Reelin' In The Years -- Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), directed by Michael Curtiz

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Angels With Dirty Faces", by Sham 69

       If the pop culture of the 1950s were built on aliens and rocket ships, then the pop culture of the 30s (and part of the 40s) were built on gangsters and Thompson submachine guns. Ever since Prohibition had made crime a lucrative business, and organized crime started to assert itself more and more into public affairs, so too did those who committed such crimes become public figures  Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, John Dillinger, names that sent thrills and chills through the hearts of the U.S., just as the stories of Billy the Kid and other outlaws had done years prior, only far more ubiquitous. From the way pop culture told it,you couldn’t walk two feet with bumping into the mob; The Shadow was bumping them off on the radio, Mike Hammer was running up against them in the pulps, Batman was facing off against them in the comics, and of course there were scores and scores of gangsters, mobsters, hitmen and other assorted goons in the theaters and film serials. So much gangster stuff that you might think that the U.S. government was funding it in order to have an easy scapegoat to blame the ills of society. Surely they wouldn’t do something that underhanded, right?

       As has been the case since we’ve moved into the sound era, there were plenty of potential films we could have covered for 1938. Of course there’s the obligatory Alfred Hitchcock with The Lady Vanishes, but Alfie’s gonna have to wait for a couple more years. Errol Flynn appeared in two vehicles that year, The Dawn Patrol and the much more famous The Adventures of Robin Hood, but I had seen a review of the latter recently and I like to keep my mind fresh. I might have done Bringing up Baby, Howard Hawks’ romantic comedy starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, but that business with It Happened One Night left me with a sour taste in my mouth. I also gave serious consideration to Norman Taurog’s Boys Town, starring Spencer Tracy and a young Mickey Rooney.  Yet in the end I decided I wanted to get to at least one gangster movie on this tour; not a mystery movie involving gangsters, which I’m sure we’ll get to once we hit film noir territory, and not movies that happened to feature gangsters like The Big House, but a straight up potboiler crime movie. Which I did.

       That film was Angels with Dirty Faces, released in 1938, written by John Wexley and Warren Duff, based on a story by writer-director Rowland Brown, and directed by the prolific Michael Curtiz, who also directed the aforementioned Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca, Mildred Pierce and many other films. Back in the day there were no two greater friends than Rocky Sullivan and Jerry Connelly, two rough ‘n’ tumble street kids who spent their days smoking cigs, teasing girls and doing crimes. One day however while attempting to steal some fountain pens for some easy profit the boys are set upon by the cops and Rocky is shipped off to reform school, thus altering the course of the two boy’s lives. 15 years later, Rocky (played by James Cagney) is now a free man and has returned to his old neighborhood in order to reconnect with his pal Jerry (Pat O’Brien), who is now a priest watching over the next generation of hooligans (played by the troupe of child actors known as The Dead End Boys). However Rocky is also one of the most notorious gangsters in the city, and part of the reason he’s there is to collect the 100,000 dollars he lent out to his lawyer James Frazier (Humphrey Bogart) as well as his cut of the action. Rocky is a charming guy, winning the hearts of not only the kids of the neighborhood, and yet his lust for power and riches sets him at odds with the morally righteous Jerry, leading them towards a conclusion that will once again affect the course of their lives forever.

       Gangster movies are often criticized for glorifying the criminals they center around. Just look at the explosive popularity of Brian de Palma’s remake of Scarface, whose main character is a murderous, drug-dealing psychopath. I don’t think that criticism is without reason, yet I think the opposite also tends to be quite prevalent; That criminals are subhuman creatures who exist only to be cannon fodder for our gun-toting protagonist. What I like about Angels with Dirty Faces, then, is that it’s a very human film. Rocky Sullivan is not a good guy; He has no problem with using intimidation and violence to get what he desires and so do the people around him, and he’s pretty damn good at it. Yet at the same time he’s not completely bad either; You can see the goodness in him and how he tries to help the people important to him in his own way. Similarly, although Jerry is in the right he’s not self-righteous about; He opposes Rocky’s actions but he doesn’t damn him or attack him for it, he understands how his friend became the way he is and wants to make sure that others don’t follow the same path. In that way Angels with Dirty Faces becomes less of an action-packed gangster film and more like a tragic drama where two friends and pushed against each other by forces beyond their control. Which I think is the way to go about it, rather than just ‘watch these people do bad stuff until they’re killed by some cops’.

