Angels With Dirty Faces

Angels With Dirty Faces is not a particularly profound film but it is based on a profound idea; that fate can be decided on something as simplistic as that one boy can run faster than another. This irresistible concept, added to the professionalism of Warner Brothers at its peak of artistic confidence, turns what might have a run-of-the-mill gangster movie into a classic of Golden Age filmmaking. Of course, it helps a great deal that the star of the movie is James Cagney, returning to the gangster genre after a few years away and immediately showing that when it comes to tough guys, he is just about unbeatable.

The following review contains spoilers for the film

The film, like most of its stable mates at Warners, is basically cheap melodrama which is turned into gold by solid craftsmanship in every quarter. Two boyhood friends, Rocky (Cagney) and Jerry Connolly (O’Brien), are involved in a minor bout of theft which sees Rocky escape while Jerry is arrested. Fifteen years later, Jerry is a Catholic Priest while Rocky is a successful criminal. Father Connolly is working in the slums, trying to help a group of boys – played by the Dead End Kids – before they grow up into the life of crime which he so narrowly avoided. But he soon becomes concerned that Rocky’s glamorous escapades are becoming a dangerous influence on the kids and that they will end up meeting the same fate which, it soon becomes clear, is waiting for his boyhood friend.

It’s easy to imagine this material in the hands of a cheap hack from Monogram. It would have been played for maximum sentimentality by a group of actors who would have disgraced even the worst amateur dramatic society. But here, in the hands of Michael Curtiz, it works quite beautifully. Curtiz has constantly been undervalued as a director, largely because his work tends to be highly professional while not being especially ‘personal’ – by which I mean that you can’t tell that he’s made a film from watching a few minutes of it in the way that you can with, say, Orson Welles or Vincente Minnelli. Yet Curtiz worked hard and fast with a level of professional competence and imagination which is quite staggering when you consider that he was routinely expected to make at least two full-length films in a year. His films are sometimes mediocre but they rarely dip below that level and at his best, he can use the camera with a subtle brilliance that belies his unimpressive reputation. In Angels With Dirty Faces, he paces every scene to perfection, stopping occasionally for comic asides but never stretching out the material beyond its natural capacity. The camera is constantly moving; not in a showy way but to keep a sense of energy which is backed up by the engaging performances. When he builds to a climax, particularly the famous scenes on ‘The Last Mile’, Curtiz uses shadows and light with genuine originality. Indeed, throughout the film there’s an Expressionist visual style which is noticeable without being pushed down our throats.

Even better, Curtiz works extremely well with the actors. I think it’s fair to say that Pat O’Brien was never a particularly interesting actor but Curtiz uses him with a level of dignity which is genuinely moving and doesn’t ask him to give too much. During the ending, it’s easy to imagine a lesser director encouraging the priest to drown the audience with religious tears but O’Brien just gives us one solitary tear, right at the end to make the point. Throughout the film, he convinces us of Father Connolly’s essential goodness without making him seem unbearably pious. The Dead End Kids are also used extremely well. This group of young actors, most of them plucked from the New York streets, had only been in two films following their success on stage in “Dead End” – the film of that play and a small B-Movie called Crime School with Humphrey Bogart. In their later films, the Kids are so obnoxious that you can hardly bear to watch them but Curtiz doesn’t allow them to mug their scenes into submission. They are certainly funny but they are never permitted to play for cheap laughs – according to Rudy Behlmer, Cagney made it very clear that any attempt on their part to upstage him would have severe consequences. Humphrey Bogart also appears in this movie, making a strong impression as a suave, duplicitous lawyer – the following year, he did even better as Cagney’s co-star in The Roaring Twenties and in 1940 he finally made the big time with the lead in Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra. Then John Huston gave him a call and, at the risk of sounding like a voiceover, the rest is, as they say, history.

