James Cagney and Doris Day Are Dynamite as a Mismatched Pair in 1955's Love Me or Leave Me
The late Doris Day had the complicated, difficult and emotionally fraught distinction of being America’s Sweetheart, or one of our nation’s semi-officially ordained Sweethearts, during her heyday in the 1950s and early 1960s. Day rose to superstardom as the wholesome, freshly scrubbed girl next door, an American ideal, the woman every mother wished her son would bring home and every man wanted for his wife.
Like all true icons, Day came to embody something at once much bigger than herself and smaller. Day came to represent something pure and healthy and upbeat about the American people and the American spirit. But the same wholesome persona that made Day a household name did not reflect the depth of Day as a complicated, three-dimensional, staggeringly complex human being. Fame became a golden prison for Day as it is for so many people who attain that staggering level of celebrity; it gave her wealth and power and extraordinary adoration but at a steep price to her autonomy and independence.
Day might have projected sunny, virginal innocence onscreen but by the time she hit the big screen in 1948’s Romance on the High Seas she was a worldly young woman forced to grow up fast in the demanding, high-profile worlds of live performance, radio, recording and national tours. She was a show-business trooper, a veteran, a lifer who ultimately and unexpectedly chose to do something else with her life.
In that respect, Day was intimately familiar with the show-business world depicted in the 1955 Ruth Etting biopic even if Ettinger was from an earlier generation, having rocketed to fame in the roaring twenties instead of the 40s and 50s. The similarities go beyond that. Day was known as "America's sweetheart of song” while in Love Me or Leave Me Etting’s brutish mobster boyfriend bills the object of his affection "Chicago’s Sweetheart,” after the city where they meet and come together.
The plum role of Etting afforded Day a priceless opportunity to croon her way through Etting’s voluminous body of catchy ditties but it gave her one of her darkest, meatiest and most challenging dramatic roles as well.
Love Me or Leave Me gave Day the extraordinary challenge of holding her own onscreen opposite James Cagney at his incendiary, apoplectic, ferocious best, as a borderline feral hoodlum who falls helplessly, desperately in love with a woman he cannot control or contain and resorts to extreme, criminal measures in a doomed attempt to hold onto her.
Love Me or Leave Me consequently offered a potent yin and yang, beauty and the beast pairing of Doris Day, America’s sweetheart, the wholesome, smiling blonde girl next door, and a limping and rage-choked Jimmy Cagney, American gangster, a dark and brooding figure of violence, rage and criminality.
Day plays Etting, a singer and actress who takes the proverbial rocket ride to stardom with the help of Martin Snyder (a perfectly typecast Cagney), a brutish mobster in the dry cleaning and intimidation business with an interest in the beautiful young performer that is much more than professional.
The bruisingly intense career criminal helps the ambitious young singer rise from dancehall hostess to chorus girl to featured attraction to star, but at a cost. Etting and Snyder enjoy a profoundly transactional relationship. Etting is in a furious hurry to become a star in the tiny window in which a miracle like that is even hypothetically possible and the lovestruck hood is more than willing to use his connections, power and muscle to make that happen in exchange for being the man in her life.
The young singer feels appreciation rather than adoration or anything amorous towards the older man. Etting certainly does not repay the gangster’s obsessive, paranoid, soul-consuming passion but she nevertheless feels compelled to fulfill her part of the Faustian bargain she made with Snyder in exchange for the best shot at stardom.
The more successful Ruth becomes, the less she needs Martin in her career or her life. There reaches a point, not too far into the film and Ruth’s professional journey, when this rough around the edges and also everywhere else brute, with his explosive temper and total lack of social graces, stops being an asset and becomes a profound professional and personal liability.
A toxic combination of brutish anger and emotional fragility, Martin is not the kind of man who can handle such a radical shift in a power dynamic gracefully, or at all. The mobster and his musical moll have a Star is Born dynamic where the protege becomes decidedly more successful than their fragile, dangerously insecure star-maker/mentor due to explosive, undeniable natural talent and the older figure is pathologically unable to handle it, leading to a nervous breakdown and tragedy.
