The Public Enemy, a 1931 Warner Brothers gangster classic, is easily remembered as the movie in which James Cagney used Mae Clarke's nose as a grapefruit grinder. As Cagney recalls, it was just about the first time that "a woman had been treated like a broad on the screen, instead of like a delicate flower."
The ambivalence toward women is just one of the many stylistic contradictions that make The Public Enemy worth studying, not only for its intrinsic merits but also as a creative expression bending under the constraints of censorship.
The Public Enemy, a 1931 Warner Brothers gangster classic, is easily remembered as the movie in which James Cagney used Mae Clarke's nose as a grapefruit grinder. As Cagney recalls, it was just about the first time that 'a woman had been treated like a broad on the screen, instead of like a delicate flower.' As Henry Cohen points out in his introduction to the film script, however, the grapefruit scene is an uncommon touch of honesty in a film that, under the pressure of the Hays Office, swing awkwardly between typical Warners realism and sentimental accommodation.
