There’s an unverified story that in 1953, tough-guy actor James Cagney agreed to submit to an in-depth, carefully supervised interview after allowing himself to be injected with a 21st Century woke-candyass serum.
Once under the influence of this experimental drug, Cagney stated that filming “problematic” scenes of murder and misogyny in films like The Public Enemy (’31) and White Heat (’49) were among “the darkest days of my life.”
The Cagney experiment was discussed on a recent episode of the Inside of You podcast, which had previously posted an interview with Buffy the Vampire Slayer costar James Marsters, who said more or less the same thing about filming a traumatic sexual assault scene with Buffy costar Sarah Michelle Gellar. So Matsters was hardly the first to feel this way.
Cagney quote: “Pushing that halved grapefruit into Mae Clarke‘s face while shooting Public Enemy made me feel awful. After the first take I ran off the set, sweating and sick to my stomach. All I could think of was how poor Mae must have felt with that grapefruit juice stinging her face. It was all I could do to keep from weeping out loud. I felt like I needed a priest.”
A biography of Public Enemy director William Wellman allegedly reports that Wellman was alarmed by Cagney’s on-set behavior. He got up from his director’s chair, pulled Cagney aside, slapped him hard across the chops and said “pull yourself together, you little fucking pussy….it’s acting, for Chrissake!…you’re pretending to be a a bad-ass Chicago gangster…get it?”
Cagney obeyed, and yet 18 years later he felt a similar sense of shame and remorse when slapping Virginia Mayo around during the filming of Raoul Walsh‘s White Heat. He also felt convulsed with guilt and moral revulsion after shooting a railroad engineer point-blank in the gut. Walsh had heard stories about how Wellman handled Cagney, so he too went up to the Oscar-winning actor, slapped him hard and said “you pathetic little whiner!… I don’t want to hear another word about your sensitive-ass feelings about pretending to be a psycho killer….man up and do the job!”
