By Andre Sennwald
It is just another gangster film at the Strand, weaker than most in its story, stronger than most in its acting, and, like most, maintaining a certain level of interest through the last burst of machine-gun fire. That was not the intention of the Warners, whose laudable motive it was to have The Public Enemy say the very last word on the subject of gang pictures. There is a prologue apprising the audience that the hoodlums and terrorists of the underworld must be exposed and the glamour ripped from them. There is an epilogue pointing the moral that civilization is on her knees and inquiring loudly as to what is to be done. And before the prologue there is a brief stage tableau, with sinuous green lighting, which shows a puppet gangster shooting another puppet gangster in the back.
The Public Enemy does not, as its title so eloquently suggests, present a picture of the war between the underworld and the upperworld. Instead the war is one of gangsters among themselves; of sensational and sometimes sensationally incoherent murders. The motivation is lost in the general slaughter at the end, when Matt and Tom, the hoodlums with whose career of outlawry the picture is concerned, die violently.
Edward Woods and James Cagney, as Matt and Tom respectively, give remarkably lifelike portraits of young hoodlums. The story follows their careers from boyhood, through the war period, and into the early days of prohibition, when the public thirst made their peculiar talents profitable. Slugging disloyal bartenders, shooting down rival beermen, slapping their women crudely across the face, strutting with a vast self-satisfaction through their little world, they contribute a hard and true picture of the unheroic gangster.
The audiences yesterday laughed frequently and with gusto as the swaggering Matt and Tom went through their paces, and this rather took the edge off the brutal picture the producers appeared to be trying to serve up. The laughter was loudest and most deserved when the two put a horse "on the spot," the reason being that the animal had had the temerity to throw Nails Nathan, the gang leader.
There is a reminder of newspaper headlines toward the close when Tom, lying wounded in a hospital, is kidnapped and murdered. The acting throughout is interesting, with the exception of Jean Harlow, who essays the role of a gangster's mistress. Beryl Mercer as Tom's mother, Robert Emmett O'Connor as a gang chief, and Donald Cook as Tom's brother, do splendidly.
THE PUBLIC ENEMY (MOVIE)
Directed by William A. Wellman; written by Kubec Glasmon, John Bright, and Harvey Thew, based on the story "Beer and Blood" by Mr. Bright; cinematographer, Dev Jennings; edited by Ed McCormick; music by David Mendoza; art designer, Max Parker; produced by Darryl F. Zanuck; released by Warner Brothers. Black and white. Running time: 83 minutes.
Source: The New York Times, April 24, 1931