Yet, once again, the film belongs fairly and squarely to James Cagney. This is a quite extraordinary performance, taking the Tom Powers character from The Public Enemy and adding a layer of reflective self-consciousness and, inadvertently, human feeling. I can’t say enough about what a great actor Cagney was but it’s worth labouring the point. The seven years since Public Enemy saw him playing a wide variety of characters, most of whom shared a love of garrulous mouthing-off and a swiftness of movement which suggested that even the most innocuous characters had to keep watching their backs. In this movie, Rocky seems to be a violent man who has just begun to consider that there might be more to life than a straight route to the chair. Cagney is exciting to watch, as usual, and he’s also incredibly funny here especially in his scenes with the Dead End Kids, most of them clearly keen to imitate some of his mannerisms. But there’s something else which takes this performance beyond what might be expected and that’s a level of instability. There’s a sense of Rocky being emotionally out of control, constantly responding to changing situations in ways that he doesn’t understand. His scenes with Jerry and the boys are touching, not because of some sentimentality about old friends and social conscience, but because they demonstrate that Rocky can’t dictate his own responses. This leads to a key question. Why does Rocky capitulate to his friend’s final request when it destroys everything which gave his notorious life a meaning, however squalid that life was. Some writers say that its a sop to the Legion of Decency, suggesting the redemptive power of requesting God’s forgiveness. Others claim that he’s simply doing it as a last favour to Jerry. My own take on the scene is that, as so often in the film, Rocky can’t control his own responses and that although the demonstration of a ‘yellow’ side begins as intentional playacting to please Father Connolly, it becomes something more; an expression of genuine fear and horrified remorse which is as impossible for him to hide or control as his paternal impulse towards the Kids. Cagney is great at evoking emotional instability and it’s this which explodes into some kind of emotional chaos in his two final gangster movies. Michael Curtiz loves characters who do things for reasons they can’t quite explain to themselves and it’s this which powers his best later work including those two masterpieces, Casablanca and Mildred Pierce.

Clearly, Angels With Dirty Faces is a sentimental favourite and the product of a compromise between Warner Brothers and the Legion of Decency and the Breen office, both of which demanded that crime should be explicitly shown as not paying. But it’s more than this, a film which takes the requirements of censorship and turns them into something complex and beautiful. The revelation of social injustice, corruption and the squalor in which people were living is remarkably explicit for the time and another example of how Warners was the studio which showed the way things are rather than the way they should be. The last ten minutes are still as emotionally gruelling as they must have been in 1938 and, it seems to me, this is because they remain complex and ambiguous. This is the triumph of the film – it allows you to read into it what you like while still escaping any one specific interpretation. Even better, it serves as the stepping stone by which Jimmy Cagney, with sublime skill, turned the giggling psychotic Tom Powers into a terribly flawed, endlessly complicated human being.

The DVD

Yet another fine disc in the Warner Gangsters Collection, Angels With Dirty Faces looks very impressive. The 1.37:1 monochrome transfer is generally excellent although perhaps not as good as the ones on White Heat and The Roaring Twenties. The level of detail is impeccable and contrast is excellent. The blacks are suitably deep and the greyscale is nicely reproduced. There is, however, a minor amount of print damage throughout which I didn’t expect. Nothing that seriously affects your enjoyment of the film but this places it a level below the best Warner transfers.

No criticisms about the soundtrack however. This is a clear, crisp mono track which offers fine range and renders the dialogue very clearly.

As with the other discs, the array of extras on offer is delightful. Once again, the highlight is a new twenty minute documentary which looks in detail at the making of the film. All involved are enthusiastic about the movie – and Professor Drew Casper goes into ecstasies about Michael Curtiz which may be justified but come across as more than a little exaggerated. Sadly, Martin Scorsese doesn’t appear this time but there’s still plenty of information imparted and the always welcome Rudy Behlmer comes out of it particularly well. In addition to this, we get a very animated commentary track from Dana Polan who packs a lot of observation and analysis into ninety minutes. I found this one of the more entertaining commentaries from the box set. Also present is the original theatrical trailer and a delightful 1939 Lux Radio Theatre broadcast featuring Cagney and O’Brien repeating their roles.

Also present is another “Warners Night At The Movies” feature, this time for 1938 in which Leonard Maltin introduces four entertaining throwbacks to a lost age of cinemagoing. There’s a trailer for the hugely enjoyable farce Boy Meets Girl, some Movietone News footage which includes film of the Munich agreement, an early cartoon featuring Porky Pig and the inimitable Daffy Duck and “Our Where The Stars Begin”, a knock-em-dead Technicolor short about a maniacal director who seems to be based on Michael Curtiz. This latter feature is the pick of the bunch and it is in excellent condition.

My only serious criticism of the disc, and its broken record time again I’m afraid, is that the subtitle provision for the main feature does not extend to the extras. Warners are really ignoring a significant minority of their customers through this oversight.

If you like Angels With Dirty Faces then you will love this DVD. If you’re not so keen then you will at the very least appreciate the time and effort put into the disc. Essential stuff.