Yet the star on the rise and the hood on the decline, mentally as well as professionally, get married anyway and when Hollywood comes a calling for the red-hot singer Martin tags along after his wife like a lost puppy and only succeeds in getting in her way. Instead of greasing the wheels of the star-making machine, the overwhelmed and out of his depth Chicago hood threatens to gum them up with his unwanted and counter-productive intrusions into his wife’s professional life.
Martin’s name means something in his hometown of Chicago. It inspires both fear and respect in the places where he brutally asserts his power. It means nothing in the chic clubs of New York where Ruth becomes a sensation thanks to her talent rather than Martin’s behind the scenes machinations. Martin’s name means less than nothing in Hollywood. Being married to a two-bit hood with some pull in his hometown becomes an enduring source of embarrassment to the singer on the rise, especially when Etting’s latest motion picture finds her collaborating once again with Johnny Alderman (Cameron Mitchell), a piano-playing musician she struck up a flirtatious friendship with during her early days in Chicago.
Johnny is everything Martin is not. He’s handsome, tall and well-mannered. He’s an artist capable of controlling his temper and his emotions. He’s also in love with the beautiful singer, actress and now movie star but not in the scary, terrifying way Martin is. Johnny’s feelings are not tainted and poisoned by jealousy and anger the way Martin’s are.
A love triangle develops between a woman torn between her ever-growing attraction towards the suave musician and her feelings of obligation towards a man who needs her so badly that it’s tearing him apart from the inside.
Martin’s ominous aura doesn’t just threaten violence: it promises it. From his very first moment onscreen, Cagney vibrates with menace and angry, nervous energy. He’s a powder keg of a man never more than a few seconds away from erupting with free-floating rage. Violence is not something that he does; it’s who he is.
When Martin finally explodes into violence, it feels inevitable. Cagney may be five-foot-five with a permanent limp but his personality and glowering charisma are so outsized they make him seem eight feet tall and bulletproof at the start of the film, before life and show-business play havoc with his sense of self.
Cagney’s performance alone gives Love Me or Leave Me a texture all its own. Due in no small part to the pummeling, method actor intensity Cagney brings to the role, Love Me or Leave Me is an utterly singular combination of glitzy, old school, song-filled MGM musical melodrama and sadism-laced emotional psychodrama.
It seems perverse and a little sadistic to cast a great song and dance man like Cagney in a musical where he doesn’t sing or dance but Cagney is such a powerful and expressive actor that he gets as much out of watching Day as Etting perform for an increasingly adoring public with a powerful, complicated combination of pride, lust, anger and vulnerability as Day does singing Etting favorites like “Ten Cents a Dance” and “Sam, the Old Accordion Man.”
You’d have to skip ahead to the similarly grim Pennies from Heaven and Dancer in the Dark to see such punishingly intense performances in a musical. Love Me or Leave Me is consequently notable for both its wonderfully handled production numbers and its surprising, unexpected psychological realism and complexity.
Love Me or Leave Me feels at once like a product of its era and a prescient exploration of toxic masculinity that anticipates the rage-filled male melodrama of John Cassavettes and the French New Wave.
What Etting and her violence-prone star-maker share isn’t love, really but rather a combustible, fascinating and unfathomably complicated combination of dependence, resentment, history and nostalgia. Etting doesn’t love Martin, nor is she seemingly attracted to him physically but the bond they share is nevertheless fierce, if impossible to understand from the outside.
Love Me or Leave Me is an anomaly in so many ways: it’s a Jimmy Cagney musical where Jimmy Cagney doesn’t sing or dance, as well as love story about a woman who most assuredly does not love the unhinged, violent man obsessed with her, and a tough, uncompromising musical vehicle for America’s Sweetheart that empowered her to play an iron-willed, savvy survivor intent on living through the kind of terrible, if initially necessary relationship that destroys lesser souls.
So even though Love Me or Love Me found Cagney once again playing a hot-tempered criminal and Day effortlessly inhabiting the role of an ambitious young singer whose talent cannot be denied, the film is anything but a rehash. It’s a riveting, unique exploration of a complicated, ultimately impossible relationship between two very different people that has the unexpected benefit of leaving audiences with a song or two in their hearts as well as a renewed appreciation for the extraordinary, unexpectedly complementary gifts of its two iconic, perfectly cast stars.
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