For his previous Pulps in the Movies post, John Locke spotlighted a flick starring James Cagney. All well and good, but Jimmy wasn’t the guy holding a pulp in that one.
Did Jimmy himself ever read a pulp in a motion picture, you might ask.
Come on, spill with the dope. Did he?
John snappy-patters an answer:
Here’s Cagney on a train reading the January 4, 1930 Argosy. He appears to be absorbed in the third installment of Otis Adelbert Kline’s Maza of the Moon (no relation to ERB’s The Moon Maid, of course).
Standing by, with other things on his mind, is co-star Edward G. Robinson.
The film Smart Money was released on July 11, 1931, so it’s unlikely that the prop department snagged the pulp fresh off the newsstand. If they didn’t have it in their inventory of useful objects, they could easily have bought it for half-price (5¢) from any bookshop that carried used magazines.
