Picture Snatcher

I would imagine that most 1933 audiences found themselves mightily entertained by “Picture Snatcher.” It holds up very well today, as most 1930s James Cagney pictures do.

A lot of the credit goes to Cagney of course, that most dynamic of actors. But much of it has to with the Warner Bros. house style. It doesn’t let up for a minute and one scene leads logically to the next. Reliable director Lloyd Bacon sure knew how to keep things hopping.

Back in the 1930s when big cities like New York and Chicago had five, six or more daily papers the competition was fierce, and “Picture Snatcher” captures those days well. A flurry of bodies moving to and fro, the noise of the typesetters, editors barking into phones and drinking from bottles in the bottom desk drawer. If this wasn’t how newspapers were back then, it’s how they should have been.

In “Picture Snatcher”, Cagney plays Danny Kean, recently released from prison. He’s met by his old gang, but is determined this time to go straight. He goes to the Graphic News, the daily rag with the worst reputation in the city, to get a job. City Editor McLean (Ralph Bellamy) would like to give him a job, but can’t. Cagney decides to make them give him a job by getting a picture of a fireman who is holding off the cops, and the press, at bay in a burned out apartment building after the fireman found his wife and her lover in bed together. He torched the place and won’t come out.

Cagney succeeds in getting the interview in a very funny scene by pretending to be an insurance adjustor and getting an estimate on the damage. He gets the story and the picture, which nabs him a job on the Graphic News as a photographer, aka picture snatcher.

There’s really no plot, but a series of sequences where Cagney gets photos that the other news photographers can’t. One sequence, based on fact, has him sneaking a camera into an execution chamber and getting a photo just as the juice is turned on.

This being a 1930s Cagney picture, there has to be a doll to trade insults and kisses with and this time its not Joan Blondell, but Patricia Ellis, playing a college cutie who wants a job in journalism. She’s also the daughter of a cop who put Danny away years ago. The cop is played by Robert Emmett O’Connor, who played the befuddled cop in the Marx Bros. classic “A Night at the Opera” (1935) and he’s still befuddled here, thought less so. He likes Danny Kean and wants to see him go straight, but not with his daughter.

Alice White plays Bellamy’s girl who is not above batting her eyes at Danny. There’s a couple scenes where he slaps her around in the best Cagney style. Has any actor ever gotten away with smacking women around without losing sympathy as Cagney did? I don’t think so.

The film concludes with a mass gunfight when the police are out to get Jerry the Mug, an old comrade of Danny’s. (I like that name, Jerry the Mug. So gloriously Warner Brothers). Of course, he knows where Danny’s is holed up, and if Danny can sneak in, he can maybe get some photos of Jerry the Mug’s final minutes. The cops fire enough bullets into Jerry the Mug’s apartment for a small war. I’m not sure “The Longest Day” (1962) fired as many bullets as the cops do here.

I wonder if contemporary audiences would find the Danny Kean character unlikeable? He’ll do anything, or trick anyone, to get that front page photo. However, it’s likely Depression-era audiences, not knowing when the next bomb was going to drop, was cheering him on the whole way.

Rating for “Picture Snatcher”: Three stars.