So you liked White Heat, with psychotic mamma's boy Cody Jarret going way over the top? Well, here's one just like it, only without any pretense at psychological probing of Cagney's character. Ralph Cotter is just plain evil, that's all there is to him. Unfortunately any comparison with White Heat shows up the deficiencies of this movie. There's simply no real reason to be all that interested in any of the characters. They rob and steal, scheme and cheat, but there's no real drive to their actions. You keep wondering why you should spend any time with these nasty people; even Cagney lacks that vicious charm he usually gives to these gangster roles.If you can watch Cagney do anything you may like this movie, for me it held too little appeal.

James Cagney is in top form in this rare & obscure gem, obviously made to cash in on the success of White Heat. If you enjoyed White Heat you will relish Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Cagney does not disappoint & shows that he is still at his best as a gangster. No matter how evil & despicable Cagney was you could never really hate him. That was how charismatic & electrifying James Cagney was & only he could have played Cody Jarrett & Ralph Cotter. Cagney is more in control & more clever & manipulating as Ralph Cotter. Everyone gets sucked in & gets caught in his web from Crooked Cops played by Ward Bond & Barton Maclane, a crooked lawyer (Luther Adler), the moll (Barbara Payton), the wealthy businessman & his spoiled daughter. I like the scene where Cagney sets a trap for Inspector Webber (Ward Bond) by recording a conversation about plans for a bogus heist on record to blackmail & use against him to get what he wants. Cherokee Mandan says "Let's try it on for size", he gets Ralph a gun permit & later Cagney even gets the inspector to give him a policeman's uniform to undermine & cash in on a criminal racket."Any business that pays 50 grand is a good business to be in". Cagney seemed unstoppable & was in control of every situation, pushing the envelope & it's easy to see why Holiday Carlton (Barbara Payton) had to kill Cagney in the end for killing her brother during the prison break. I almost wished he hadn't of gotten killed by her because it seemed like the rich father & his daughter had some kind of good influence on him, Ezra Dobson later approves of their marriage & decides not to have it annulled & offers Cagney a proposition of managing his daughter's money(Helena Carter)who's richer than her father. When she asks Ralph why he carries a gun she asks to see it & intentionally tosses it in the water. "You don't need it any more", he was heading in a new direction & starting a new life of respectability & leaving his criminal life behind. Or would Ralph have just gotten greedy to their millions of $$ & bumped them off as well or would he have reformed ? We'll never know. Watch this movie, I highly recommend it !!

Hi, It's actually a right hand drive car but alas I can't be positive with the identification of it. I too thought it was a Mercedes but now know it probably isn't. It could well be an Hispano Suiza though. If you do an image internet search on this car a very similar one comes up albeit with a spare wheel attached to the door but it wouldn't be unknown for this to be removed by the production company because it got in the way. What I can say though is that it can decelerate from 110mph to 20mph in half a second (ha!)I will watch this with interest.I agree that it is a great film though. Film4 have just shown it for the second time to my knowledge. Hope they show Love Me Or Leave Me soon, a favourite of mine and apparently of Cagney himself. In both these films Cagney was in his early 50s, being born in 1899 but still believable as a character.

It's hard to believe that Above The Line talent like Gordon Douglas, Harry Brown and Horace McCoy could fall so badly into the old Flashback trap; you know the one, one character begins to tell another or, in this case, a crowded courtroom of something that happened in the past and almost as soon as we're in full flashback mode the character narrating disappears leaving us to watch a series of events at which he was not present and by extension could have no knowledge of. Perhaps the fact that this film is now 59 years old and what was arguably fast-moving then now veers toward the pedestrian draws attention to this basic flaw. It's quite possible that viewers at the time were prepared to put up with sloppiness like this if they were caught up in the plot. Clearly it was a cynical ploy to cash in on the success of the previous year's White Heat which provided Cagney with one of his finest gangster roles. He has another good gangster role here but it's never going to get even close to Cody Jarret. Neither Barbara Payton nor Helena Carter have any real charisma as the two love interests competing for Cagney and stalwarts such as Barton McLane, Luther Adler, Ward Bond and Rhys Williams appear to be walking through it and/or phoning it in. It's certainly watchable as a filler on television which is where I saw it and it did keep me watching til the finale which, inevitably, ended in tears.