The Time of Your Life (William Cagney Productions, United Artists, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Way I See It I looked for something to watch in the next couple of hours and found it in The Time of Your Life, which I had out as part of the American Movie Classics boxed set of four films with James Cagney that contained films from the two major interregna between his long-standing association with Warner Bros.: the 1936-37 period in which he was able to break his Warners contract legally and signed with a promising indie called Grand National after the other major studios refused to risk Jack Warner’s wrath by signing him (Warners eventually won his contract back on appeal and so after his two Grand National films, Great Guy and Something to Sing About, he returned to the Warners fold for Angels with Dirty Faces, ironically a project Grand National had developed for him) and again between 1943 and 1948. Cagney’s Warners contract had officially ended with Yankee Doodle Dandy, a biopic of legendary Broadway star and playwright George M. Cohan (who managed the interesting feat of acting in two live Broadway plays simultaneously: the theatres were next door to each other and, since Cohan had written both plays, he timed them so his character would be off-stage in one when he was on-stage in the other) that gave Cagney a rare opportunity to perform as the song-and-dance man he always said he was at heart (in his autobiography he said that his biggest career regret was he got to do so few musicals), won him an Academy Award and made Warner Bros. a ton of money.

Cagney decided to form his own production company, made his brother William Cagney the CEO, and signed a releasing deal with United Artists -- though he occasionally free-lanced for other studios, including the quite good semidocumentary World War II spy drama 13 Rue Madeleine for 20th Century-Fox. For what turned out to be the last Cagney Brothers production, the Cagneys selected William Saroyan’s play The Time of Your Life, which had won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Critics’ Circle award (the Tony Awards didn’t yet exist) and was obviously a “prestige” piece of work. It’s about a lowlife bar on the San Francisco waterfront called Nick’s Place, after its owner -- who surprisingly is not played by Cagney but by a relatively restrained William Bendix. (Bendix was a first-rate character actor, but unfortunately what was potentially his greatest performance -- in Raymond Chandler’s 1946 script The Blue Dahlia, as Buzz, the World War II navy veteran who had been driven homicidally crazy by the stresses of combat -- was disemboweled by the U.S. Navy. They said that if Paramount went ahead with Chandler’s original ending, with Bendix’s character having killed Alan Ladd’s faithless wife in an attack of PTSD, the Navy would never again cooperate with any Paramount film -- so the studio told Chandler to rewrite the ending so another character was the killer, and Chandler responded with one of the lamest and least believable pieces of writing of his whole career.)

Cagney plays Joe, a philosophical bar “regular” who seems to have some money even though he doesn’t have a job or any discernible source of income and who seems to get his kicks tormenting the other patrons in general and one specific patron in particular, Tom (played by Cagney’s fellow Warners refugee Wayne Morris), whom he sends on ridiculous errands like going to the Emporium department store (a fabled San Francisco landmark for decades) and buying toys, and later challenging him to a gum-chewing contest to see which one can get the most amount of stuff in his mouth at once. The bar is filled with other eccentric “regulars,” including aspiring tap-dancer Harry (Paul Draper, who’s quite good even though I wonder how Cagney felt about not being able to dance himself even in a movie he and his brother were co-producing!); Willie (Richard Erdman), who’s constantly playing the bar’s pinball machine until he finally hits a jackpot (remember that in this era pinball machines were a form of gambling, like slot machines, and many of the noir pulp-magazine stories revolved around fights between different factions of organized crime to control them; later pinball machines carried a warning, “For Amusement Only,” to let the cops know they were not gambling devices); Wesley (Reginald Beane), a Black pianist who wanders into the action, gets a job as Nick’s piano player and ends up as Harry’s accompanist; a well-to-do middle-aged couple who end up at Nick’s on a “slumming” trip; Dudley Raoul Bostwick (Jimmy Lydon, who’d previously starred in a series called “The Aldrich Family” for Paramount that was essentially a knockoff of the Hardy Family movies at MGM -- so Lydon was basically their Mickey Rooney), who spends much of the movie trying to get his would-be girlfriend Eloise on the phone even though she’s told her parents she doesn’t want to speak to him; a middle-aged woman whom Dudley calls by mistake when he gets Eloise’s number wrong and whom he invites to the bar only to reject her when he sees how old she is (a scene that seemed gratuitously cruel to me); and an old cowboy -- or at least that’s what he pretends to be -- named Murphy (James Barton) who either claims to be or is genuinely deluded enough to believe he’s Kit Carson.

