The Ultimate Book of Gangster Movies by George Anastasia

Author:George Anastasia
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780762443703
Publisher: Running Press

46 ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES (1938-NR)

STARS: JAMES CAGNEY, PAT O’BRIEN, HUMPHREY BOGART, ANN SHERIDAN

DIRECTOR: MICHAEL CURTIZ

Some movies hold up well over time. This one doesn’t.

We wanted to like Angels with Dirty Faces as much as we did the first time we saw it. But it just wasn’t happening. Maybe some movies play better in our memories than they do on DVD.

It is still worth watching, however, mostly due to the acting. As protagonist Rocky Sullivan, James Cagney delivers one of his great tough-guy performances. His classic shoulder roll and “whaddaya hear, whaddaya say” line has probably been mimicked more than any other, and his final scene still resonates.

Pat O’Brien, as Father Jerry Connolly, does the goodly Catholic priest thing to cinematic perfection. It’s a role that he and Bing Crosby (remember Father O’Malley in Going My Way?) should have had patented. Humphrey Bogart is good as corrupt lawyer Jim Frazier. And Ann Sheridan has her moments as Laury Ferguson, the would-be moll who knows better.

But the storyline in this Warner Brothers gangland melodrama seems contrived and overly moralistic. And the Dead End Kids (remembered as humorous) are six annoying, overacting caricatures—the Three Stooges times two.

Cagney got a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for this performance, which is understandable. However, the film’s two other nominations—for Best Director and Best Writing, Original Story—are hard to believe. But then maybe we’re unfairly applying 21st-century sensibilities to 1938 cinema.

Rocky Sullivan and Jerry Connolly are boyhood friends growing up in the slums of New York City. As teenagers, they hang on fire escape landings, harass cute neighborhood girls and look for ways to get into trouble.

A plan to steal boxes of fountain pens from a freight car at a train loading dock leads to a police chase and Rocky saving Jerry’s life by pulling him off the tracks after he slips and falls in front of an approaching steam engine. It ends with Rocky being captured and Jerry, the faster runner, getting away.

Rocky takes the rap, never gives up his friend Jerry to “the coppers” and heads off to reform school. Flashing newspaper headlines chronicle the highlights of the era (“Harding Nominated for President” screams one; “Flier Circles the World” hollers another) and track the next 15 years of Rocky’s criminal life. When he finally returns to the old neighborhood after a series of arrests for more serious crimes, Rocky has become a renowned gangster.

In the meantime, his childhood friend and juvenile crime partner Jerry has become the parish priest. He works to set the teenage boys in the ‘hood on the straight and narrow. And Laury, whose first husband was killed in an underworld dispute, is now into social work and setting things right.

But both still love Rocky. And he loves them back.

“Somehow I feel Rocky could be straightened out,” the good priest tells Laury after Rocky gets the Dead End Kids to come to the gym to play basketball—something the priest had failed to get them to do.

Rocky falls for Laury, even though an associate warns, “That dame’s a jinx.

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