Avaliações de usuários

A flop Broadway show, Penny Arcade, served as the vehicle for the joint debuts of James Cagney and Joan Blondell on the big screen. Both Cagney and Blondell repeat the roles they played on Broadway and both received a lot more notice than nominal stars Grant Withers and Evelyn Knapp.

Penny Arcade only ran for 24 performances on Broadway, no doubt the Depression played a part in closing it as it did many shows that season. Retitling it Sinner's Holiday, the film is about the Delano family who run an amusement concession in Coney Island. Lucille LaVerne is the tough minded mother and she's got daughter Knapp and sons Cagney and Ray Gallagher working for her. She's a tyrannical old woman, who's determined to see that none of her kids get into the illegal booze business for the quick money.

Unfortunately Cagney's involved up to his eyeballs with another concession owner, Warren Hymer, whose place is used as a front for the sale and transportation of illegal whiskey. Cagney and Hymer quarrel and Cagney shoots Hymer dead.

LaVerne is quite willing to see petty drifter Grant Withers take the fall for her son even though Knapp's falling for him. She holds out that Knapp can do better for herself, like this crowd of Carnies ever could.

Cagney's screen presence overawes the rest of the cast with the possible exception of Blondell who provides Cagney with an alibi for the shooting. You can easily tell who was heading for stardom in this bunch.

Grant Withers at the time was a promising leading man who was married around this time to Loretta Young, ever so briefly. He had a lot of substance abuse problems and faded gradually into supporting parts. John Ford used him occasionally as he got older and John Wayne always found work for him in several of his films. Cagney was still in support of Withers the following year in Other Men's Women, but in 1954 Withers had a supporting part as an outlaw leader in Cagney's western, Run For Cover. Withers committed suicide in 1959.

Sinner's Holiday is an entertaining enough film, but it really could have been a classic if Cagney had played Withers's role. William Wellman eventually remedied that in Public Enemy.

Gotta love these old pre-code black and white films; there is a great scene where if the fair-goer hits the target, the girl sitting on a swing lifts up her dress for a little "show". This straight-forward no-surprises murder story takes place during prohibition , in a penny arcade, which was also the name of the play on which it is based. It stars Cagney in his very first performance in 1930, brought in from the original play; Also in a big role is Joan Blondell, who had already made four films, but would go on to make eight more films with Cagney, as well as over 150 films on her own. The top bills are Grant Withers and Evalyn Knapp, and Lucille Laverne, who had all started in silents. Also love the plain-talking mother who has an opinion on everything and everybody. John Adolfi, the director, had started as an actor in 1907, and worked mostly in silent films. This was one of his last movies as director. Due to its age, the sound and picture quality is a little iffy, but enjoy it as a fun, plain, simple story.

In 1929, James Cagney and Joan Blondell (neither of them well-known at the time) played supporting roles in a Broadway drama called "Penny Arcade". Warner Brothers bought the film rights and brought Cagney and Blondell to Hollywood to repeat their stage roles in the screen version, retitled "Sinner's Holiday". This was the first movie for both of them. (Blondell's second film, a quickie, was released before "Sinner's Holiday", a more prestigious picture.) The actual star of this film is Grant Withers, playing a gangster who's made a lot of enemies and needs a place to hide before he gets rubbed out. Withers is pretty good, and he deserves to be better known. Cagney's role is much smaller, but he's absolutely electrifying. As soon as he steps on screen, there's no question that he's the best actor in this movie ... one of the best actors in the history of films, in fact.

Joan Blondell is boring in this film, as usual. Her appeal has always eluded me. At least in her other films she usually had something to do; here, she doesn't. There are good performances by Lucille LaVerne and Warren Hymer, in his usual typecast role as a dim gangster. Hank Mann, who was one of the original Keystone Cops (and who eventually outlived all the other Keystone Cops), is excellent here in a small role.

"Sinner's Holiday" suffers from the usual Warner Brothers complaint: low budget-itis. I saw the trailer for this film before I saw the movie itself. The trailer features a shot of amusement park rides in a funfair. This is obviously stock footage, but at least I expected the stock shot to turn up in the movie itself. Surprisingly, it doesn't. There's almost nothing on screen to convince you that this movie takes place in an amusement park. It looks like a stage play recorded on film, rather than a movie in its own right. Still, "Sinner's Holiday" has much to recommend it, and Cagney's performance alone is worth your time. I'll rate this movie 6 out of 10 points, or 7 if you're a Cagney fan. If you're a Joan Blondell fan, I don't want to know about it.

