US 97m Dir: Michael Curtiz Key Cast: James Cagney
James Cagney was famous for playing gangsters and Rocky Sullivan in Angels with Dirty Faces is his most famous character- it's the one everyone did impressions of and parodied. Sullivan always feels like a young kid playing at being a gangster, trying to be cool, but that's kind of the point of the film.
It opens with two boys stealing from a train carriage. They are pursued and Jerry manages to get away but Rocky is caught. Rocky spends the next fifteen years in and out of prisons for a serious of increasingly serious crimes whilst Jerry (Pat O'Brien) becomes a priest. On release Rocky gains power and becomes a notorious gangster.
Really this film is a morality tale. There's a tremendous line where Jerry essentially says Rocky only ends up living a life of line because Jerry could run faster than him. The film is very cutting in the way it suggests that reform centres and prisons only push young men deeper into crime rather than away from it. Rocky is also something of a hero to a group of young lads and the climax revolves around Jerry trying to break that hero worship and try to stop the kids becoming just like Rocky.
The film is surprisingly dark for it's era. It's various gunfights are carefully cut so we never see anyone directly getting shot and when it cuts back to their bodies there is suspiciously little blood but all the same, the film successfully manages to portray the brutality of these events. The film also features an electric chair sequence, again cut so you don't actually see the whole thing, but it is still a really disturbing bit of cinema.
James Cagney is a wonderful anti-hero here and Rocky is largely portrayed as a nice guy, helping out the local kids. He seems to only kill people if they are trying to kill him. In contrast Humphrey Bogart plays mob lawyer Jim Frazier who is completely irredeemable.
The film also features 'The Dead End Kids', a group of young actors who first found fame in the film Dead End and went onto to make many other films as a unit under various guises- they are surprisingly decent child actors and really help to make the film work. It does sound to me that they were basically playing themselves- during their first production they ran around the studio, crashed a truck into a sound stage and stole Humphrey Bogart's trousers.
A really great gangster film with a superb James Cagney that gets the moralising spot on and still stands up really well today.
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