Angels with Dirty Faces

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Angels with Dirty Faces
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Michael Curtiz
Produced by	Samuel Bischoff
Written by	Rowland Brown John Wexley Warren Duff Ben Hecht (uncredited) Charles MacArthur (uncredited)
Starring	James Cagney Pat O'Brien The Dead End Kids Humphrey Bogart Ann Sheridan George Bancroft
Music by	Max Steiner
Cinematography	Sol Polito
Editing by	Owen Marks
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	November 24, 1938 (1938-11-24)
Running time	97 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Angels with Dirty Faces is a 1938 American gangster film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, the Dead End Kids and Humphrey Bogart, along with Ann Sheridan and George Bancroft. The film was written by Rowland Brown, John Wexley and Warren Duff with uncredited assistance from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

Plot

Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney) and Jerry Connolly (Pat O'Brien) are childhood friends who robbed a railroad car as kids. Rocky saved Jerry's life during the chase by pulling him out of the way of a steam train while running from the guards that saw them. Rocky was then caught by the police, but Jerry - who could run faster - escaped. Rocky, after being sent to reform school, grows up to become a notorious gangster, while Jerry has become a priest.

Rocky returns to his old neighborhood, where Jerry is the Parish Priest and intends to keep young boys away from a life of crime. Six of those boys, Soapy (Billy Halop), Swing (Bobby Jordan), Bim (Leo Gorcey), Patsy (Gabriel Dell), Crabface (Huntz Hall), and Hunky (Bernard Punsly), idolize Rocky, and Jerry attempts to keep his former friend from corrupting them. (These boys were to star in Dead End Kids/East Side Kids/The Bowery Boys films).

Meanwhile Rocky gets involved with Frazier (Humphrey Bogart), a crooked lawyer, and Keefer (George Bancroft), a shady businessman and municipal contractor. They try to dispose of Rocky, but he finds the record book that they keep where they list the bribes to city officials. Jerry learns of these events and warns Rocky to leave before he informs the authorities. Rocky ignores his advice and Jerry gets the public's attention and informs them all of the crooked government, causing Frazier and Keefer to plot to kill him. Rocky overhears this plot and kills them to protect his childhood friend.

Rocky is then captured following an elaborate shootout in a building, and sentenced to die. Jerry visits him just before his execution and asks him to do him one last favor - to die pretending to be a screaming, sniveling coward, which would end the boys' idolization of him. Rocky refuses, and insists he will be "tough" to the end, and not give up the one thing he has left, his pride. At the very last moment he appears to change his mind and has to be dragged to the electric chair (whether his cries are genuine or done only to fulfill Jerry's favor is left to the viewer's imagination). The boys hear about what happened and decide he was a coward. Then Father Jerry asks them to say a prayer with him, "for a boy who couldn't run as fast as I could".

Cast

James Cagney and Pat O'Brien were great friends offscreen. Angels with Dirty Faces was the sixth of nine feature films they would make together.

• James Cagney as Rocky Sullivan
• Pat O'Brien as Fr. Jerry Connolly
• Humphrey Bogart as Jim Frazier
• Ann Sheridan as Laury Martin
• George Bancroft as Mac Keefer
• Billy Halop as Soapy
• Bobby Jordan as Swing
• Leo Gorcey as Bim
• Gabriel Dell as Pasty
• Huntz Hall as Crab
• Bernard Punsly as Hunky
• Joe Downing as Steve
• Edward Pawley as Edwards, guard
• Adrian Morris as Blackie
• Frankie Burke as William "Rocky" Sullivan, as a boy
• William Tracy as Jerome "Jerry" Connelly, as a boy
• Marilyn Knowlden as Laury Martin, as a child

Awards and honors

James Cagney won the 1939 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor for his role. In addition, the film was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role (James Cagney), Best Director and Best Writing, Original Story.

Angels with Dirty Faces was nominated for AFI's Top 10 Gangster Films list.^[1]

Michael Curtiz was nominated twice for Best Director, one for this film and the other for the box office hit comedy melodrama Four Daughters. However, Curtiz would not win, as Frank Capra took the Oscar for You Can't Take It With You. Cagney would lose to Spencer Tracy for Boys Town.

Production

When first offered the project, Cagney's agent was convinced that his star property would never consent to playing a role where he would be depicted as an abject coward being dragged to his execution. Cagney, however, was enthusiastic about the chance to play Rocky. He saw it as a suitable vehicle to prove to critics and front office honchos that he had a broad acting range that extended far beyond tough guy roles. Bogart, for one, was very impressed by the death house scene and informed Cagney as such.^{[citation needed]}

When Jack Warner saw The Dead End Kids in a production of Samuel Goldwyn's Dead End, he quickly hired the cast. For the first test as The Dead End Kids, Warner cast them in the movie Crime School opposite Humphrey Bogart which was a success which led to the culmination of this movie.

After this movie, Michael Curtiz would work again with James Cagney in films such as Yankee Doodle Dandy and Captains of the Clouds. Curtiz would later reteam with Humphrey Bogart for his landmark film, that won him an Oscar, Casablanca.

The film would mark the first of three films with Bogart and Cagney, the next two films would be made the following year, The Oklahoma Kid and The Roaring Twenties.

Adaptations to other media

Angels With Dirty Faces was dramatized as a radio play on the May 22, 1939 broadcast of Lux Radio Theater, with James Cagney and Pat O'Brien reprising their film roles.

In popular culture

• Warner Brothers created a 1939 cartoon that spoofed a film called Thugs With Dirty Mugs.
• In the episode It's Never Too Late of Batman: The Animated Series, some elements of the film were used.
• A parody of the film appears in Home Alone as Angels with Filthy Souls. In the parody, the gangster Johnny fires a lengthy machine gun salvo before remarking, "Keep the change, ya filthy animal."
  • In Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, scenes from a sequel to that film, Angels with Even Filthier Souls. In the sequel, Johnny fires his Tommy gun before saying "Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal. And a Happy New Year". In the two movies, Kevin uses the movies as an illusion to make others think that they were talking to Johnny, and that he was shooting at them.
• A 1993 episode of the British TV comedy Hale and Pace featured a seven-minute sketch parodying Angels with Dirty Faces. Entitled Angels with Big Trousers, the black-and-white faux-movie sketch featured Norman Pace playing "James Cagney as Rocky Pantaloon" and Gareth Hale playing "Somebody O'Brien as The Irishman" (Hale actually plays two Irishmen, Rocky's priest friend and a policeman). The sketch generally follows the plot of the movie, condensed and with some comedic differences. Rocky Pantaloon is a gangster whose trademark is wearing enormous trousers, and it is implied that he and the priest had a homosexual relationship in their youth. In addition to crying and sniveling on his way to the electric chair, Rocky suffers from extreme nervous flatulence and whilst on the chair, his trousers inflate with gas and he explodes. Hale and Pace brought the characters of Rocky Pantaloon and the Irishman back in another sketch, entitled Somebody Up There Wears Big Trousers (a partial parody of the film Somebody Up There Likes Me).
• Ram Jaane is an Indian Bollywood remake of the movie in 1995. Shahrukh Khan was cast as Rocky in the movie aside Juhi Chawla in one of his early villain roles during his first years in Bollywood. It took almost three years to complete.
• Trip hop artist Tricky released an album named Angels with Dirty Faces.
• The 2011 video game LA Noire offers this film as one of 50 gold film canisters scattered around the game world.

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Angels with Dirty Faces

• Angels with Dirty Faces at the Internet Movie Database
• Bibliography