A Lion Is in the Streets is a 1953 drama film directed by Raoul Walsh and starring James Cagney as a southern politician loosely based on Huey Long. Cagney's brother William was the producer, while his younger sister Jeanne was a member of the cast. The screenplay was based on a 1945 book by Adria Locke Langley. The film is compared to the similar 1949 film All the King's Men, featuring Broderick Crawford in an Academy Award-winning performance.Synopsis
Charismatic roving peddler Hank Martin (James Cagney) falls in love at first sight with schoolteacher Verity Wade (Barbara Hale) and soon marries her. On their wedding day, he rents a ramshackle home from his upper class lawyer friend Jules Bolduc (Warner Anderson). Hank rounds up some of his many friends to fix up the place, but Verity begins to realize that he is not as nice as he appears to be; while they do the work, he sees nothing wrong in going inside to read a law book. He confides to her that it is all a matter of manipulating people the right way.
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