Click here to copy URL

The Public Enemy

1931

William A. Wellman

James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Edward Woods, Joan Blondell ...

7.6

4,583

Film noir A young hoodlum rises up through the ranks of the Chicago underworld, even as a gangster's accidental death threatens to spark a bloody mob war.

	Author	Review
United Kingdom	Jake Hamilton Empire	"Still a classic of the gangster genre, showing neither glorifying the life nor pulling it's punches. (...) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United Kingdom	David Thomson The Guardian	"The deepest appeal of this 74-minute study in insolence is that Cagney is cock of the walk."	POS
United States	Marjorie Baumgarten Austin Chronicle	"This criminal tale excited audiences and landed the kinetic Cagney on the movie map. Now a classic, this is the movie in which Cagney famously crams a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face."	POS
United States	Chris Barsanti Slant	"There’s little denying the power of Cagney’s presence (...) It’s a performance so perfect in its intensity that any other quibbles about the film ultimately recede into insignificance."	POS
United States	Chicago Tribune	"Classic, grim, unusually violent gangster film"	POS
United States	Entertainment Weekly	"Cagney’s tommy-gun delivery and dancer’s grace make underworld life seductively enthralling."	POS
United States	Los Angeles Times	"If there are to be gangster pictures, let them be like The Public Enemy, hard-boiled and vindictive almost to the point of burlesque."	POS
United States	Matt Zoller Seitz rogerebert.com	"'The Public Enemy' isn't as tightly scripted a movie as some other Cagney gangster pictures. Even at 81 minutes, it meanders a bit, and one setpiece doesn't often seem to follow another, logically or psychologically."	NEU
United States	Variety Staff Variety	"There's no lace on this picture. It's raw and brutal. It's low-brow material given such workmanship as to make it high-brow."	POS
United Kingdom	Geoff Andrew Time Out	"Cagney's energy and Wellman's gutsy direction carry the day, counteracting the moralistic sentimentality of the script and indelibly etching the star on the memory as a definitive gangster hero."	POS

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.