       What really sells that idea, and the movie really, is the casting of James Cagney as Rocky Sullivan. These days Cagney is less known as an actor and more of a voice people pull out when they want to do an ‘old timey gangster’ voice, much like Edward G. Robinson, but seeing him here it’s easy to see why he became such an iconic figure. He’s got this chameleonic presence about him that allows him to shift between boyish charm and cold-blooded killer at the drop of a hat, encapsulating perfectly the ‘street kid forced to grow up too early and too hard’ nature of Rocky’s character. Quite exaggerated, especially when put up against more passive characters, but never to the point where it becomes buffoonish, like Pacino in Dick Tracy. The rest of the cast is good, obviously Bogart is putting in work, Pat O’Brien plays a good stoic, Ann Sheridan doesn’t get much but I liked what I saw, and I was also a bit surprised at how much I liked the Dead End Kids, (I’m a big fan of old New York street tough stereotypes I guess), pretty amazing that they managed to get a respectable film career off of one performance in a play years ago. Yet above all it’s Cagney that this film is built upon and Cagney that the audience’s eye is drawn towards, just as it was with Bogart in Casablanca a few years later.

       On a technical level, Angels is a well-constructed film but not an especially flashy one. I did like how several shots near the end were composed though, I thought they were blocked very well and I liked the use of shadows and darkness. The score provided by Max Steiner was much the same, good as well as unobtrusive to the story. I never really recognized Michael Curtiz as a director before, despite having seen Casablanca prior, but now having seen those films and reading up on his biography a bit it seems like he was a genuine craftsman of a filmmaker. You’re not going to see Lawrence of Arabia style flash & spectacle out of him it seems like, but he will give you just enough in order to tell the story. He’d have to be sparing too, since he was putting out six movies a year at one point. Makes all these modern directors look a bit lazy, don’t it?

       Ultimately, Angels with Dirty Faces gets the recommendation. I was hesitant to get to this film at first to be honest, expecting it to be the simplistic cops & robbers kind of movie I mentioned earlier and that I’d have to force myself to fill out the by-now standard 3 page, but I was pleasantly surprised that there was actually some meat on that bone. It’s not just a movie about violence and so on but about its effects, not just on an individual level but on one’s community. Glad I watched it. On the next stop of our tour we’ll be moving into the 1940’s, a decade of bloodshed and human misery, and we’ll be doing it with some of the biggest names of that era. As well as one of the biggest books. 

Reelin' In The Years -- A Day at the Races (1937), directed by Sam Wood

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "A Day At The Races", by Jurassic 5

       I’m not going to be one of those folks that says that comedy was so much better back in the day, as often times that seems to go hand-in-hand with ‘I want to make fun of minorities but I don’t want people to make me feel bad for doing it’, but I will say that it is distinctly different. I imagine much of that has to do with the fact that the comedy stars of the day came out of vaudeville, a style of theatrical variety show that had begun in the 1880s and had been phased out with the rise of cinema. Whereas many top comedic stars today got their start as stand-up comics before transitioning to the silver screen, those coming out of vaudeville were consummate performers: Acting, singing, dancing, musicianship, you needed to be well-rounded back in those days. That emphasis on stand-up also emphasizes the performer these days, whereas comedy then was based on the act. People didn’t turn on the Colgate Comedy Hour to see Bud Abbott and Lou Costello the people, they turned on to see the characters of Abbott & Costello, if that makes sense. At least they did until they were replaced by Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, and even then Jerry Lewis wasn’t the same guy as ‘Jerry Lewis’. Just ask the French.

       I was a big 3 Stooges fan when I was a kid, in large part because TCM or whoever loved to push marathons of their stuff back in the day, and it wasn’t until I was in late high school/early college that I first heard of the Rolling Stones to the Stooges’ Beatles, the Marx Bros. Where the crux of the 3 Stooges style lied in the fact that they were stooges and thus fucked up everything they attempted, the Marx Bros. (lascivious fast-talker Groucho, Italian con artist Chico, and prop-loving, anarchi mute Harpo, occasionally joined by their straight-man brother Zeppo or Gummo in the vaudeville days) made everyone else the stooges. As soon as they stepped into a room they were three steps ahead of everyone else there, and then it was a race to see how much they can fuck with those people before the scene ended. They were still good guys at heart, helping those in need, but they were totally fine with lying, cheating and stealing whenever the situation called for it (or because they felt like it at the time). Kinda like Eddie Guerrero when he was a babyface.

       A Day at the Races was the second Marx Bros. film to be released by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer after their move from Paramount (the home of their first five full-length films) and the second in a row to be directed by Sam Wood (who you might recall from Raffles) , following A Night at the Opera. Maureen O’Sullivan plays Judy, the young and beautiful owner of a sanitarium located near the Sparkling Springs Lake summer resort which has recently fallen on hard times. It’s looking like she might have to sell the place to shady businessman Morgan, and finding out that her lover Gill (Allan Jones) has spent all the money he’s saved up as a singer in order to buy a racehorse in order to pay her debts does nothing to lift her mood. Tony (Chico), the sanitarium employee, offers a suggestion: Get Ms. Upjohn (played by Marx Bros. regular Margaret Dumont), the resident rich lady and hypochondriac to pay off the debt! Well Miss Upjohn isn’t really in the mood to break open the pocketbook, convinced as she is that something is wrong despite all the doctors saying she’s fine. So if that’s the case, then they better call in Ms. Upjohn’s favorite doctor, Hugo Hackenbush (Groucho), physician and diagnostician, but mostly a veterinarian. Then you’ve got Stuffy the jockey (Harpo) who ends up meeting Gill at the race track while running from his own troubles, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a cinematic jambalaya.

       Of course you’re not going to a Marx Bros. movie for the plot, you’re there to see them do their schtick, and in that A Day at the Races fulfills that need. I find it hard to describe what makes the Marx Bros.entertaining, because so much of it is based on the dexterity of how they perform and how they use language (probably not a good choice for an ESL class movie night) that you really need to see it to get the full effect. This is clear whenever one of the Bros. are aimed at somebody, but Races also dedicates a decent chunk of time to longform skits involving the Bros. interacting with each other, which has a different sort of energy entirely. The only one who can match a Marx Brother is another Marx Brother after all, and seeing them play off each other is a treat all on its own. The first big skit of the film in fact, when Tony unknowingly meets Hackenbush for the first time and cons him into buying a tip on a horse, which is in a code you need to buy a code book to decipher, and so on and on, feels exactly like something they pulled out a hundred times back on the vaudeville circuit. Hell, you don’t even need the rest of the film for context, it works perfectly well on its own with a definitive beginning and end. 

       Marx Bros. films are often very musical ones as well, with most if not all of their films featuring a virtuoso solo performance by Chico on the piano and Harpo on the harp (natch). Races takes this a step further by sticking two lengthy musical numbers in the second half, including a reprise at the end. Allan Jones does his Zeppo impression here, by which I mean ‘generic old-timey Hollywood ballad’, but I do enjoy the second, jazzier number. Combined with those long skits it does throw off the pace of the film, so things end up coming across as a bit chaotic by the end. A bit of a ‘we’re running out of time so let’s wrap everything up now’ kind of thing. Not bad, just different.

       Really I’ve only got two gripes with this movie. One is an unfortunate case of blackface, when the Marx Bros. are trying to escape from the villains in a crowd of Black people, but not too much attention is drawn to it and no jokes are made at the expense of Black people during the scene so it’s not as bad as it could have been. The other issue is with Harpo, or rather how he’s utilized in this film. Not only does he seem less actively chaotic than he has in other films, but he also seems kind of...superfluous, I guess is the word? As if they struggled to find something for him to do except at the very end of the film. I also must admit that I hate his ‘whistling as talking’ gimmick, and when he breaks it out here it lasts just long enough to get me in a sour mood. They get back by the next scene, but that fucking whistling is not doing it for me dude.

       When talking about the best Marx Bros. movies, I imagine folk with more cinema experience than I do likely lean towards their output with Paramount (that Zeppo tho). Honestly I’d probably agree, although it’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to watch their early stuff. However I think A Day at the Races (as well as A Night at the Opera) works as a good showcase of their stuff, and showed that they still had plenty left in the tank. At least until they reached A Night in Casablanca, by which time the wheels were definitely falling off the car. 1937 though? Still good, and so it gets the recommendation.

       This year’s potential inductions included Disney’s landmark animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Leo McCarey’s family drama Make Way For Tomorrow, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage. We’re heading closer and closer to some dark times on the timeline, so how about for our next stop we get into some heavier fare?