It's the Coney Island boardwalk amusement park. Ma Delano runs a penny arcade and lives above it with her children Jennie, Joe, and Harry (James Cagney). Mitch McKane runs a bootleg operation under them and has his eye on Jennie but Angel Harrigan beats him to her by weeks and months. Harry gets involved with Mitch and one night, he shoots Mitch dead in a confrontation. He hides his crime as the police investigates. He confesses to Ma who tries to frame everything on Angel.

I don't think that I've ever seen Cagney play such a sniveling little punk, at least not to this extent. It's interesting and a little fun. He's not the lead in this one. It's really really early in his career. It's his first credited role. It's also fun to see the sleaziness of the amusement carnival laid out in this pre-Code talkie. There is something edgy while being innocent.

On a Coney Island arcade, a corpse turns up.

John Adolfi's movie version has not aged particularly well. Likewise. Many of the performances do not stand up to 90 decades. While Evalyn Knapp, Jimmy Cagney and Joan Blondell (Jimmy and Joan had taken the same roles in the Broadway production) are fine in their roles, the whole seems an uneasy morality play and the other actors give stagey line readings. Cagney and Blondell are still working their way through, but their staginess seems to fit the characters and Jimmy's nervous energy delivers a punch.

This is a fun movie. Great to see some true movie stars in their earliest roles.

But the movie suddenly ends. It's as if they realized they were down to their last reel of film and decided to jump ahead several pages to the final scene.

It's still worth seeing.

Middling Pre-Coder that's notable for being the film debuts of James Cagney and Joan Blondell (with her natural hair color, no less). The plot's about a family that runs a waterfront penny arcade and the trouble the youngest son (Cagney) gets into, including bootlegging and killing a guy. One for Cagney fans to check off their list but it's really not that great. The characters are all pretty unlikable and Jimmy shows little of that trademark charm & swagger in the role of a sniveling punk. Public Enemy would play to his strengths much better and, of course, make him a star. Lucille La Verne plays Cagney's mom and she hams it up in every scene. Grant Withers is pretty good as the ne'er-do-well turned good by the love of a woman. That woman being lovely Evalyn Knapp. She was my favorite part of the whole picture. The scene with her and Withers under the pier is probably the film's highlight. It's an early talkie so it creaks and groans but at least it doesn't seem like a filmed stage play, so points for that. Still, after it's over, you won't be in any hurry to tell your friends about it.

This busy little film that was originally entitled "Penny Arcade" was retitled "Sinners Holiday" for no other reason than the fact that there were several films put out in 1930 with "Holiday" in the title that were successful. This film may have its fair share of sinners, but nobody is really on holiday in this fast-talking fast-paced little piece of Vitaphone history.

James Cagney starts out his career with Warner Brothers pretty much where he ended it - crying on his mother's lap just as he did in "White Heat" - the lap of a mother that will do anything to keep her baby out of trouble. Cagney plays Harry Delano, a tough guy who thinks he's tougher and smarter than he really is. His family runs the Penny Arcade in the amusement park. Evelyn Knapp plays his sister, Jennie. Jennie is in love with amusement park smart guy Angel Harrigan (Grant Withers), an ex-con and handyman at the arcade who has the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time when Ma Delano needs a fall guy to save her son Harry. It also doesn't help any that Ma Delano doesn't approve of Jennie's plans to marry Angel.

James Cagney gets more screen time in his first film than he does in any film until he gets his big break in Public Enemy. There is also a pretty good role for Joan Blondell in her first screen appearance as Myrtle, some-time girlfriend of Harry - also someone Ma Delano doesn't approve of. Who exactly did Ma Delano think her kids were going to wind up with while working in the amusement park? Wall Street types?

How did Cagney and Blondell end up together in this film, you might ask? Al Jolson bought the film rights to the Broadway production of "Penny Arcade" and would only sell it to Warner Brothers if Cagney and Blondell reprised their roles. Why he did this nobody knows, since Al Jolson was hardly known as a benefactor. However, in doing this he saved Warner Brothers a second time. The first time was in putting the studio on top in talking pictures, this second time he gift wrapped two actors that were perfect for the urban look and feel that the studio had been going for but had been having a rough time succeeding in getting right with the actors they were employing.

In summary, this film is full of the interesting minor characters, urban slang, and fast talking that make the early talking Warner Brothers films so much fun.

I could tell from the trailer for SINNERS' HOLIDAY that this is a film I could very well do without viewing--but I tuned in to see Cagney in his debut performance.

