A play by William Saroyan, brought to the screen apparently through the strong will of James Cagney. Some might call this a "vanity project" but it reminds me more of Barry Levinson's wonderful "AVALON" an expenditure of Hollywood clout to make a movie of seriousness and quality that is not obvious commercial material, but expresses something close to the filmmaker's heart. (Levinson had just made an enormous hit with RAINMAN, and could probably have made any movie he wanted. He spent that clout to make AVALON, a memoir of his obviously beloved grandfather.)
The Cagneys (James and his brother William) recruited a very unusual cast: a number of the significant characters are played by actors who never or hardly ever appeared in another movie.
The material, based on a major 1939 Broadway play, floats along like the drifting thoughts of a person with a mild fever - not the hallucination of a high fever, just a mild enough fever to prevent the film from being driven by a plot. Plot is incidental here, barely even trying to be an excuse for the observance of life. Life has events, but it's rarely plotted, and usually it's the fact of drama being plotted that distinguishes it from ordinary life. But Saroyan was supremely interested in the nobility of un-extraordinary people.
The liberalism (and I mean the word - at least loosely, in its political sense) of this movie is notable. Cagney was one of Hollywood's outstanding liberals - so much so that he was accused of being a Communist sympathizer in the early 40's - a charge he answered by making YANKEE DOODLE DANDY. The fact that he chose to make this film in the wake of the 1947 rise of the House Un-American Activities Committee is to his everlasting credit.
The Cagneys (James and his brother William) recruited a very unusual cast: a number of the significant characters are played by actors who never or hardly ever appeared in another movie.
The material, based on a major 1939 Broadway play, floats along like the drifting thoughts of a person with a mild fever - not the hallucination of a high fever, just a mild enough fever to prevent the film from being driven by a plot. Plot is incidental here, barely even trying to be an excuse for the observance of life. Life has events, but it's rarely plotted, and usually it's the fact of drama being plotted that distinguishes it from ordinary life. But Saroyan was supremely interested in the nobility of un-extraordinary people.
The liberalism (and I mean the word - at least loosely, in its political sense) of this movie is notable. Cagney was one of Hollywood's outstanding liberals - so much so that he was accused of being a Communist sympathizer in the early 40's - a charge he answered by making YANKEE DOODLE DANDY. The fact that he chose to make this film in the wake of the 1947 rise of the House Un-American Activities Committee is to his everlasting credit.