Product Description

Here’s Cagney as Danny Kean, a former gangster who has decided to go straight after a stretch in the big house. Danny has fallen for Patricia (Patricia Ellis), the daughter of the cop who put him away (Robert Emmett O'Connor). Dad isn't convinced that Danny has left his life of crime behind him, and he isn't too impressed with his new career taking pictures for a sleazy tabloid newspaper. Between getting a lurid photo of a fireman in front of a burning building (where his wife and her lover met their fate) and a daring shot of a woman being executed (based an actual incident when a New York Daily News photographer got a photo of Ruth Snyder in the electric chair), Danny's work is selling papers but hardly making Officer O'Connor think his daughter is in good hands (especially since he was in charge of press security for the execution).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39267 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2008-03-25
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, DVD, Original recording remastered, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 77 minutes

Features

• Deceit. Theft. Lawlessness. They can land you in the pen. Or they can land you a job in the legit world. James Cagney plays a con fresh out of Sing Sing and putting his criminal skills to work as a sneaky, snaky tabloid photog in the slam-bang Picture Snatcher.Cagney ? spontaneous, freewheeling and roughing up guys and dolls alike ? brings a million volts of starpower to this pre-Hays Code romp. T

Amazon.com
Picture Snatcher is exemplary early Cagney, 77 hard-charging minutes with the favorite son of the Lower East Side as a brash ex-con determined to go straight. How straight is a delicate question, since his job is scoring sensational photos for a raunchy tabloid. Picture Snatcher was made before the Production Code cast its puritanical shadow over Hollywood, and the script features two memorably morbid sequences--Cagney's debut as a literal picture snatcher, and the snapping of a clandestine prison-death-house photo--as well as abundant opportunities for risqué byplay, gallows humor, and freewheeling amorality. Lloyd Bacon (soon to direct Cagney in Footlight Parade) makes yeoman work of it all, even getting away with scenes in the newspaper's restroom, and staging a last-reel shootout ferocious enough to be worthy of a real gangster movie. With Ralph Bellamy as Cagney's newspaper boss (rare for him in those days to get a smart-guy role), Patricia Ellis as Cagney's girl (the daughter of the cop who sent him up), and sex-pixie Alice White stealing just about any scene she's in. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews

Fast-paced early Cagney film
1933's "Picture Snatcher" is one I've waited to come out on DVD for some time. It's about a gangster (James Cagney) who decides to go straight and become a photographer for a scandal sheet. The complication in the film is that Cagney's character is in love with the daughter of the cop that arrested him and sent him to prison. Dad isn't as convinced as his daughter that the ex-gangster has really changed. In the end, Cagney gets his exclusive photo of an execution - by breaking all of the rules of course - and he gets the girl. You would have figured as much, so I don't really think these are spoilers. The fun is watching how Cagney does these things. The film is fast paced and full of the energy that only Cagney could lend to such a role. Special features are:
Vintage theatrical trailer: I Loved A Woman
Classic WB short: Plane Crazy
WB cartoon: Wake Up The Gypsy In Me

This film is part of the larger volume 3 of the Warner Gangsters Boxed Set that is being released on the same day as this movie.

Cagney Joins The Paparazzi
This was great! It's vintage James Cagney: tough, cocky, funny and endearing! The film is also typical early '30s: short, entertaining, fast-moving with some wild dialog and plenty of action and humor.

Imagine the outcry today if they showed the hero pushing women around as Cagney did here and in other films of the period. This particular story has Cagney playing "Danny Kean," an ex-con who quits his former mob and winds up at a tabloid newspaper as a member of the paparazzi! (I guess this story was ahead of it's time.) He does what he has to do get a picture for the paper, and a financial raise for his efforts.

Along the way are several very pretty women "Pat" and "Allison" (played respectively by Patricia Ellis and Alice White); a number of sexual innuendos (which wouldn't have made it in the picture had this been made a year later); and just a fun-filled corny 1930s ride.

Cuts to the Chase
For years, Cagney's pre-1935 WB films, with few exceptions, went largely unseen. Ever since Turner Classic Movies made them available, I've seen all the early Cagneys and consider "Picture Snatcher" to be one of my three favorites (along with "Public Enemy"(1931) and "Taxi"(1932)). Fast paced and lean, the film whips along as the result of Cagney's firecracker performance. As WB always did at that time, the film gives the viewer a feeling of NYC in the early 1930s, like Ben Shahn photographs set to movement.
If you like Cagney, I can't recommend this enough.