If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Public enemy is one of the most iconic gangster film I've had watched. The only other gangster films I've scene was Scare face and that was the remake. Even though it is old for my age and time , I do recommend it to be watched. You can relate to their lives and understand why they traveled in the path that they did. I mean coming out of poverty to be the ones calling the shots and becoming wealthy even though they killed people and broke some laws along the way and then having the cops on your tale do not really have a happy ending, especially when you have other people wanting your head too .

THE PUBLIC ENEMY is a gem of crime fiction genre. After watching the film, this is my sentence came to my mind and I completely trust her. The powerful dramatization, social criticism and acting are more than convincing. Do not go into a -Aligning with the actual events at the time of Prohibition. I have the historical knowledge to conclude in this movie has the truth.The Public Enemy is the cornerstone of gangster drama. The actual shift in noir style. Most importantly, what is the film The Public Enemy will not drop any possibility that the world of gangs and crime so fundamentally contradictory world of government and legal currents. This movie will set things up so that shows two broken things: actually just broken things - such as the Criminal mile and as it is corrupt country in economic crisis and the legal patriotic values that include civil obligations and duties. Behind the condemnation of crime and hellish road that is growing up and raising one gangster stands out as a proposal for the viewer to live up to that image and to weigh it as the nature of which is not to be necessarily damned and negative to the world the law and the authorities, but that account with what there is in fact wrong and what is right.In essence, the point of the film is about how American society has to wake up and deal with the criminals, because the human relations by the day drifting towards the underworld.James Cagney as Tom Powers was after this film became a tough guy. A young, short, rude and able to breathe face that looks scary furiously. Some actors are just perfect for a certain type of role. Its performance is perhaps remarkable, controversial, convincing or exaggerated. The film was to such an act. It is important.Edward Woods, Joan Blondell, Donald Cook, Leslie Felton and Mae West They are good or just solid. The longer I stayed at Jean Harlow. She was the first bombshell in Hollywood. I make a distinction between sex symbol and sex bomb. This film need such an actress. I did not expect a good chemistry between Cagney and Harlow, but so bad a „cameo" in the film is rarely seen. In the description of the main female role. I think the female characters in this film quite degraded. Harlow had learned a lesson.The Public Enemy is a very good gangster movie. Technical, stylistic and interpretive very serious piece of work. Domination by James Cagney, who with his brisk acting set the standard.

The gangster film was already big business when this movie came out in 1931, but it got a needed dose of star power with the arrival of James Cagney.Cagney plays Tom Powers, a tough kid from a middle-class Chicago family who sees the underworld as his ticket to the big money and respect. Prohibition helps reward his sinister urge. When his brother points up the error of his ways, Powers sneers as only Cagney could:"I suppose you want me to go to night school, and read poems!" This would have been the smarter choice, as "The Public Enemy" does make clear, just not nearly as much fun."The Public Enemy" is celebrated as one of three milestone films from 1931 that put gangster cinema in the big time. And while it doesn't have the story strength of the original "Scarface," it makes up for this lack with Cagney's breakout performance.He's a dynamo from his first moment on screen, and remains so for the run of the film. He obviously relished the choice one-liners and hard-nosed confrontations, but excels just as much with his non- verbal acting, like his playful uppercut jabs, his leering grins, and his infectious wink. You aren't meant to like the guy, and don't, but try to keep your eyes off him.Solid support is given by a secondary cast of heavies, like Tom's buddy Matt Doyle (Edward Woods), along for the ride even when he's clearly unnerved by Tom's manic moments. Leslie Fenton is debonair Nails Nathan, a mob boss whose smooth, charismatic manner keeps Tom in line...for a while. Tom's underworld sponsor, Paddy Ryan (Robert Emmett O'Connor), seems decent by mob standards, but he's a lightweight against the sort of trouble Tom attracts.You could almost subtitle this film "Fun With Food" with all the times food is used unpleasantly. Tom's upright brother throws a keg of beer into a table. Paddy Ryan proves the most disgusting eater of potato chips until Homer Simpson. Tom and Matt turn a prize horse into dog food. And of course, there's that grapefruit.The grapefruit scene is "The Public Enemy's" single most-remembered moment, and fun to watch. Yet it works in forwarding the message of the film, which is the coarsening effect crime has on a person like Tom. Even riding high, he can't help himself when a girlfriend named Kitty (Mae Clarke) he's become frustrated with hesitates about serving him booze with his breakfast. His is a classic overreaction, and funny for that, but instructive, too.Tom really isn't presented as a likable guy. We watch him because it's Cagney, but you aren't meant to sympathize with him. For all the pious words we get about crime not paying, from the ponderously- portrayed brother and from the opening and closing credits, it's Tom himself that brings this message home.The film isn't perfect. The Cagney-less opening is slow and labored, with leaden, stylized performances all around. The story itself is kind of episodic and not well-stitched together. Jean Harlow does a brief turn as one of Tom's romantic interests to pointless effect. Paddy locking his boys in an apartment without their guns is about as smart as putting them in a warehouse awaiting a shipment of booze from Al Capone.Overall, though, when "The Public Enemy" is good, it's very good. Director William Wellman shows why he is regarded as an innovator of sound cinema, with an opening pan shot that goes 270 degrees around a city street, or a fatal fur heist shot in near-total darkness that gives it an expressionistic veneer. Tracking shots give you a sense of motion and of danger that more than makes up for the lack of visible violence. It's all in your head, and worse that way.Most important, Wellman knew he had a prize stallion in Cagney and rides him to glory, keeping him in frame for nearly the entire film. Early Hollywood sent up many stars, but few still burn as bright as Cagney does here.

A violence both gritty and fused to ignite the darker side of our imagination with black humour that still even though made back in 1931 still pervades the near nullified scruples of today's audience. This is The Public Enemy a landmark crime film directed by William "Wild Bill" Wellman who from the outset brings the streets and the times through social-realist montages showing a harsh environment which Tom Powers, Cagney's first notch on the eternal bedpost is born to.James Cagney dances across the screen with a presence that would turn early sound era acting into an art form. His character you could almost say is at first a victim of circumstance originally lead astray, but his fiendish nature soon rises to the fore in a poetically disturbing revenge scene where Tom Powers offs a childhood acquaintance who begs for his life to no avail, a scene where the most disturbing violence happens off screen in our minds.The Public Enemy which appears in an episode of The Sopranos is a stand- up film of any genre featuring all the now trademark elements of the gangster picture above all it's doomed anti-hero who in a climatic shoot out we see walking through the mean streets in the rain to violent redemption, worth mentioning that Cagney walks right into the camera his face filling the screen, a sequence which would also be I think replicated to a greater realised effect in Angels With Dirty Faces.