This is a nice unusual little film; more entertaining than I ever suspected it would be based on the reputation of the Saroyan play and what I've heard about the film version over the years. This film doesn't have quite the "spit and polish" we expect from films with major stars in the 1940s, probably because it wasn't produced by a major studio as far as I'm aware. However this is a good thing in some ways, as the film feels a bit more free to be what it wants to be than most studio adaptations. For example the credit sequence at the beginning is very charming, listing the hobbies and habits of the primary characters in theatrical style – Joe (James Cagney) is described by "whose hobby is people", McCarthy (Ward Bond) as a "blatherskite", Krupp (Broderick Crawford) is a "bewildered policeman" and so forth.<br /><br />Maybe a lot of people over the years have seen nothing but a reflection of his TV work, but I thought William Bendix was very impressive as a man who is at the same time savvy enough to run a saloon in the waterfront district of San Francisco and charming enough to be believable as a family man. James Cagney's work is remarkably fresh as well, a complete departure from a lot of his tough guy roles that we usually saw him in. Jeanne Cagney, his sister, is far better suited to her role, a melancholy dance-hall type who forms an attachment with Joe's best friend Tom (Wayne Morris) than she was as the femme fatale in the more widely seen "Quicksand" opposite Mickey Rooney. All the characters are developed in such a way that we empathize with them even though some are a bit absurd, such as the dancer who wants to be a comedian but just isn't funny (played here by Paul Draper and on Broadway by Gene Kelly) and a black man (Reginald Beane) who's astonished at the mere idea of being paid to play piano. Everything is done in a style that's not even remotely naturalistic but which somehow manages to convey some real insight into human behavior – it reminds me of the old saying "Live in the skin you're in" and there's a sign on the window of the bar that's the first thing we see in the film that expresses much the same sentiment. The acting is designed to accentuate this feeling, almost a literal "slice of life." As Joe says in perhaps the film's one attempt at a profound statement: "Living is an art, it's not bookkeeping. It takes an awful lot of rehearsal for a man to get to be himself." Our characters don't exactly progress through standard melodramatic devices but rather through a process of self-recognition best exemplified through the relationship between Kitty (Jeanne Cagney) and Tom. Just like Wesley, our piano playing unemployed man, there's no way to seize the possibilities of life as long as we are so narrow in our conditioned expectations from ourselves and others. Joe is extraordinary because, perhaps because of his traumatic lost love, he seems to have abandoned normal social modes of behavior and the expectations and limitations imposed by them.<br /><br />I think a lot of people will probably feel that the various changes the characters go through are too contrived and of course it's obvious that all these events would be unlikely to occur within the play's span of time of only one day. It's probably more fruitful to see the movie as essentially a filmed play, since there are very few cinematic tricks and since all of these events and character development can be seen in "theater time." Some of the contrivances are only apparent because the play has been trimmed a bit to fit into theater showing times; the original romance between Tom and Kitty was apparently more developed in the play. That makes Tom's confession of love seem a bit forced. There's not a lot to complain about in the movie; I just took it for what it is and I enjoyed it very much for the brief scenes that really show the good aspects of human nature and a sense of hope for humanity. The little guy actually does win his pinball machine, Tom really does get together with Kitty, and the bad guy Blick (Tom Powers) doesn't manage to shut the bar down. I loved how Joe kept sending Tom for seemingly random items and the fact that there was no "clever" resolution to explain why he asked for them. It seems like Joe is very interested in the random nature of the saloon and the kind of random people who come into the saloon, as he befriends Kitty and later an old drunk frontiersman (extraordinary character work by James Barton). The story would be painfully predictable with no random elements if it wasn't for the presence of Joe – the credits pretty much tell us everything about both the good and the bad (Blick for instance is a "stool pigeon and frame-up artist") and so perhaps I should have expected for things to turn out in a somewhat less than usual manner but I was still taken somewhat by surprise simply because the style of the film had lulled me into a state of acceptance.<br /><br />This film probably won't appeal to all that many people nowadays except fans of classic theater and James Cagney's acting. But it's a worthy and unusual film, even a daring film in the fact that it allows Cagney to simply fulfill his strange role in the film and doesn't feel weighed down by the traditional trappings of the "star system" that usually take stage to film adaptations off their tracks.