Le bar aux illusions

I have now seen every movie James Cagney has made. For some reason, until recently this film hasn't been on television for years. While Maltin found this film disappointing, I really enjoyed it. It is a cozy sort of movie with about 98% of the film taking place in a barroom. Cagney is terrific as the man who sits at the table observing life as it passes him by. Everyone who comes in talks to him. Cagney's real life sister Jeanne, gives a fine performance as the daydreaming girl from Chicago. William Bendix has to be one of the greatest character actors of all time. His performance as Nick, the owner of the bar, glues the film together. This movie was well worth the wait.

It was an interesting idea to film this William Saroyan play, which does not seem to lend itself particularly well to a screen adaptation. It turned out well enough, and in particular most of the characters are brought to life believably and effectively. James Cagney stars in what is quite an atypical role for him, and he is backed up by a good cast of character actors.

The story has Cagney as Joe, a regular at Nick's saloon who watches everyone come and go. Rather than a main story line, there are instead a number of things happening in the lives of the characters - some are important and some trivial, but all of them matter to the characters themselves. To make it work as a movie, it is essential that the cast makes the characters realistic and worth caring about, and in that regard they succeed pretty well.

William Bendix is very enjoyable as Nick, and the cast also includes Jimmy Lydon, Cagney's sister Jeanne, and Tom Powers, who is pretty effective as a menacing bully. Even most of the minor characters get some good moments of their own.

This is the kind of movie that can be pretty enjoyable if you are in the right mood for it, but that won't seem like much if you aren't. Most of it relies on simple conversation and interaction among the characters, and it has a decidedly offbeat feel to it, but if/when that's what you're in the mood for, then this works rather well.

James Cagney had an affinity for nostalgic type stories and if The Time of Your Life is a contemporary piece for 1939 when it made its Broadway debut, it has a nostalgic feel to it.

No real plot here, just a whole group of character studies about the various habitués of Nick's Place on the San Francisco Embarcadero in the Thirties. The observer here is Joe, a man who just whiles a way the hours observing humankind in the bar with no visible means of support. He must be a retired civil servant on a pension like me. Maybe that's why I like the film so much.

Two members of the original Broadway cast did the film version, Reginald Beane the black piano player and William Bendix as Nick, owner and proprietor of the place. By that time Bendix was a big star with The Life of Riley on radio and he must have cost Cagney a bundle. But Bill Bendix is always worth it.

The villain of the piece is Tom Powers who either played thugs or policemen in film. As Blick, he's a bottom feeding scuzzball who either informs on people or blackmails them depending on how he can make some dirty money. In this case he focuses on a young woman with a shady past played by the star's sister Jeanne Cagney. It's probably her best film role.

Someone else remarked in a review that he thought it was timely that The Time of Your Life came out in 1948 as the McCarthy era was getting underway. True enough, but I believe that author William Saroyan had a specific political target in mind in 1939 in Congressman Martin Dies who headed the House Un-American Activities Committee when it was created in the late Thirties. Dies was that kind of a bullying interrogator that Blick is in the play.

Paul Draper who was the dancer/comedian in the cast was in fact blacklisted shortly after this came out. On Broadway his part was played by Gene Kelly. I guess getting Kelly from MGM would have blown Cagney's whole budget in 1948.

The Time of Your Life has always struck me as kind of an anti-The Iceman Cometh another play set in a tavern. But that one is by Eugene O'Neill and no one ever accused O'Neill of being optimistic. O'Neill's characters in his play are as pessimistic a lot as Saroyan's are optimistic. The two works really ought to be seen back to back.

The tavern as a setting for theater has a tradition that goes from Falstaff to Cheers. The Time of Your Life is an honorable addition to the tradition.

From what I'd heard of this film, I was expecting something dull and boring and Eugene O'Neill-ish.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was a lot to love in this film. In fact, it left me happy and smiling. James Cagney's character is so off-the-wall in comparison to his other film roles. He just sits quietly, leading a seemingly monotonous life. He listens to a couple of songs over and over; he drinks champagne. Most of all he interferes for good in other people's lives.

I also watched this film because I'm fascinated with Jeanne Cagney and how much she looked like her brother. It's great to see James and Jeanne working together, particularly in this story, where he's playing an Irishman and she's Polish - but she's got his face. Yes, I'm easily amused.

It's a random film. It appears on the surface to be patched together and no, it's not action packed and fast-paced. But look beneath the surface, and you'll see it's about the value of observing, paying attention to things and people around you, and acting on what you see. We all could do with a little more of that - although I don't think we need to do it for hours on end in a bar. It can be done during normal life too.

I felt this film moved along pretty steadily. There was always some new thing popping up as something else was being resolved. And, although on the surface everything is resolved in the end, there are still a lot of questions one asks. I won't go into details here - I'll let you discover for yourself... and I strongly recommend you should do so!!

In this adaptation of William Saroyan's award-winning play The Time of Your Life, James Cagney plays a gentle barfly named Joe who settles in Nick's (William Bendix) Bar with various colorful characters like an imaginative old cowboy or a tap dancing comic who can't get laughs. His sister Jeanne plays Kitty Duval, a woman who claims to once have been in burlesque. She and her brother have some of the most touching scenes in the movie. The pace takes a while to get used to but if you're in the mood for something optimistically offbeat, The Time of Your Life should be up your alley! By the way, future "Gilligan's Island" cast member Natalie Schafer plays a society woman who "slums" by going to Nick's Bar with her husband. Pretty amusing cameo.