The James Cagney Blogathon: Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950)

The following is Thrilling Days of Yesteryear’s contribution to The James Cagney Blogathon, which is being sponsored from April 8-12 by The Movie Projector.  For a list of the other participants and the films discussed, please click here.

In 1949, after several years of independent filmmaking with his producer brother William (which produced such duds as Johnny Come Lately [1943] and The Time of Your Life [1948]), actor James Cagney returned to Warner Bros., the studio that had made him famous with the moviegoing public.  His comeback film was White Heat (1949), a rip-snortin’ gangster saga directed by Raoul Walsh that stands today as one of Cagney’s greatest films.  Warner’s made the Cagney brothers an offer they couldn’t refuse: if Jimmy agreed to star in Heat, WB would give William Cagney Productions (their independent company) a sweetheart co-distribution deal that would allow them to pay off their losses (the previously mentioned Time of Your Life was in the hole to the tune of $500,000).

Cagney had played gangster and gangster-types in many movies since his film debut in Sinner’s Holiday in 1930.  But Jimmy wasn’t overly fond of being typecast as such (every actor enjoys the opportunity to flex his thespic muscles) despite the fact…well, he was so damn good at playing them.  In 1936, when Cagney left Warner’s for an abbreviated two-picture stint at studio upstart Grand National, one of his big box office successes upon his return to WB in 1938 was Angels with Dirty Faces…another well-acknowledged Cagney classic.

In between White Heat and the mostly forgettable musical The West Point Story (1950), Cagney made what was essentially his last true gangster flick (Jimmy plays a hood in 1955’s Love Me or Leave Me—but that’s primarily a vehicle for Doris Day), Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950).  While the film as a whole doesn’t completely jell, the movie contains one of the actor’s most interesting performances…and since it rarely seems to turn up on TCM it’s definitely worth seeking out if you come across it.

Cagney plays sadistic gangster Ralph Cotter, who as the film opens is doin’ his boardin’ with the warden at a county work farm with his partner, a man named Carleton (played by an uncredited Neville Brand).  Ralph has arranged—with the help of a slightly crooked guard named Cobbett (John Halloran)—to take an extended leave of absence from the farm, and in his escape, Carleton is shot and wounded by the guards.  Cotter puts a bullet in Carleton’s brainpan to make sure he doesn’t talk, and when he reaches the area where the getaway car awaits finds Carleton’s sister Holiday (Barbara Payton) with rifle in hand, picking off the guards shooting at Ralph.  (Holiday is unaware that Ralph has plugged her brother, and Cotter is apparently too polite to volunteer the information.)

With the help of Holiday and getaway car driver Joe “Jinx” Raynor (Steve Brodie), Cotter continues his recidivist ways once on the outside; he robs a grocery store (shooting the store’s owner, who later joins Carleton in the Great Beyond) and earning the enmity of Vic Mason (Rhys Williams), the individual who bankrolled Ralph’s escape.  The weaselly Mason sics a pair of cops on Cotter—Inspector Charles Weber (Ward Bond) and Lt. John Reece (Barton MacLane)—and to Cotter’s dismay, Weber and Reece relieve him of his new ill-gotten gains because they are crookeder than a dog’s hind leg.  Drawing on Jinx’s expertise as a radio operator, Cotter arranges for Weber and Reece’s next shakedown to be recorded…and to keep the two corrupt flatfoots (flatfeet?) in line, he enlists the services of another grifter, a lawyer named Keith “Cherokee” Mandon (Luther Adler).  Ralph, Cherokee and Jinx engineer a heist in which they relieve a local racketeer named Romer of his substantial take from various criminal enterprises—something the crooked fuzz bemoan because they were originally on his payroll.

Though it seems that Ralph is on top of the world (ma), he makes that fatal mistake that all hoods make—he’s become infatuated with a socialite named Margaret Dobson (Helena Carter).  He’s been advised by his counsel (Cherokee) to run fast, run far because her father—industrialist Ezra Dobson (Herbert Hayes)—can make things mighty uncomfortable for all of them.  So Ralph, being a sensible chap, takes his lawyer’s advice.  No, of course he doesn’t—he winds up marrying Margaret, which naturally pisses her father off to the point where Daddy uses his influence to have the marriage annulled.  Because Ralph turned down some $25,000 in payoff money, however, Ezra has had second thoughts about his new son-in-law: he thinks Cotter is just the husband Margaret needs, and is going to allow him to manage her considerably substantial holdings.