This is a museum piece, creaky in plot and development with abysmal stage dialogue and unnatural performances from GRANT WITHERS and EVELYN KNAPP, both of whom get top billing but neither one able to act their way out of a paper bag.

JAMES CAGNEY has the thankless role of the son caught up in a murder charge, a n'er-do-well punk with a trampy girlfriend (JOAN BLONDELL in unflattering make-up and hairstyle), and a harridan for a mother (LUCILLE La VERNE), the woman who gave The Witch a voice in Disney's "Snow White" several years later. None of these characters have any depth or engage the viewer for more than a few seconds. La Verne is particularly unpleasant in the central mother role.

Summing up: Nothing good to say about this one, except that Cagney alone deserves praise for his crying scene. He really throws himself into the part.

This is obviously a quickie churned out by the Warner factory in the early '30s as a part of their crime drama series.

In 1930 with the advent of sound they were having to re-learn how to make moving pictures. Like most films of this year, this was essentially a filmed stage play so it doesn't quite feel the way a movie should. It is very stagey, the actors virtually stand in line projecting their voices to a surreptitiously placed microphone in what look like theatre sets. That said, this is worth seeing if only for the fascinating use of 1920s/1930s slang to differentiate between the generations. Weird that 'tickled pink' was the slang of the streets back then - can't imagine 21st street gang members saying that these days! Another reason this is worth seeing is that the mother is actually the wicked queen from Snow White!!!!

Of course the main reason you'll want to see this is because it's James Cagney and Joan Blondell's first film. Although Joan only has a small part you can tell she's destined for greater things. Cagney however is of a different class altogether to everyone else. Unlike the rest of the cast, he is doing proper movie acting. His naturalness, his screen presence makes him almost anachronistic, like he's been superimposed from something made years later. Apparently he was considered for this film's main role but they thought that the early recording equipment wasn't quite good enough to record his hard-boiled accent. You can certainly see why he could command such a massive salary and how he would be essential to the future success of Warner Brothers.

This is a must-see film which captures a specific time and place: the prohibition-era Atlantic City Boardwalk scene.

This movie was released in 1930 at the height of prohibition and the beginning of The Great Depression.

It is the first film teaming of Cagney and Blondell, lifelong friends.

They acted these roles in the theater before the rights were purchased by Al Jolson to sell the script to Warner Brothers.

The scenes showed would have been absolutely scandalous five years later when the code went into effect.

The acting is great from the top down.

Cagney is at his most raw and gripping.

Great story which truly depicts the period and place with a reality-based tone that is hard to find in pictures anymore.

Quite short even for the time period at 60 minutes, this film is notable only for being James Cagney's film debut, and for being the first of seven that paired him with Joan Blondell. The film titillates us early on with pre-Code naughtiness; for example, a penny arcade game, "Hit The Bull, Up She Goes", which has a woman seated next to a bulls-eye that, when hit with a ball, causes her to flip 90 degrees upwards and reveal her legs. Another is seeing a bathing outfit on leggy Evalyn Knapp that would fit right in in 2016. Unfortunately, the story is pretty simple and the film is marred by poor acting, most notably by lead Grant Withers, who's hard to watch. Even Cagney is uncharacteristically off in his performance. The only exception is Blondell, 24 years old and in her second film role, appearing as a tough-talking brunette, who steals every scene she's in.

They just knew how to get down to business without wasting time in the early 1930s. In one hour flat this one has more plot and snappy dialogue and makes more sense than many films twice as long.

The film is set in a sleazy amusement park, mostly girlie shows, run by low-level grifters who tell the truth about anything only if it suits their purposes. Most are fairly innocuous but there are some hard cases ultimately leading to violence.

Although Grant Withers as drifter Angel Harrigan gets top billing, the central character is really elderly and unattractive Ma Delano (Lucille La Verne), who's in charge of the place. Though no more ethical than the others she at least tries to keep things under control while looking after her three grown children.

The eldest, Joe (Ray Gallagher in a small part) is a solid citizen but younger brother Harry (early James Cagney) is running around with hoodlums and virtuous but hot-to-trot daughter Jennie (Evalyn Knapp) wants to marry Harrigan over Ma's objections.

In a few years Cagney would be a big star while Withers' star would be fading. Whoever had the idea that in this film Withers should deliver his many wisecracks in a mock-effeminate voice did his career no favors. Cagney leaps out at you in his over-the-top hyperactive style that might have been annoying in a less talented actor but set the pace for leading men of the decade.