Ironically, by far the best performance in this movie is delivered by someone named Cagney, but who isn’t the star; she’s James and William Cagney’s sister Jeanne, and she plays Kitty Duval, an edgy burned-out woman who claims to have been a star in burlesque. Her real name is Katerina Koronovsky and she’s from Chicago, where she served a two-year sentence for a crime screenwriter Nathaniel Greene had to left unspecified due to the Production Code but which is obviously prostitution. (I haven’t read Saroyan’s original play, so I don’t know whether he was more specific about Kitty’s crime than Greene could be under the Code,) She’s attracted the unwelcome attentions of Freddy Blick (Tom Powers), a professional stool pigeon who hangs around San Francisco’s sleazier bars and looks for people in trouble with the law, apparently so he can make a living turning them in and collecting the rewards on them -- though since she served her sentence it’s unclear just what he could do to her. Joe has been doing his best to redeem her, including putting her up in a classy hotel and trying to pair her with Tom -- for whom Joe also lines up a job as a long-haul truck driver between San Francisco and San Diego even though Tom doesn’t even have a driver’s license. His hope is that Tom can earn enough driving that he and Kitty can get married and settle in San Diego, where (presumably) no one knows about their past.

In the end Nick the bar owner steps out to go for a walk, leaving Tom to run the bar (given that this film is supposed to be taking place on the waterfront during a longshoremen’s strike, I expected Nick to come back beaten up by goons of one side or the other, but he doesn’t), and during that time Murphy the cowboy wanna-be takes a shot at Blick and thinks he’s killed him. Nick sees Blick unconscious and presumably dead, and puts his head in his hands and worries for the future of his license now that someone has been killed in his club -- only Blick isn’t really dead, Murphy’s shot missed and he was only knocked out by a left-handed punch from Joe: apparently the Cagney brothers realized that with five minutes of the movie left to go they’d have to put in a fistfight just to let their audiences know that despite their story’s Broadway pedigree it was still a James Cagney vehicle. Tom and Kitty pair off and leave, and the last shot for some reason is of Nick tearing up the sign that had adorned the entrance at the beginning that Nick’s was a place where you could “come in and be yourself.” (Everybody comes to Nick’s.)

I wouldn’t go so far as to call The Time of Your Life what Dwight Macdonald called “the Bad Good Movie” -- a film made with aspirations to greatness but whose basic material wasn’t nearly as strong as the filmmakers thought it was and which ended up as too pretentious for its own good -- but it’s close, and I think the fault is mostly William Saroyan’s. He was a “name” writer with a lot of successes under his belt both in novels and on the stage, but in this play I think he was trying way too hard to be Eugene O’Neill and was falling miserably short of his model. (I couldn’t help but wish through long stretches of this movie that the Cagney brothers had got the rights to O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh instead.) Aside from Kitty -- who’s a pretty stereotyped character herself but is brought to vivid, unforgettable life by Jeanne Cagney’s performance (which should have broken her career wide open; in 1948 the film noir cycle was at its height and judging from her work here, she’d have been excellent as hard-bitten noir women, but I guess she never got casting directors to take her seriously out from under the shadow of her superstar brother) -- the people in this movie are less flesh-and-blood human beings and more like schticks from Saroyan’s cliche mill.

It also doesn’t help that the second male lead is cast with someone as weak as Wayne Morris -- imagine John Garfield in his role giving the character some real flesh and sinew instead of a little milquetoast on whom Saroyan and Greene tried to pile some angst -- and for something that was clearly a prestige production the Cagneys selected an oddly weak director, H. C. Potter. It needed someone like William Wellman or William Wyler who could have built tension in a movie set almost exclusively in one locale (about the only time we get out of that damned bar is for a scene in which Tom goes to the home of a bookmaker to place a bet on a race -- and the people are watching the race on TV, which makes this one of the first movies to show a regular commercial television set in action; this was just before the major studios decided TV was the enemy and therefore they wouldn’t show televisions in movies even as a greater proportion of American homes had them; still later, of course, the studios kept themselves in business by producing series shows for TV!). The Time of Your Life is an engaging movie but far from a great one, and it’s ironic that a year after he made this expectation-bending prestige film for his own company, Cagney closed it, went back to Warners and got cast in familiar territory as a psycho gangster in White Heat -- which turned out to be one of his best-remembered and most popular films.