ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES: Blu-ray (Warner Bros. 1938) Warner Archive

A couple of Hell's Kitchen hell-raisers - Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney) and Jerry Connolly (Pat O'Brien) part company after one of them is carted off to reform school in Michael Curtiz's classic Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) – a picture to dissolve America’s ‘hero worship’ for vigilantes, begun in the era of legendary Robin-Hood-esque figures like, Bonnie and Clyde, Scarface and Al Capone.  At once, the picture marks a return and a farewell to the kinds of heavy-hitting, ripped from the headlines fare Warner Bros. – the studio footing this bill – was known for, before the installation of Hollywood’s self-governing production code of ethics in 1933. It also slated for departure the screen image of Cagney as a rough-hewn, uncouth, steely-eyed goon with a gat – a disciple, come graduate from their ‘murderer’s row’.  And although Cagney would revisit this screen persona several more times throughout the decade, the forties would bring diversity to his on-screen characterizations. Diminutive in size (Cagney was all of 5-feet 4-inches in his stocking feet), the volatile and creative dynamo brewing from within easily towered over this, and frequently, far above the rest of his WB cohorts, including Humphrey Bogart and George Raft. While Raft would quietly fade into obscurity as the years wore on, and Bogart – arguably, to surpass Cagney for sheer box office drawing power in the forties, Cagney, through no small feat, and sheer drive, managed to diversify his portfolio with an impressive spate of classics, appearing in dramas, musicals and comedies – always, to great effect.  And yet, even for all his hard-won efforts to set aside these early years, as he rose to the podium to accept his AFI Lifetime Achievement Award in 1974, the impenetrable iconography of Cagney as that ruthless young buck come gangland terror, clung to his laurels, Cagney, to poke fun at Frank Gorshin’s impersonation of himself, hissing “You dirty rat” (a line Cagney never actually uttered in the movies, but was nevertheless credited to him).

The other ‘great’ star to appear in Angels with Dirty Faces is, alas, an all-but-forgotten in the pantheon of memory, except to those die-hard classic film fans: Pat O’Brien. O’Brien, oft’ cast as a thinly veiled Irish/American Catholic derivation of himself (indeed, O’Brien had been named for an architect murdered while trying to break up a bar fight), who indirectly influenced the comedy career of Jack Benny, and could call upon the likes of Spencer Tracy as his roomie while the two struggling young actors were looking for work, marked his breakout as the original Hildy Johnson in 1931’s smash, The Front Page, opposite Adolphe Menjou. A freelancer, O’Brien then made the Cook’s Tour of all the Hollywood majors, including RKO, MGM, Paramount and Universal. Warner Bros. signed O’Brien to a long-term contract – a stay, barely to last until the end of the dirty thirties before a highly publicized dispute over his renewal ended with the permanent disillusion of his contract. O’Brien and Cagney first appeared together in 1934’s Here Comes the Navy – a disposable programmer in which, nevertheless, O’Brien’s level-headed calm proved the perfect counterbalance to Cagney’s cocked pistol. The two were soon paired together in Devil Dogs of the Air, and, The Irish in Us (both in 1935), then, Boy Meets Girl (1938) – the latter, immediately to precede their re-teaming yet again in Angels with Dirty Faces. O’Brien’s rift with Warner Bros. effectively ended his fruitful career aspirations. He signed with 2oth Century-Fox (who didn’t use him), then, moved to Columbia and Universal – appearing in aimless fluff, neither to exhibit the hallmarks of excellence he had once known, nor reinvigorate his prospects for bigger and better roles to follow. Despite close friend, Spencer Tracy’s pinch-hitting for O’Brien to appear in two of his best movies from the 1950’s – The Last Hurrah (1958) and Some Like It Hot (1959), O’Brien’s truly iconic period in Hollywood had run its course and he retreated into television – then, considered the red-headed stepchild of the industry - for his bread and butter. O’Brien and Cagney would reunite one last time for 1981’s Ragtime – a picture in which they shared no screen time, though nevertheless validated the old-time luster of their stardom. When O’Brien died in 1983, Cagney would embrace his sadness, referring to O’Brien as his ‘dearest friend’.

Angels with Dirty Faces was actually kicking around Hollywood for a handful of years, thanks to a synopsis treatment by Rowland Brown, known for his hard-edged crime dramas. Together with producer, Mervyn LeRoy, the property was shopped around the block several times with no takers. Brown and LeRoy’s desire was to feature the ‘Dead End Kids’, a troop of New York youth to have created havoc on the set of their first big picture, 1937’s Dead End, jumping co-star, Humphrey Bogart and stealing his pants – also, smashing a truck into the wall of a soundstage. So, Angels with Dirty Faces eventually landed at Grand National Pictures as a ‘splendid vehicle’ for Cagney.  At this juncture, Cagney – whose manager was his own brother, William, decided to walk away from his paltry contract at Warner Bros., filing a lawsuit and thereafter accepting work at poverty row Grand National instead. Alas, Cagney – fearing typecasting, turned down the part to appear in Something to Sing About (1937), a movie whose $900,000 budget was beyond Grand National’s means, and, whose complete implosion at the box office sent the studio into receivership. Rather shrewdly, the Cagney brothers then pitched Brown’s concept to Warner Bros. as a possible ‘revival’ picture for Cagney, to rebrand his ‘tough guy’ persona hand-crafted at that studio. Warners bit, and, Michael Curtiz was assigned to direct.

