A Lion Is In The Streets (1953)

An ambitious peddler (James Cagney) in the rural South marries above his station when he marries a schoolteacher (Barbara Hale). But when he challenges the local and state powers that be, he becomes a true backwoods hero to the swamp folk. But his ambition causes him to sell out and be corrupted when he has an opportunity to run for Governor. Based on the novel by Adria Locke Langley and directed by Raoul Walsh. The tendency is to call this a blatant rip off of ALL THE KING'S MEN right down to the characters and the denouement but actually the novel was published a year prior to Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer prize winning novel. Walsh's film is done in broad strokes and lacks the nuance of ALL THE KING'S MEN. Cagney's overwrought performance is exhausting rather than stimulating and he's a little mature for the part of a cocky swamp rat, maybe if he had done the role 10 years earlier. Hale is good as his wife but Anne Francis as the swamp vixen who becomes Cagney's mistress can't do much with an underwritten part. The Franz Waxman score sounds like he'd been listening to too much Dimitri Tiomkin. With John McIntire, Warner Anderson, Jeanne Cagney, Larry Keating, Sara Haden and Lon Chaney Jr.