Ralph does not get the chance to make the smooth transition into responsibility.  Holiday, with whom Cotter has been housekeeping since his prison break, has heard all about the Margaret situation…but what’s worse, she’s heard from Cobbett that Ralph was the guy what croaked her brother.   She deposits a bit of lead into Ralph in retribution, and the entire criminal enterprise comes a-crumblin’ down (Ralph’s tragic tale is told in flashback as Holiday and the rest of Cotter’s “gang” stand trial).

Because of the phenomenal success of White Heat, William Cagney purchased the rights to Horace McCoy’s 1948 novel Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye in the hopes that it, too, would achieve the same kind of positive b.o. as the earlier film.  Goodbye did very well on its initial release, despite the fact that it was banned in several states because—and this is one of the elements that makes the movie an interesting watch—of its hard-hitting subject matter and no-holds-barred violence for the time period.  The Buckeye State, for example, kept the movie out of sight from Ohio theatergoers by declaring it “a sordid, sadistic presentation of crime with explicit steps in commission.”  (Be sure to bring the kids for the matinee showing!)

McCoy’s best-known work is probably They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?—a 1935 Depression era novel that was brought to the big screen in 1969 by Sydney Pollack.  Both the worlds of Goodbye and Horses feature disreputable characters that are unabashedly on the take—in Goodbye, Ralph Cotter tells lawyer Mandon that he’s left a copy of the incriminating recording of Weber’s shakedown with his brother, “the only honest man in the world.”  (We get a glimpse of this paragon of virtue testifying at the trial shortly before the film calls it a wrap…and the brother is played by Cagney’s real brother William.)

The problems with the film have been attributed to both its direction and to the man who adapted McCoy’s book, screenwriter Harry Brown.  Gordon Douglas rode herd on the film, a journeyman known primarily for helming many of the Our Gang comedies and occasionally rising to the occasion with movies like Them! (1954) and Rio Conchos (1964) (Douglas also directed Cagney in 1951’s Come Fill the Cup, a movie that is also rarely seen but praised by a few as one of the actor’s best performances from the 1950s) but he doesn’t seem to be able to hold the material together the way an accomplished pro like Raoul Walsh could with White Heat.  (There are elements of Brown’s screenplay that don’t make a lot of sense—Cotter’s decision to marry Margaret seems to me more of a contrivance to hasten his downfall since it’s apparent the cops won’t get the job done.  Uneven shifts in the overall narrative and an unfortunately abrupt conclusion keep Goodbye from being a truly satisfying film.)

However, Cagney’s performance as the sociopath Cotter is extremely well-done; it’s intimated by several characters that Ralph is a bit cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs though Cagney is much more nuanced in conveying this, refusing to go the giggly “They-haven’t-got-Cody-Jarrett” route.  Luther Adler, a character veteran from many fine noirs (House of Strangers, D.O.A.), gives one of his career performances as Jimmy’s shady mouthpiece, and it’s amusing to see Ward Bond and Barton MacLane, Humphrey Bogart’s cop nemeses from The Maltese Falcon, as the dishonest lawmen here.  There are other standout turns from Rhys Williams (as the greasy Mason—because he works in a garage), William Frawley, John Litel (not a lawyer in this one), and Frank “King Kong” Reicher.

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is remembered as actress Barbara Payton’s shining silver screen showcase—in fact, a biography of the tragic Payton by author John O’Dowd borrows the film’s title for the book.  The blonde starlet, after making a favorable impression alongside Richard Basehart in Trapped (1949), lobbied hard for the part that ultimately went to Marilyn Monroe in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) but was rebuffed.  Despite being untested as a screen presence Barbara held her own alongside the veteran Cagney; brother Bill even arranged for a weekly salary of $5,000 during filming.  But in the roles that followed—westerns like Dallas (1950) and Only the Valiant (1951)—Payton did not receive the opportunity to expand on the splendid work she did in Goodbye and soon found herself haunting B-flicks and programmers like Bride of the Gorilla (1951).  A series of failed relationships (Payton, married to actor Franchot Tone, started seeing Tom Neal on the sly…and that alone should clue you in on her bad choices in men) and a spiraling into substance abuse and prostitution shut the door on a promising career; Payton died of heart and liver failure in 1967.

Despite its Warner’s pedigree, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye eventually found a home in the video library of Republic Pictures (now owned by Paramount), where it was released on VHS in the 1990s and to DVD in 2002 (from Artisan Films).  The disc has been OOP for some time now, but because Olive Films has acquired most of the titles from the Republic/Artisan stable and given them new releases, perhaps a re-release of Goodbye will soon be in the works.  In retrospect, it’s good that they’ve waited—the UCLA Film & Television Archive has restored the Cagney classic, presenting the film to the public in March of 2011.