Virginia Mayo & James Cagney

Virginia Mayo and James Cagney shared the screen for three feature presentations.  In their first match-up, White Heat (1949), they were a rather rough-and-tumble team – gangster husband and wife on the lam (pictured above).   Virginia nearly gets a grapefruit in the face at the breakfast table, but, unlike Mae Clarke in Cagney’s The Public Enemy (1931), Virginia manages to avoid that particular abuse.  Later in the movie, she does, however, get her chair knocked out from under her (see the picture below).  In their next outing, The West Point Story (1950), Virginia fares a little better, but her character must suffer through an on-again-off-again romance with Cagney.  Their only other shared screen appearance is in the movie Starlift (1951).  Here, playing themselves, they perform variety acts in a kind of Toast of the Town Goes Hollywood format.