PICTURE SNATCHER. Warner Brothers, 1933. James Cagney, Ralph Bellamy, Patricia Ellis, Alice White, Ralf Harolde, Robert Emmett O’Connor. Director: Lloyd Bacon.

   What this above average little semi-crime drama has going for it most of all can be summed up in two words: James Cagney. An an ex-con looking for a new life, he’s on the screen for most of the movie and in none of those scenes is he sitting or standing still. He’s on the go every minute. Although short in stature, he can make you tired just watching him, as he kids and connives his way around his new career as a news photographer for a sleazy bottom-of-the-barrel newspaper.

   Aiding him in his new life, after he’s dumped the mob he was once the leader of, is Ralph Bellamy as the paper’s sympathetic city editor. Lusting for him — no other word will do — is Alice White, the paper’s “sob sister” writer who — surprisingly enough really is a damned good rewrite person in her own right.

   But Danny Kean (Cagney) has eyes only for the daughter of the cop who ran him in three years ago, and all kinds of complications ensure from this one small remarkable coincidence, the kind that oculd happen only in movies like this.

   Being a pre-Code movie, there some fairly explicit innuendos between Cagney and Miss White, plus some revealing shots of the latter in her lingerie. All the more bonus, you’d have to say, to Cagney’s bold, bravura performance in this one.