His picture is on magazine covers, his name in lights. Ex-con artist Dan Quigley is "doing all right in this movie racket", a big man in Hollywood. But if his criminal past resurfaces, he could end up in the big house. James Cagney is pulse-quickening Quigley in this pre-Hays Code romp described in its day by the New York Evening Post as "a kind of resume of everything Cagney has done to date in the movies". By turns, Lady Killer is a filmmaking spoof, a crime thriller, a character study. And with Cagney's vitality out front, it's enormously greater than the sum of its parts. The likable cast includes Mae Clarke, famously grapefruited by Cagney in The Public Enemy and destined for a notorious donnybrook here.