I am a prisoner to my own enthusiasms!

During my recent trip to Sudan, I spent part of my downtime reading a book called Wicked River, an anecdotal history of the Mississippi River before and during the Civil War. The book was a lot of fun (I highly recommend it) and--as is often the case when I like something--it made me want to read something similar. In this case, I was struck with an urge to re-read some Mark Twain.

Fortunately, despite being located in one of the poorest places in the world without a single bookstore or library at hand, I had my Kindle, which contained (among many other items) the complete works of Mark Twain. My last Saturday there, with no teaching responsibilities for the day, I spent several hours reading through Tom Sawyer. Gee whiz, that was fun. It might actually be a decade or more since I read it last.


A few days later, I read Huckleberry Finn during the plane ride from Entebbe to London. The beginning of Chapter 19 of Huck Finn, by the way, is arguably the finest piece of prose ever written. Read it here and see for yourself.

On the plane ride from London to Tampa the next day, I started Public Enemies, by Bryan Burrough, an excellent history of the birth of the FBI and the pursuit of criminals such as Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde and the Barker Gang.


Well, THAT made me want to re-watch James Cagney's slam-bang movie version of those events: 1935's G-Men. It's not an historically accurate account at all--the bad guys are all fictionalized and the general flow of events make the FBI look a lot more competent than they were in those early days. But it's a great movie--I wrote about it in this post a few years ago and outlined its strengths.

So there you have it--I'm a slave to my own enthusiasms. Read a book on the Mississippi and I just gotta read Mark Twain. Read a book on the bank robbers of the early 1930s and I just gotta watch a Cagney movie.

Thank goodness for tools like the Kindle or DVDs that provide me with instant gratification. Otherwise, I'd be an emotional wreck.

By the way, here's a sample of the most bizarre use of Huck, Tom and Becky Thatcher ever:

DECADE BY DECADE: Part 3: G-Men, gangsters and tommy guns

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As we enter the 1930s, it soon becomes apparent that if you want the absolute best in slam-bang action and tough guys (any of whom could, without exception, beat the snot out of modern day leading men such as Tom Criuse or George Clooney without even working up a sweat), then you have to turn to Warner Brothers.


The WB is responsible for the best gangster and crime films ever made. The studio played off the talents of Cagney, Bogie and E.G. Robinson, while drawing plot elements and story construction from the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, Warner Brothers gave us classic after classic during the 1930s. The Roaring Twenties, Bullets or Ballots, Little Caesar, Public Enemy, The Petrified Forest and other gangster films gave us wonderful stories and characters, filmed in beautiful black-and-white while dropping in more than their share of superbly designed action set pieces.


G-Men (1935) is a fun and interesting example of the genre because it takes Cagney's image as a tough guy and manages to believably plop him down on the side of the angels. Cagney is "Brick" Davis, a down-and-out lawyer who nonetheless remains honest and refuses to work for gangsters. When a friend who joined the Justice Department is killed, Brick opts to join up as well, hoping to get a chance to nail the thugs who committed the murder.


The plot is a well-constructed police procedural, with Brick and the other G-Men using reasonably believable methods for tracking down the bad guys. Along the way, they engage the villains is a series of blazing gun battles. There are few more entertaining images in existence than those of Warner Brothers tough guys blasting away at each other with tommy guns, shotguns and .45 automatics. The director was William Keighley, one of a number of Warner house directors who had a spot-on sense of what looked good on film.

A subplot involving Brick's adversarial relationship with his boss and his eventual romance with his boss's sister is handled well, getting us to like these characters all the more without interfering with the flow of the main plot.


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Cagney is backed up in the film by a number of talented character actors, including Robert Armstrong, Lloyd Nolan and Barton MacLane. That is, of course, another main strength of the WB gangster films. The old studio system (where actors were under contract to a specific studio and assigned to the films they appeared in) is open to a lot of legitimate criticism in terms of labor practices, but it did create a stable of skilled character actors that gave real backbone to the movies of that era.