James Cagney: A Celebration

by Richard Schickel

(Applause Books). The study of James Cagney's screen persona is far more than a profile of a great beloved star. It is a meditation on over a half-century of social history. From Cagney's early days to such successes as Yankee Doodle Dandy , Schickel follows the star's spectacular career. A great dancer who became a great actor, James Cagney could play George M. Cohan or Public Enemy No. 1 with equal ease and conviction. This book explains how. (Richard Schickel is chief cinema critic of Time Magazine .)

2 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2000

About the author

Richard Schickel is an important American film historian, journalist, author, filmmaker, screenwriter, documentarian, and film and literary critic.

Mr. Schickel is featured in For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism. In this 2009 documentary film he discusses early film critics in the 1960s, and how he and other young critics, rejected the moralizing opposition of Bosley Crowther of The New York Times who had railed against violent movies such as Bonnie and Clyde.

In addition to film, Schickel has also critiqued and documented cartoons, particularly Peanuts.

Schickel was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964. He has also lectured at Yale University and University of Southern California's School of Film and Television.

Reviews

[Monica]

Did you ever not want to finish reading a book? This one was like that for me. Schickel gives readers tremendous insight into Cagney's legend. What I like about this book is that is gets as close to Cagney's heart as any writer could and is also a social history. It helps to have seen Cagney's body of work, and, unlike Andrew Bergman's opinions I concurred with Schickel nearly all the time.

[Tirzah]

I read James Cagney's autobiography last summer when I was making a dent in his filmography. Not all of his films are readily available in my library system, so I didn't get around to finding the more obscure ones until this summer, which put me back into an extreme Cagney mood and led me to read this book. By my definition, it's part bio and part critique of his films offering historical context behind the films. I found the historical context interesting and the critique sometimes annoying, so I eventually skimmed and read the parts that stood out to me. The pictures are quite plentiful.

If one is looking to read a book on Cagney's life, go for the autobiography. Go for this book if you want an analysis on Cagney's films.

[Dollie]

After recently watching Yankee Doodle Dandy, I decided I wanted to learn more about James Cagney and borrowed this short biography of him. I didn’t know that he had been president of the Screen Actors Guild. I learned a lot of things I didn’t know about the early days of Hollywood and it was interesting. All his movies were discussed, which was great, but I had been looking for more personal information, his early life, his home life, his marriage (ok, so I’m nosey), but he was evidently a very private person, so I didn’t learn a lot about those. There were lots of photos from his movies and a full filmography.