This time, James Cagney's up on a trumped up drunk driving charge and George Raft is the racketeer. Cagney was a reporter out to blow the lid off a crooked politician and an outburst in court added to his sentence. Through saving Raft's life from a prison rat, Cagney becomes his pal. Being the good guy he is (for a gangster anyway), Raft uses a convenient escape to help his new buddy out. After all, what are pals for, yaah? Yaah.Since he's already co-starred in gangster pictures with both EGR and Bogie, it was time for Raft to co- star. He gives a well rounded performance as a crook who knows he's in for the duration (199 years!) with nothing to lose but a wasted life if he doesn't attempt an escape. That sequence alone is quite thrilling, coming fast and out of nowhere. A clever script gives this fast pacing with an A budget and direction that would soon begin to wane in their early 40's B pictures. A bit of Warner Brothers publicity has the prisoners watching "Wings of the Navy", the perfect time for revenge on Joe Dowling, the rat. George Bancroft and Maxie Rosenbloom add color as some of Raft's cohorts, Jane Bryan as Cagney's devoted girl (there always has to be one of those, you see...) and Thurston Hall as the blowhard politician, more corrupt because of his own stupid arrogance and those around him than his own intelligence. Willard Robertson is a pretty brutal prison guard, one of the more hissable villains of prison films. Add in Emma Dunn for sentiment as Cagney's ma, and you've got the formula for a great melodrama that proves that crime does not pay, either for gangsters like Raft and dumb politicians like Hall.

"Each Dawn I Die" is a crackerjack, black & white, Warner Brothers' prison yarn expose. The Burbank studio shifted its agenda away from gangster pictures to prison pictures. Rather that lionize mobsters, they tackled the grim conditions in prisons but they relied on gangsters to maintain tension and suspense. The plot is pretty preposterous, not only for the way that our hero James Cagney is railroaded into jail and the unlikely stunt that George Raft pulls to get him out of stir. The violence is staged with such finesse that you know what happens even though you never see the outcome. When a callous prisoner guard dies at the hands of the inmates, we see the primary inmate arm himself with a curved hook. The guard tries to get away from the angry inmates, but he is pulled back into the crowd. You know that he dies and you know how he dies, but you don't see the homicidal act. Meantime, this trim 92-minute melodrama emerges as a stinging indictment of corruption both inside and outside of prison. Cagney is as pugnacious as ever, and the Warner Brothers' stock company is as strong as ever. When he fails to get the goods on crooked district attorney Jesse Hanley (Thurston Hall), Cagney lands behind bars when the district attorney frames him for manslaughter in a hit & run. When Ross's newspaper refuses to print a retraction, the D.A.'s henchmen abduct Ross, douse him with liquor, and turn him loose in a car. A dazed Cagney collides with another car, and three die in the other automobile. A solemn, forthright judge sentences Cagney to one to twenty years in the pen. Meantime, George Raft is a gangster sent up to serve life. Society is definitely flawed in this scorching melodrama. No sooner does Cagney wind up in prison than he learns the corruption runs from the D.A.'s office to prison. Director William Keighley and scenarists Norman Reilly Raine, Warren Duff, and Charles Perry don't pull any punches. Everybody on Ross' newspaper knows that he was framed, but they haven't got a shred of evidence to substantiate their contention. While Ross is locked up, he intervenes when a treacherous inmate Limpy Julien (Joe Downing) tries to kill 'Hood' Stacey (George Raft), and Stacey promises to help Ross out of his predicament. "No matter how tough it looks or how long it takes," vows Stacy, "I'll get you out." Ross agrees to confess to the Warden John Armstrong (George Bancroft) that he saw Stacy with the incriminating murder weapon. Stacey wants Ross to turn stool pigeon so he will get a trial outside of prison. During the trial, Stacey leaps out of the courtroom from the second floor and lands on a truck with a cushion so he can escape. Conditions in prison are depicted mighty. Inmates are not allowed to speak unless they are on the exercise yard. A crippled guard, Lang (Willard Robertson), who harbors nothing but contempt for the inmates pits prisoner against prisoner and loves to generate discord amongst them. After Stacy successfully dives out the window to freedom, Lang and a gang of guards beat him up in a futile effort to extract information from him. Armstrong walks in on Lang and his cronies, and he warns him in no uncertain terms of the consequences he will face. "I've told you before I will not tolerate brutality in this penitentiary. I've laid down punishment rules that are fully adequate. And as long as I'm warden, those rules will be obeyed." This is a very important dialogue exchange because it shows that prisons were not flawed institutions. Instead, prison corruption was an aberration created by disgruntled men like the prison guard. Meantime, Ross winds up in solitary confinement, handcuffed to the bars, with no hope. Armstrong visits him in solitary and promises to get him open if he will divulge the truth behind Stacy's jailbreak. A hardened Ross refuses to sing. "You haven't got a thing on me and you're not going to get a word out of me. I know where Stacy lamed to but I'm glad he made it. I'm here on a phony rap and you've no right to keep me here. You've got no right to keep me here. So get this, from now on the rules are off, I'm going to talk when I please and do what I like. I'm going to be as mean and dirty and hard to handle as the worst con in the joint, and I will skull drag any screw who gets in my way." Meantime, Ross' girlfriend Joyce (Jane Bryan) appeals to Stacey to honor his promise to Ross. At first, Stacey hated Ross because he believed the former newspaperman had double-crossed him by alerting the press about Stacey. Anyway, Stacey tracks down the man who can clear Ross, but to achieve his goal, Stacey must go back to prison. Stacey knows that one of the inmates in the pen participated in the scheme to railroad Ross. The big finale occurs when the inmates orchestrate a jailbreak, but the National Guard shows up to thwart them. Stacey corners the canary, Shake Edwards (Abner Biberman of "The Roaring Twenties" who framed Ross, and Armstrong hears the confession. The National Guard close in and toss in tear gas. Stacey bids Ross goodbye and goes out in a hail of gunfire with Shake. "Each Dawn I Die" is worth watching despite its outlandish premise.