Knapp is fetching and convincing despite having to plow through occasional sappy dialogue. Warren Hymer is effective as a bad guy, as are Joan Blondell as Cagney's cynical girl friend and Purnell Pratt as a hard-boiled but sympathetic police detective.

Many similar films have a happy or unhappy ending that seems arbitrarily chosen but this one has a cynical finale that you won't see coming.

Save for the debut of James Cagney and Joan Blondell Sinner's Holiday is a rather lifeless early sound experiment of urban lingo spoken from the side of most of the cast's mouth. Chuck full of cynicism and greed with a murder and sappy romance thrown in for good measure it flounders from the outset.

Ma Delano runs a penny arcade on the midway with her three kids. Two contribute but youngest Harry (Cagney) would rather work where the big money is with bootlegger Mitch McKane. After McKane fires his barker Angel Harrigan (Grant Withers) Ma takes him on. When Mc Kane ends up dead Harrigan becomes the prime suspect.

Sinner's Holiday is filled with hard boiled eggs but most are rotten. It's endless tough talk and little else as director John Adolfi, probably ham strung by the microphone does little to bring any verve or suspense to his scenes. The mercurial Cagney and sassy Blondell bring some life to their limited roles but Withers sarcastic lead looks bored most of the time and Evelyn Knapp as his love interest about as engrossed as he. Holiday is no way to enjoy one.

Sinner's Holiday (1930)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Somewhat interesting drama about a small time crook (James Cagney) who kills a man in self defense but let's his sister's boyfriend (Grant Withers) take the blame. The most interesting aspect of this film is the fact that it was Cagney and Joan Blondell's screen debut. The film takes place inside Coney Island, which is another interesting thing to see. Other than that this early talkie is like many others of its day. There's way too much talking and none of it is very interesting. The direction is also pretty weak and there's just not too much life in the story. The relationship between Cagney and his mother played by Lucille LaVerne is also very strange in an incest type of way.

Ah, life on the Boardwalk in Coney Island and the penny arcades. Scenes long gone and never to return. Actors Jimmy Cagney (in his film debut at 31) and Joan Blondell (working on her fourth or fifth husband) head this cast of unknowns in a script that was written during lunch hour at some office in Manhattan. The plot is convoluted, the characters are as shallow as low tide, and the action is minimal. Other than that, this is one of the greatest films ever made. Seriously though folks, don't waste your time on this turkey unless you want to get a peek at Cagney's debut (which is actually a good enough reason to watch).

This being James Cagney's first film you see the reason that Warner signed him, his character in this is a Mischievous young man and this ends up with him making a very big mistake. His mother played by Lucille La Verne is the typical mothering figure protecting her little boy including her telling him and other members of the family off for their own good is funny and Cagney playing alongside The likes of Joan Blondell and Evalyn Knapp just makes this short 1 hour film a cute little tale. Cagney and Blondell are so alike in their acting and giggles that they went on to make a fair few films together and they do it so well.

great acting, short but sweet film and a great start for Cagney

I like James Cagney films because of the characters he plays. He's usually tough or funny and never plays the pretty boy. This was certainly the weakest character I've ever seen him play, but Cagney wasn't the reason this movie was below average; it was Evelyn Knapp.

"Sinner's Holiday" took place at Coney Island. It was noisy and slightly debaucherous. Ma Delano (Lucille La Verne) ran a penny arcade and she ran her two children: Harry (James Cagney) and Jenny (Evelyn Knapp). They couldn't take a breath without Ma's knowledge. She kept tabs on the two of them at all times. Even still she didn't know that her baby boy had gotten mixed up with a bootlegger named Mitch McKane (Warren Hymer).

When Mitch had to go to trial for a murder he left Harry in charge of his operation. When Mitch was acquitted he came back looking for Harry. The word was that Harry had been stealing from Mitch. It was going to be curtains for Harry if the rumor was true.

I've watched dozens of movies from the 30's. Many of them I don't like, but there are some that are quite good. Even though they're black & white and the acting is different and the lingo is different, I can get into the movie as long as it's a good plot. I'm still getting used to "hooey" and "swell" as frequently used slangs.

James Cagney, Lucille La Verne, and Joan Blondell (playing Harry's girl, Myrtle) were perfectly fine, while Evelyn Knapp left a lot to be desired. In fact, I like the Cagney Blondell combo. This was their first movie together, but they went on to do "Other Men's Women," "The Public Enemy," "Blonde Crazy," and "The Crowd Roars" (of what I've seen). Evelyn Knapp didn't do enough to sink the movie, but she sure didn't help.

Free on Odnoklassniki.