The Public Enemy: Tom, the grapefruit and the ending
Tom Powers grows up alongside Matt Doyle, but his brother is Mike Powers.
Matt joins him in crime; Mike challenges the life he has chosen.
Those two relationships pull Tom toward different versions of belonging.
- Tom PowersJames Cagney
- The boy who becomes a bootlegger
- Matt DoyleEdward Woods
- Tom’s childhood friend and partner in crime
- Mike PowersDonald Cook
- Tom’s older brother, who rejects his criminal life
AFI’s cast and story record
Who is in the grapefruit scene?
Cagney’s Tom pushes half a grapefruit into the face of his girlfriend
Kitty, played by Mae Clarke. Jean Harlow plays Gwen Allen, the woman
Tom takes up with afterwards. The
Library of Congress
identifies Clarke in the scene; AFI distinguishes the two roles.
The smallness of the gesture matters. An ordinary breakfast becomes a
display of power, with no change of room or elaborate preparation.
Watch how quickly Tom makes his impatience somebody else’s humiliation.
The same energy that makes Cagney command the screen becomes difficult
to enjoy when it lands on the person sitting across from him.
What happens to Tom at the end? Ending spoilers
Tom survives the gunfight in which he takes revenge for Matt’s death.
His rivals then abduct him from the hospital. The body delivered to
his mother’s door is Tom’s: the apparent journey home has become
the gang’s final act against him.
AFI’s synopsis separates the hospital survival from
the later abduction and killing.
That sequence changes the force of the last image. We have followed
Tom through a world where he tries to dictate every encounter. At
home, the consequences arrive for people whose lives he could never
keep separate from his own. The gangster story ends on a family’s
doorstep, making the cost of his rise impossible to leave in the street.
