Words similar to cagney

Example sentences for: cagney

How can you use “cagney” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:

More importantly, her assertion that the audience is unclear about Cagney's true state of mind at the end of Angels With Dirty Faces is just plain wrong.
What Americans do recall about Cagney they're likely to have picked up from imitators (including, of all people, Sammy Davis Jr.), who loved to mimic his nasal, rapid-fire delivery, and to re-enact that moment at the end of his films when he gets plugged with what seems like 300 bullets and reels theatrically for 12 minutes before dropping dead.
Other actors had played scum, but only Cagney played scum with an awesome dignity, like a predator in a nature documentary.
Cagney riffed on this hard-boiled persona for about a decade, most harrowingly in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), playing Rocky Sullivan, a killer who freaks out just as he's about to go to the electric chair.
A couple of times during this period, he'd test-screen a film, the audience would object to the new passive Cagney, and he'd have to shoot a new ending in which he went crazy and punched someone out.