(1940)3Bruce EderBy the end of the 1930s, James Cagney was one of Warner Bros.' top stars and had bested the studio management every way that it was possible to do so -- he'd even managed to get out of his original contract, thanks to the studio's having violated its terms and losing in court. Once back at Warner Bros., he was not only looking for better, more challenging roles, but better pictures in which to play them, and was in a position to do something about it. This is how City for Conquest, the most ambitious picture he'd done up to that time, came about. He'd read the original 1935 novel by Aben Kandel and persuaded the studio to buy the rights; he saw the role of Danny Kenny as something new and challenging for him, and ended up getting most of his wish. Although it was pared down considerably from Kandel's book, and restructured so that the character of Danny, instead of being one of a half-dozen protagonists, was the major focus of the screenplay, the movie retained a good portion of the scope and grandeur of the book, in which New York City itself, and everything it symbolized, good and bad, was the "star" of the film. The movie also has a sense of grandeur and sweep, not too different in some ways from the symphony that Arthur Kennedy's Edward Kenny eventually writes -- indeed, only in its middle section does City for Conquest switch gears to become, for a few minutes, a relatively conventional (although still well done, in the best Warner Bros. manner) crime and boxing drama, and therein lies the film's only real flaw. Kandel's book was an attempt to write a thematically all-encompassing Great American Novel, not too different in many ways from John Dos Passos' USA (and Kandel and Dos Passos had crossed paths professionally in the 1920s). The narrative was about the city itself, as much as any of its characters, and it had a mixture of narrative sweep and lyricism that transcended any of the individual, interwoven stories contained within.
For the movie, the complexities of some of the characters and the interlocking stories were reduced considerably in scope and depth (in the book, for example, there was enough on Elia Kazan's Googi that one could have almost done a movie about him). On the other hand, producer/director Anatole Litvak was also able to bring some of the best of what Warner Bros. could offer in production values to the story. For example, the film has one of the finest of Max Steiner's scores from this period, one in which Steiner was able to slip what amounted to a chunk of a symphony into the movie, in an unusual extended music sequence at the end that also helped to make this one of the most ambitiously structured movies of its period. In addition, the physical look of the film, and the presence of a superb range of actors (with some serious New York-spawned talent at its core) helped give the film a verisimilitude, along with a rough-hewn beauty, that made the whole production work well for almost nine-tenths of its length. Cagney ended up delivering one of his finest performances to date, in a memorably powerful yet vulnerable persona. His portrayal of Danny is excellent throughout, but never more so than in the second half, after his sight is gone; there his work is beautifully nuanced, subtle, and convincing. And Ann Sheridan, handed a beefier role than she usually got, plays Peggy Nash with a level of sensitivity and understated sophistication that puts it with her best work, anticipating her performance in Kings Row. The movie as a whole falls perhaps slightly short of its ambitions because of the boxing sequence, which brings it a little too far down to earth, but it gets rescued by their performances and an enviable array of supporting work by Frank McHugh, Donald Crisp, George Tobias, a young Elia Kazan, and Arthur Kennedy (in his screen debut), plus Steiner's music and some exceptional photography by Sol Polito and James Wong Howe.
This film, incidentally, exists in two distinctly different edits. In the original 106-minute version, Frank Craven is present at the opening and closing, and at various points in the films as "The Old Timer," who tells the story we're seeing, and we are also introduced to Danny, Peggy, Ed, and Googi as children on Forsyth Street. Craven's presence is somewhat similar to the role of the Stage Manager that he played a year or so earlier in the film version of Thornton Wilder's Our Town; and Craven is also very much present in the original trailer. But for about 50 years, ever since it was cut for a 1948 reissue, the only way to see City for Conquest, on TV or in repertory theaters, or on VHS or laserdisc, was in that shorter 96-minute version, which eliminates the device of The Old Timer's narrative and cuts out virtually Craven's entire role, as well as removing most of the early scenes depicting life on Forsyth Street and introduces Danny, Ed, Peggy et al. as adults. The original version was restored to circulation without much fanfare on the 2006 DVD edition. The longer cut may seem more pretentious, although it's also more balanced in its structure and content, and it does frame the characters better; the shorter version offers more immediacy in the narrative without the presence of Craven's storyteller, but it also ends too abruptly because of the editing, and loses some of the scope of the original's narrative structure. When one watches it, there is clearly something missing, even if one is totally unfamiliar with the longer version. In any case, as of 2006, only the latter is extant.
There are three key characters in Anatole Litvak's filmization of Aben Kandel's novel City for Conquest, as opposed to the six or more in the book -- but the real star, to a large extent, is New York City and its entire population. For purposes of the movie, however, the dramatic arc is linked to James Cagney, as honest, unpretentious truck driver Danny Kenny, whose life is involved with two other people -- his kid brother, Ed (Arthur Kennedy), a gifted musician trying to survive in the rough-and-tumble world of New York's Lower East Side, and Peggy Nash (Ann Sheridan), the neighborhood girl from the Lower East Side whom he's loved, one way or another, since he was a kid. Danny is happy doing what he does, driving a truck, but when Ed's scholarship is cut in half, he reluctantly takes an offer of a boxing match to raise the cash he needs, going into the ring under the fighting name "Young Samson." At about the same time, Peggy -- who loves to dance -- has her head turned by Murray Burns (Anthony Quinn), an ambitious but sleazy aspiring professional dancer. Eventually Peggy goes into partnership with Murray and is ultimately driven by her own ambition to leave Danny after she accepts his marriage proposal. By now, he's getting up in the boxing world, and in his bitterness over losing Peggy he accepts a bout for the world's welterweight championship. He's not overmatched as a boxer, but the money involved in this fight is just too big for it to be honest, and Danny is left all but blinded when his opponent's handlers slip resin dust onto his gloves. Danny is left seemingly a shell of a man, though he's content with his lot in life as far as it goes. He doesn't want any special attention or favors from anyone; the only thing he would like, though he's too proud to admit it, would be for Peggy to come back. But by now her dancing career with Murray has fallen apart, and she's too tortured by guilt, over the sequence of events she helped start, to come near Danny. It falls to Ed, who has never given up composing, to express the inexpressibles that each of these characters feels through his music. His first major classical work is a symphony ostensibly about New York City, which he conducts in its premiere at Carnegie Hall; but it's also about Danny and his life, and his dreams.