Although innocent, reporter Frank Ross (James Cagney) is found guilty of murder and is sent to jail. While his friends at the newspaper try to find out who framed him, Frank gets hardened by prison life and his optimism turns into bitterness. He meets fellow-inmate Stacey (George Raft) and they decide to help each other.Rather than be the good guy ("G Men") or the bad guy ("Public Enemy"), here we have Cagney as an innocent newspaper reporter framed and then sent to prison, where he becomes a little bit hardened. Maybe not quite a bad guy, but not really the good guy, either. It is a nice transformation, and an interesting commentary on prison life.I am not very familiar with George Raft (I actually know him more from reading Mafia history than from film), but if he is like he is here in other films, I need to see more George Raft.

Released in the summer of 1939, near the tail end of a decade's worth of hugely popular and influential gangster films from Warner Brothers, the studio's "Each Dawn I Die" is perhaps best remembered today for one reason: It is the only film to feature James Cagney and George Raft as costars. Raft HAD appeared in cameo parts in the 1932 Cagney films "Taxi!" and "Winner Take All," but those roles were nothing compared to the part he enjoyed in "Each Dawn I Die," in which he gets to completely dominate the usually irrepressible Cagney, and even emerge as the hero of the film. Rapidly paced and ultimately fairly moving, the film packs quite a bit of action and story into its 92 minutes, did justifiably great business at the box office, and remains yet another gem from "Hollywood's greatest year."In the film, Cagney plays an investigative newspaper reporter named Frank Ross. After writing a story about the town's crooked D.A., Ross is knocked out by thugs, splashed with booze, and set behind the wheel of a moving car. Three people are killed in the resultant smash-up, and Ross, effectively framed, is sent to the Rocky Point Penitentiary, doing "one to 20 years" for vehicular manslaughter. In the prison, he is assigned to hard labor in the twine-making factory, where he encounters "Hood" Stacey (Raft), a lifer with whom he bonds. To make a long story short (and "EDID" DOES feature a rather complex plot; this is a prison film with more on its mind than the usual big-house set pieces), Ross actively abets in Stacey's escape from the "Graybar Hotel," so that Stacey might use his underworld connections to prove Ross' innocence. But is there really honor among thieves, and will Ross be released before his imprisonment transforms him for the worse? In an increasingly suspenseful story line (based on the novel by Jerome Odlum), these are the main questions that come to the fore....Fans of Cagney's cocky, pugnacious tough-guy roles of the 1930s may be a bit surprised at how "EDID" spools out. His Frank Ross character may start out that way, but life at Rocky Point has a way of finding the cracking point of even the sturdiest nuts. Indeed, Cagney's sobbing breakdown before the parole board is simply stunning, and audiences would have to wait a full decade to see Cagney do a similar prison freakout scene of such affecting power (I am referring, of course, to Cody Jarrett going bonkers in the mess hall, in 1949's immortal "White Heat"). Cagney is aces in the film, despite playing the more passive role; his Frank Ross suffers terribly while doing time, and the viewer wonders if he will ever emerge the same man that he was at the film's opening, or become toughened and animalized, as was the case with Paul Muni's James Allen character in the superb Warners film "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" (1932). Raft, surprisingly, matches Cagney scene for scene, and I only say "surprisingly" because Raft is apparently held in low esteem, in many quarters, for his thespian chops. But he is just terrific here, and his real-life association with gangsters gives him an air of verisimilitude that easily brings him up to Cagney's level. Cucumber cool, he easily emerges as the film's most admirable and resourceful character (viewers would have to wait a full 20 years to see Raft essay an equally likable gangster role, as Spats Columbo, in "Some Like it Hot"), while the growing admiration and friendship between the two men is very much the heart and soul of this picture. Cagney, a product of NYC's Lower East Side, and Raft, who was raised in NYC's Hell's Kitchen, make a marvelous team in this, their only real pairing. They are hugely abetted by a roster of great supporting actors, including pretty Jane Bryan as Cagney's sweetie; George Bancroft as the ineffectual warden; Maxie Rosenbloom as a fellow convict, who gives the film what little humor it possesses; and the dependably hissable Victor Jory as the crooked assistant D.A. and later, stunningly, the head man at Ross' parole hearing. Director William Keighley, who had worked with Cagney before, on 1935's "'G' Men," and who would go on to work with him three more times (on 1940's "The Fighting 69th" and "Torrid Zone" and 1941's "The Bride Came C.O.D."), fills his frame with constant movement, utilizes effective close-ups, and keeps the action moving at a rapid clip. The dialogue in the film is as rat-a-tat-tat as the rapid-fire machine guns that the National Guard utilizes in the film's (seemingly obligatory) riot sequence, and a repeat viewing may be necessary to fully capture it all (it was for me, anyway). Culminating with an explosive finale in which every character gets pretty much what he deserves (at least, in accordance with the Production Code of the time!), "Each Dawn I Die" is a hugely satisfying affair, and a great success for everyone involved in it.