ST. JAMES THEATRE

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 187, 4 May 1940, Page 16

ST. JAMES THEATRE

.Tames Cagney's many “fans” have developed the habit of saying—with a good deal of truth—that no picture with Jimmy in it can be a bad picture. When George' Raft’s special brand of toughness is added to Cagney’s, all doubt is removed; the show must be good. That is just the case with “Each Dawn I Die,” which has entered the second week of a season at the St. Janies Theatre. Cagney, Raft. George Bancroft and many other actors, who really are actors, carry along a familiar story with a fine swing. The many deaths come dramatically, and wrongdoing, inside and outside the law, is drastically punished. Frank Ross (Cagney) is a newspaper reporter, a first-rate crusader whose stories carry his .own name, and, because of that, their own punishment when he treads too heavily on crooked toes. Complementary to the reporter, is Stacey (Raft), brought up in a similar slum backyard, who has turned to crime itself as his only way out.

Ross’s newspaper exposures of graft and racketeering in high places bring him into disfavour with the crooked District Attorney. With ruthless efficiency worthy of a much better cause, the young newspaperman is “beaten up,” his clothes and person sprayed with liquor, and then dumped into an empty car which, driverless, crashes into another and kills the occupants. Ross is sent to jail for manslaughter, and goes in company with Stacey. The warden of the jail (Bancroft) is hard but honest, unaware of the cruelty and brutality of his underlings. Jail life soon turns the best of men into wild animals, snarling, fighting, and even killing each other. In this hard battle, Ross earns the respect of more experienced criminals, specially of 'Stacey, and these two strike tip a queer friendship, which, despite some misunderstandings, is maintained to the end.

On the “outside,” Ross’s friends and his -fiancee (Jane Bryan) lend every effort to uncover the real criminals —but Ross would have been there still if it had not been for the dramatic pleas made by the girl to both the jail warden and to Stacey. It is in the midst of a jail-break, when death conies smashing through every window from the machine-guns of the militia, that Ross’s innocence is proved. But proved it is at last, and he walks out a free man, with all the world before him.