The Public Enemy

The Public Enemy (1931) is a Warner Bros. crime drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director William A. Wellman shot the film in weeks during the early Depression years, and it hit American audiences like a punch — raw, unsentimental, and closer to the street than anything Hollywood had put on screen before.

Tom Powers (James Cagney) and Matt Doyle grow up scraping through the slums of Chicago's South Side in the early 1900s. Petty theft leads to robbery, robbery slides into bootlegging when Prohibition turns crime into an industry. Tom climbs fast. Cagney plays him not as a charming outlaw but as something harder — quick-tempered, coiled, capable of turning on anyone in the room. The grapefruit scene alone has been referenced in dozens of films since. Jean Harlow appears as his girlfriend Gwen, and Mae Clarke plays the woman on the wrong end of that famous breakfast.

Wellman built the film as a moral arc that goes one way only. It set the template for the gangster genre through the 1930s and beyond. Watch The Public Enemy (1931) online on iFILM.