Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) - film review

Jerry Connolly and Rocky Sullivan are two kids growing up in a poor area of New York.  Their first attempt at robbery ends in failure  – Jerry escapes but Rocky is caught and sent to a reform school.  Whilst Jerry becomes a priest, Rocky is lured deeper into a life of crime, and inevitably ends up in jail.   Fifteen years later, Rocky returns to his home district to settle some unfinished business with crooked lawyer James Frazier.  The latter is persuaded by his associate, Mac Keefer, that Rocky is a nuisance that must be eliminated...

Two of the biggest icons of Hollywood’s Golden Age – James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart – share the limelight (the first of three films where they appear together) in this memorable crime drama, directed by Michael Curtiz (of Casablanca fame).  After a string of gangster films in the 1930s, which played fast and loose with Hollywood’s strict Production Code, Angels with Dirty Faces came as a sort of grudging mea culpa.  It tries to bring a dimension of social morality into the gangster thriller genre by showing how easy it is for people – particularly young men from disadvantaged backgrounds – to be corrupted by the wrong kind of role models.  

The moralising is sincere but it is also a little clumsy, to the extent that the film occasionally appears to have something of a crisis of identity.   On the one hand, the film wants to condemn the negative influence gangster "heroes" may have on society, but on the other it is a gangster film, having a charismatic and sympathetic gangster as its main character.  It’s rather like the owner of a distillery giving a lecture on the harm that alcohol consumption can cause, whilst handing out free bottles of whisky.   This in-built dichotomy does, however, have a positive effect, in that the film is far less predictable than other contemporary gangster films, and the characters are certainly more complex and interesting.   

The film offers James Cagney his best role up until this point (he had by this stage in his career become pretty well typecast as the archetypal underworld "tough guy").  The part of the multi-faceted Rocky Sullivan allowed Cagney to turn in one of his best performances – one that won him the New York Film Critics Circle Award in 1939.   The juvenile delinquents who end up as Cagney’s willing disciples were played by the Dead End Kids, a group of young actors from New York who first appeared together in the Broadway play Dead End in 1935 before going on to feature in a number of major Hollywood movies of this period.

What makes Angels with Dirty Faces such a compelling and memorable film is its striking sense of realism, achieved through some exemplary performances, meticulous set design and moody photography.   The film’s dramatic ending – shocking and poignant in equal measure - is one of the greatest of any Hollywood movie, and a tantalising foretaste of what Michael Curtiz would achieve with some of his other great films.

© James Travers 2008

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