NFR Project: 'Angels with Dirty Faces' (1938)

 

NFR Project: ‘Angels with Dirty Faces’

Dir: Michael Curtiz

Scr: John Wexley, Warren Duff

Pho: Sol Polito

Ed: Owen Marks

Premiere: Nov. 26, 1938

97 min.

Warner Brothers was tops when it came to gangster melodramas – a genre they pioneered with films such as Little Caesar and The Public Enemy. This is one of the best in the lot – a story that seems cliched now, but only because it has been recycled countless times. It’s a hard-hitting, gritty tale about a gangster (James Cagney) and a priest (Pat O’Brien) who grew up together, and their influence over a group of impressionable young boys (the Dead End Kids – more on them later).

Rocky Sullivan and Jerry Connolly are two ghetto kids in New York City, knocking around together and stealing when they get the chance. They are chased by police – Jerry gets away but Rocky does not. Rocky goes to reform school and becomes a career criminal. Jerry joins the church.

Fifteen years later, the old friends reunite, as Rocky is released from prison and returns ot his old neighborhood. He meets up with Father Jerry, and gets to be looked up to by the gang of local kids, who idolize his criminal lifestyle. Rocky has trouble with his former criminal partners, and battles them even as Father Jerry takes to the airwaves to condemn him and his like.

Rocky finds out that his former friends plan to rub out him and Father Jerry, so he kills them first. Running from the police, Rocky is trapped in a warehouse. Father Jerry tries to get him to surrender, but is taken hostage. Rocky is captured, tried, and sentenced to death.

In the death house, Father Jerry pleads with Rocky to act scared at his execution, to show the kids who admire him that he is no better than a yellow rat. Rocky boldly refuses – then breaks down at the last minute, sobbing and begging for mercy. The kids re suitably chastened. And Father Jerry says, “Let’s go, boys . . . and say a prayer for a boy who couldn’t run as as fast as I could.”

Cagney is in fine form as Rocky, generous one moment and murderous the next. O’Brien has the thankless role of playing the saintly priest, but does well with it. Humphrey Bogart is on hand, in one of his last bad-guy roles as a crooked lawyer.

The Dead End Kids are the centerpiece of this film. They had starred in the 1935 Broadway show Dead End, and then were brought out to Hollywood to play the same roles in the movie version. The original Dead End Kids consisted of teen actors Billy Halop, Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, Leo B. Gorcey, Gabriel Dell, and Bernard Punsley. This dese-and-dose collection of New York truants proved popular, and started appearing in movies written around them. They appeared in Crime School in 1937, this film a year later. Eventually, the group starred in its own series of poorly written, low-budget comedies – nearly 60 films until 1958, bearing names such as the Bowery Boys, the Little Tough Guys, and the East Side Kids.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Adventures of Robin Hood.