- Kevin Hart (left) in The Wedding Ringer
This past fall, when Jonathan Rosenbaum introduced the James Cagney comedy Blonde Crazy (1931) at the Siskel Center, he argued that that Cagney’s screen persona in the ’30s was never plausible but always relatable. One can’t readily imagine Cagney’s character in Crazy existing in the real world. He’s a walking contradiction—a wisecracking con man with a mean streak who’s as kind to his friends as he is ruthless with the rich folks he swindles. And yet one sympathizes with Cagney—in comedies as well as musicals and crime dramas—on the basis of his crowd-pleasing energy and his deep-seated understanding of what it’s like to eke out a living.
One big difference between the two is that Hart hasn’t yet allowed himself to appear menacing in the movies. Cagney, of course, played villains as brilliantly as he played heroes. That concentrated energy, which made him so electrifying as a con man or choreographer, made him terrifying as a gangster. (Part of Cagney’s enduring fascination stems from the overlap between his comic and noncomic performances—one sees a bit of the showman in his criminals and a bit of the monster in his good guys.) Hart sometimes seems capable of Cagney-like menace in his stand-up specials. When he goes off, in Let Me Explain (2013), on exes whom he considers “psychos,” one senses genuine hostility, and Hart strengthens this impression when he jokes, in another routine, about threatening to punch a woman in the throat. (Is it worth mentioning that Cagney often threatened and occasionally hit women in his 30s vehicles?) I find this side of Hart appalling, though I can see him outgrowing it, or at least learning to channel it into something constructive, a la Jonah Hill in The Wolf of Wall Street.
