A short year after filming White Heat, James Cagney returned to the gangster genre once more with Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, a decent, but not nearly as notable, film based on a novel by Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?). The film isn’t a bad one—it has plenty of twists and turns, and it clips along at a nice pace—but compared to White Heat, it feels a little bit tame and flat.

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is a fairly straightforward tale of blackmail, revenge, and fate. Cagney plays the gangster Ralph Cotter, who busts out of jail, getting his partner in crime killed in the process. Looking for a place to stay, he shacks up with his partner’s sister Holiday (Barbara Payton), who blames him for her brother’s death, but finds his violent tendencies strangely attractive. Together, they begin making a reasonable living by blackmailing a bunch of crooked cops.

Like White Heat before it, it has more in common with Warner Bros.’s pre-World War II gangster films (such as The Public Enemy, which, of course, made Cagney famous) than it does with contemporary noir. The camerawork is all pretty straightforward, with simple compositions based entirely on right angles and a story concerned more with crime than with the characters’ troubled psyches. Like White Heat, however, it possesses a dark Freudian subtext that colors the proceedings a noirish shade (with or without the requisite Dutch angles). The ambiguous relationship between Ralph and Holiday is what drives the picture, and while it was arguably done better in other films, Payton pulls off the “woman aroused by violent actions” bit pretty well here. Truth be told, she even upstages Cagney in several scenes.

Therein lies the problem, though—and the reason why Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye wasn’t particularly well received in its day. A sexual relationship based entirely around hatred and violence is interesting, to be sure, but following on the heels of the deeply disturbing Oedipal love triangle in White Heat, it feels comparatively healthy. Cagney the sexually repressed madman is replaced here by Cagney the calculating womanizer. Even with the introduction of a second love interest (a wealthy socialite played by Helena Carter), the sexual side of things never really goes anywhere, and there is very little shock and suspense to be had, as the characters all behave (comparatively) rationally.

That being said, viewed out of context, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye holds up pretty well, and can certainly be considered a minor classic. It’s simply hard to argue with watching Cagney do his gangster shtick, and the plot clicks well enough that it makes for satisfying viewing. The only major regret here is the timing—had it come out ten years earlier, it would have been cutting edge. Had it come out ten years later, it would have been sellably retro. As it was, it was merely another decent genre picture. Nothing to sneeze at, certainly, but nothing to write a master’s thesis about, either.