Un leone per la strada

A Lion is in the Streets (1953)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Raoul Walsh directs this incredibly uneven and at times poorly written tale of a poor peddler (James Cagney) who finds his calling in politics. After the death of his friend, the man begins to slowly rise up and lead the poor people against the evil rich but this game contains one twist after another. A LION IS IN THE STREETS features a terrific cast, some great cinematography and at times a compelling story but there are just way too many beyond stupid moments that keep this film from being a complete success. I must admit that I got caught up in the story and it made for a mildly entertaining film but at the same time there were moments where I was wanting to scream at the television. There's no doubt in my mind that this was an incredibly poor screenplay that needed a major re-write. There's no doubt that those involved wanted to get their message across but they should have done it with better, more realistic writing. I won't spoil anything but there's a court scene and the sequence at the end, which should have been terrific but they're just so far fetched that the message involved in them are just lost. Another problem is that stuff will come up in the story and never get explained or even commented on again. There's an entire subplot with Cagney's swamp girl lover that comes and goes. Cagney's wife gets pregnant but this disappears from the screenplay only to then pop back up out of no where. There are some terrific performances here including Barbara Hale as the wife, Anne Francis as the swamp girl and we've also got strong work from Lon Chaney, Warner Anderson, John McIntire, Jeanne Cagney, Onslow Stevens and Cagney's old buddy from Warner, Frank McHugh. As far as Cagney goes, there's no question that he's got some passion and fire going on. The performance is incredibly energetic, although the accent comes and goes at times. A LION IS IN THE STREETS isn't a complete success but the cast alone makes it worth sitting through.

I guess Cagney took the "lion" part literally since he roars all the way through. Unfortunately, it does get tiresome. That along with a brash behavior competes with plot development muddying overall impact. Perhaps Cagney saw a need to out-bluster award winning Broderick Crawford in 1950's thematically similar All The King's Men. Don't get me wrong-I'm a long time Cagney fan, but his turn here amounts almost to a caricature of his usual dynamic persona.

The movie itself lacks impact, mainly because of a screenplay that fails to concentrate Hank's (Cagney) trickery into a central focus. Instead, the story veers around in rather murky fashion, particularly with the political conniving that leads to Hank's downfall. For example, see if you can sort out the Castleberry, Polli, Beach, Rector, roles leading to Hank's downfall. Or figure out the clumsily developed Jeb Brown legal proceedings. To me, the script badly needed a re-write. Also, the casting of the women's roles requires a stretch. Hale's Verity appears much too refined for loud-mouth Hank, while Francis's Flamingo(!) appears about 20-years too young. These appear aimed at reinforcing Hank's blustery charisma. Anyway, I did like the 'one for all' bonding of the sharecroppers, especially when they transform Hank's shack into a bright bungalow. Also, the way the gin mill cheats is enlightening and I expect really happened to cotton growers. So there are compensations. However, the movie itself strikes me as one of Cagney's lessers and shows why it's seldom included in his iconic canon.

More like a bull in a china shop! Cagney completely unfettered here, carrying everything before him in a typical barn-storming performance of sheer bravura.

Forget all the succeeding shortcomings of the plot, they're there from the start and almost far too numerous to mention, but let's just throw some in - like Cagney's whirlwind romance with too-young-for-him school-marm Barbara Hale and even more ridiculous fling with far-too-much-younger-for-him Anne Francis as a wild-child with a crush on our hero, who in a "hath no fury" scorned moment improbably tries to feed Cagney's new bride to the crocodiles, mix in a plumb-loco trial scene where Cagney props up a dying witness to testify for his innocence even as he expires on the stand and grandstand it all with Cagney's "Kingfish" character Hank Martin getting shot at point-blank range by the widow of the same dying witness when Cagney's treachery in thrall of power is exposed, just at the point when he's fathered his first child and lost the election to boot!.

Only Raoul Walsh could whip all this into, I hesitate to call it shape and in under 90 minutes at that. Shot in gleaming technicolour, with hordes of well-marshaled crowd scenes and with Cagney threatening to self-combust from the off, this has to be one of the most preposterous films I've ever watched. You could argue with some justification that the great man chews more scenery than Hungry Horace, but best just to surrender yourself to the whirlwind, suspend all disbelief and see where it deposits you. It may not be Oz, but there's certainly a wizard at work here.

A Lion Is In the Streets wastes enough talent for at least a half-dozen good movies. It had an excellent director, Raoul Walsh, but a bad script. James Cagney is energetic in the lead, as a Huey Long-like Southern pol, but his accent is poor, and he seems out of place running around the bayous in a white suit. The fine supporting cast,--Barbara Hale, Anne Francis, John McIntire, Warner Anderson--don't have much to work with, and the dialogue is mediocre throughout. Franz Waxman's dynamic, stirring score is wasted also, and deserves a better film. The movie looks anachronistic for its year of release (1953), and might have worked better had it been made in black and white, five or ten years earlier, while color just makes it seem artificial and unreal. I kept on expecting Lon Chaney, Jr. to turn into an alligator man every time he showed up.

As a serious study of a corrupt demagogue this film is clearly useless. There are simply too many ludicrous scenes. Let's list two, shall we? First there's the one where the demagogue's mistress attempts to feed his wife to the gators (yeah, you read that right) only to have the wife decide, when the attempt fails, not to rat her out. Then there's that trial scene where we are asked to believe that a judge, even a crooked one, would allow a man who is bleeding to death from multiple gunshot wounds to take the stand. As a biopic of Huey Long this film also falls short, mostly due to Cagney, with his pathetically inept try at a cracker accent and being ten, no make that twenty, years too old for the part coming in a distant second to Broderick Crawford who deservedly picked up the Oscar for "All The King's Men". However, (and it's this "however" that makes "Lion" a fairly good movie) as a study of mob violence and the suddenness of its onset and the scariness of its furor director Raoul Walsh and scenarist Luther Davis are not only on firmer ground than in their attempts to show how power corrupts but they are on strong prophetic ground as well with the scenes of Cagney, (who was born in Manhattan), refusing to concede, inciting a riot and exhorting his rioters to march on the state capitol, all eerily reminiscent of the behavior of another native New Yorker on Jan. 6, 2021. At this point, roughly the last third of the film, I became mesmerized. Give it a B minus. PS...The only performance that stood out for me was Onslow Stevens as a Southern version of Edward Arnold in "Mr Smith". Haven't really seen much of this actor's work, a condition I hope to rectify.