewd career moves are? "Oh, nonsense.

If you listen to all the clowns around, you're just dead. Go do what you have to do." It is one of the grace notes of this movie season that James Cagney is once again doing what he does as well as any man who has ever lived.

--R.S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.