Search - City for Conquest on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Content Advisory: Suitable for Children Movie Release: 1940 DVD Release: 07/18/2006 Format: DVD - Black and White - Closed Captioned Edition: Dual Layered Audio Tracks: English Subtitles: English, French, Spanish SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 44 mins Studio: Warner Home Video Members Wishing: 4 Genres: Drama, Melodrama

There are three key characters in Anatole Litvak's filmization of Aben Kandel's novel -City for Conquest, as opposed to the six or more in the book -- but the real star, to a large extent, is New York City and its entire population. For purposes of the movie, however, the dramatic arc is linked to James Cagney, as honest, unpretentious truck driver Danny Kenny, whose life is involved with two other people -- his kid brother, Ed (Arthur Kennedy), a gifted musician trying to survive in the rough-and-tumble world of New York's Lower East Side, and Peggy Nash (Ann Sheridan), the neighborhood girl from the Lower East Side whom he's loved, one way or another, since he was a kid. Danny is happy doing what he does, driving a truck, but when Ed's scholarship is cut in half, he reluctantly takes an offer of a boxing match to raise the cash he needs, going into the ring under the fighting name "Young Samson." At about the same time, Peggy -- who loves to dance -- has her head turned by Murray Burns (Anthony Quinn), an ambitious but sleazy aspiring professional dancer. Eventually Peggy goes into partnership with Murray and is ultimately driven by her own ambition to leave Danny after she accepts his marriage proposal. By now, he's getting up in the boxing world, and in his bitterness over losing Peggy he accepts a bout for the world's welterweight championship. He's not overmatched as a boxer, but the money involved in this fight is just too big for it to be honest, and Danny is left all but blinded when his opponent's handlers slip resin dust onto his gloves. Danny is left seemingly a shell of a man, though he's content with his lot in life as far as it goes. He doesn't want any special attention or favors from anyone; the only thing he would like, though he's too proud to admit it, would be for Peggy to come back. But by now her dancing career with Murray has fallen apart, and she's too tortured by guilt, over the sequence of events she helped start, to come near Danny. It falls to Ed, who has never given up composing, to express the inexpressibles that each of these characters feels through his music. His first major classical work is a symphony ostensibly about New York City, which he conducts in its premiere at Carnegie Hall; but it's also about Danny and his life, and his dreams. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

James Cagney - Danny Kenny
Ann Sheridan - Peggy Nash
Frank Craven - Old Timer
Donald Crisp - Scotty McPherson
Arthur Kennedy - Eddie Kenny

This DVD provides a major revelation that, amazingly enough, the makers have done nothing to publicize at all -- the first showing of the original 106-minute version of Anatole Litvak's City for Conquest in almost 60 years. The movie, based on Aben Kandel's novel of the same name, was long regarded as a partial failure, by its star, James Cagney, and by many critics. It has its flaws, to be sure, not least of which is that it strips away a little too much of the grandeur (one of the elements that literary critics did like) in Kandel's book; however, it was always impressive with what it tried to do and, at least 85 percent of the way, succeeded at. It came out fairly late on laserdisc and only with the barest of special features, paired with Each Dawn I Die. Warner Home Video has made up for that on DVD with a heavily loaded edition, complete with commentary track by Richard Schickel, plus the featurette "Molls and Dolls: The Women of Gangster Films," plus a studio blooper reel, newsreel material, and a pair of short subjects, the Oscar-nominated Service With the Colors and the cartoon Stage Fright. Schickel's commentary is a good one, although he is a little too leisurely and gives us too little information on some of the performers and others whom he chooses to discuss; Frank McHugh's relationship with Cagney was important, beyond any doubt, but we should have heard more about McHugh than the fact that he was a New York actor. The same goes for Arthur Kennedy, Anthony Quinn, and Ann Sheridan. We do hear a lot about Elia Kazan, who had an important supporting role in this movie, and something about the screenwriter, John Wexley -- and his prior work with Cagney, which was extremely important, and his career as a nonfiction author -- but there is a lot that Schickel never gets to that he should, which is even more frustrating, given the long stretches that he leaves without any commentary at all. The documentary "Molls snd Dolls" includes observations by screenwriter/director Robert Evans, scholar Partricia King Hanson, writer Nicholas Pileggi, screenwriter/director Larry Cohen, author Rick Jewell, and author Eric Lax, plus actresses such as Talia Shire and Theresa Russell. They discuss several actresses who seldom get profiled, including Jane Bryan and Mae Clarke, with a special emphasis on the work of Joan Blondell. The shorts and cartoons are entertaining, and include the trailer for another Cagney vehicle, The Fighting 69th, which, appropriately enough, is grouped with the Technicolor short film "Service With the Colors," a tribute to American soldiers.

But what's equally important here is that the DVD presents the original 106-minute version of City for Conquest, which contains about eight minutes of footage that hasn't been seen since the movie was cut to 98 minutes for a 1948 reissue. It was the short version that was released on the laserdisc (and VHS tapes), and also to television; the additional material frames the story as a narrative by Frank Craven, playing a character referred to as "The Old Timer," who is somewhat akin to the Stage Manager in Our Town which, curiously enough, is a role that Craven had portrayed two years before, in a screen adaptation of the latter play. The disc opens to a simple, straightforward multi-layered menu that offers easy access to all of the features. The full-screen (1.33:1) image is extremely crisp; the source for the longer cut is cleaner than that used for the shorter cut on the laserdisc, though there are a few frame anomalies that creep in every so often, but you have to be watching closely to catch them; the photography, by Sol Polito and James Wong Howe, is stunning throughout. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide