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.