Film review: Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)

This is a good companion-piece to The Roaring Twenties.  Although there's no mention of fighting in WWI in this one it does take Jimmy Cagney (or rather, the boy-version-of-Cagney's-character Rocky Sullivan (played by a vaguely Cagney-esque child actor)) from the streets to great wealth through bootlegging, alongside a weaselly-and-eventually-back-stabbing Humphrey Bogart.  And just like in that one, he gets to finish off Bogart before his own particularly melodramatic death.  However, at least his love interest in this one falls for him, and he avoids ruination in the stock-market crash, but on the downside the way he meets his end is in the electric chair, so win some, lose some.

I'm not entirely clear if the titular angels are the boyhood friends Rocky and Jerry Connolly (played as an adult by Cagney's real-life buddy Pat O'Brien) or the Dead End Kids (literally, that's the name of the group of young actors who really came from the streets of New York and first appeared in the Broadway play of that name, and whom we've also seen with Bogart as a good guy in the cheapo Crime School) whom the adult now-priest Jerry is mentoring when Rocky comes back to the old neighborhood after his latest spell in the big house, only to have them fall head-over-heels for the gangster over the Father.  

(If you want some idea of what the Kids are like, if this were a decade or so later they'd be singing Gee, Officer Krupke.)  The beginning sets it up not just with young Rocky and Jerry but also young Laury Ferguson, who, after being (mildly) bullied by Rocky, grows up to be his love interest (and get her revenge), as played by Ann Sheridan.  

Then Rocky and Jerry head to the railyards to see what they can lift.  They're inside a railcar filling their pockets with fountain pens (of all things) when the cops catch up to them.  They do runners, and Jerry, being faster, gets away, while Rocky gets caught climbing a fence.  Jerry feels guilty and, visiting Rocky in jail (with stitches in his head in a place where Pat O'Brien later has a scar) offers to admit shared guilt.  Rocky will have none of it and says in Jerry's position he wouldn't consider being a sucker like that.  Then it's montage time, as Rocky bounces in and out of the pen, climbing the criminal ladder as he goes, until he gets caught and asks his lawyer Humphrey Bogart to look after his $100 grand while he's serving six years.  It's after that that we see him come back to the old neighborhood and reconnect with Jerry and Laury.  Bogart's Frazier is none-too-pleased to see Rocky, as he is now working for big boss Mac Keefer, but gives Rocky $500 to be going along with and promises him the rest of the $100G by the end of the week.  Of course, he sends a hit squad to bump off Rocky, but he evades them and they kill one of their own by mistake.  Then he forces Frazier to open his safe, which contains dynamite information on every important person in town that allows Mac pretty much free hand.  He then ransoms Frazier for the $100K from Mac.  In the meantime he's getting to know the Dead End kids, and there are extended indoor basketball scenes, if you can believe it.  

Then things move pretty quickly to a shootout, Mac and Frazier bite it but the police corner Rocky.  Jerry goes in to get Rocky to give up 

but he holds him up "at gunpoint" (really there are no bullets left in his gun) to get out, and yet still gets caught and put on death row.  The Dead End kids follow his exploits avidly, and are convinced he'll die as he lived, cool as a cucumber.  So Jerry goes to Rocky on death row with a request that I was surprised to find I thought was asking too much: Rocky should pretend to be a coward and scream and cry and beg not to die so that his grip over the Dead End Kids would be broken.  Rocky correctly points out that he's taking away the last thing he has left.  Will he do the right thing?

As with Roaring Twenties, there are stretches of this movie that are corny, but it builds to a crackerjack finale, and Cagney is never less than mesmerizing.  The last sequence of him being led to the chamber is pure film noir, beautifully shot with inky shadows thrown across the scenes and closeups of Cagney's steely face.  

Somewhat of a surprise to me was how dismissive both Cagney and the Kids are of the religion that Father Jerry half-heartedly pushes.  Rocky is under no illusions that there's going to be nothing after the chair, and all he has to leave behind is his reputation.  I can't help but resent Father Jerry for even asking...