CITY FOR CONQUEST.
James Cagney & Ann Sheridan,
Anthony Quinn, Donald Crisp, Frank McHugh.
Dir: Anatole Litvak, 1940, Warner Bros.

SYNOPSIS:
An Eastside trucker becomes a boxer but gets blinded in a fight while his composer brother gets all classical and gives up pop.

"I did all my own fight scenes; the prospect of a few punches in the puss never bothered me. They threw in a fighter who'd been a pro and this was his first appearance in pictures. When the director said 'All right, action!' he got a little excited. He threw one, hitting me right on the chin. A dandy. I swung around so the camera couldn't see me and I laughed as I said 'Oh, you son-of-a-bitch.' I got a kick out of it because his face was absolutely stricken when he realised what he had done. Then I threw one, hitting him square on the chin and his knees buckled. We mixed it up and finally the director said to cut and to print it. 'My God, Joey, did I hurt you?' I asked. 'I saw my whole family,' he said, 'I saw my Uncle Ben, my Aunt Minnie, I saw my Cousin Davey, I saw them all.' From that point we got along fine."
- Jimmy Cagney.

REVIEWS:
"Phony but oddly persuasive melodrama set in a studio in NY and heavily influenced by the pretensions of the Group theatre."
- Leslie Halliwell.
"Sometimes we wonder whether it wasn't really the Warner brothers who got NY from the Indians, so diligent and devoted have they been in feeling the great city's pulse, picturing its myriad facets and recording with deep compassion the passing life of its seething population."
- Bosley Crowther. (whoever he is?)