For inspiration, Cagney drew upon two figures from his youth; boyhood pal, Peter Hessling, later convicted of murder and executed in the electric chair, and, a drug-addicted pimp that lived in his neighborhood, whose iconic twitch and trademarked line, “Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya say?” was factored into the screenplay with Cagney’s usual finesse for mimicry. Ironically, Cagney’ body language and 'that line' would outlast this characterization and be closely associated with his own screen persona thereafter. “I did those gestures maybe six times in the picture,” Cagney later reflected, “…and the impressionists have been doing me doing him ever since.” Meanwhile, Brown’s screenplay, handed over to writers, John Wexley and Warren Duff, went through several substantial mutations, with the finishing touches applied on set during shooting, occasionally via improvisation by the actors. However, Cagney was determined not to let the ‘inmates’ run away with the asylum. Recognizing the Dead End Kids might be up to their old tricks, especially when one of them, Leo Gorcey, adlibbed a line “he’s psychic” to ruin the rhythm of Cagney’s performance, in the next take – anticipating the line – Cagney instead hauled off and gave Gorcey a stiff arm above his nose, sending the kid and his cohort, standing directly behind him, into the brick wall. The resultant effect: Cagney finished his scene uninterrupted, but made a life-long enemy of Gorcey thereafter. Tough times. Tough kids. Very tough actor. Don't mess with Cagney. Good advice for us all.

Angels with Dirty Faces holds a dubious distinction as the movie that might have prematurely ended Cagney’s life. Instructed to play a scene with live machine-gun bullets ricocheting all around, Cagney – no stranger to the unpredictability of live ammo – instead politely informed Curtiz he would have to stage the scene using rear projection as he was not about to put himself in harm’s way. Curtiz obliged, and the pro-gunner took dead aim to shoot the plate, with one of the bullets suddenly deflecting from the steel frame of the window and piercing the wall where Cagney, otherwise, would have been standing to complete the scene live – a narrow escape, indeed. For authenticity, Warner Bros. sent Cagney and the crew to Sing Sing – the death house built by architect, Lewis Pilcher to shoot Rocky’s climactic meltdown. Cagney cagily plays this scene right down the middle, the audience never entirely certain whether Rocky is ‘turning yellow’ right before their eyes, or merely playing to the crowd to dissuade the rest of his motley crew from following in his footsteps – a promise earlier made to O’Brien’s Father Jerry Connolly.

Our story, set in the twenties, follows two boyhood friends, Rocky (Frankie Burke) and Jerry (William Tracy), as they attempt a juvenile heist on a box car full of fountain pens. Aside: Burke ought to have been Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting actor here. Not only does he bear an uncanny physical resemblance to Cagney, but he has a superb mastery of Cagney’s inimitable diction and mannerisms – hauntingly recreated on point and to perfection. Inexperience plays its part and the boys are found out by the police. Jerry manages to escape. But Rocky is caught and sent to reform school. Fast forward fifteen years into the future: Rocky (now played by Cagney) is arrested for ‘legit’ armed robbery, his attorney and co-conspirator, Jim Frazier (Humphrey Bogart) begging him to take the hit alone for a cool $100,000 to be paid on the day of his release from jail. Rocky bites the bullet and is sentenced to three years hard time. Fast forward again, Rocky returns to his old haunts and discovers Jerry has since become a Catholic priest. Aside: all of this exposition is brilliantly handled by Curtiz, mostly through brief vignettes, skillfully bookended by montages. We cut through Rocky’s formative period and graduation into a life of crime - 16-years in about as many minutes of screen-time before getting to the real/reel heart of our story with breathtaking concision, never to appear rushed or out of place.

Jerry is empathetic to his old pal, encouraging him to take a room at Laury Ferguson’s (Ann Sheridan) boarding house – a girl he once bullied on the streets, and, who made a solemn promise to herself to get even with him for the insult one day. This, she does with humorous results when, in showing Rocky the room, he becomes flirtatious. She smiles – then, belts him one on the chops before pulling his hat down around his ears in much the same way he did to her when she was just a child: a great ‘hell hath no fury’ moment for Sheridan, an ingenue then, but whose star would exponentially rise at the studio after appearing in this movie. Rocky pays an unanticipated ‘social’ call on Frazier at his fashionable casino. Frasier promises to have Rocky’s money ready for him by the end of the week, lending him a cool $500 spending cash in the meantime. Alas, upon departing Frazier’s casino, and quite unaware of his reputation at first, Rocky gets his pockets picked by some young hoodlums – Soapy (Bill Halop), Swing (Bobby Jordan), Bim (Leo Gorcey), Pasty (Gabriel Dell), Crab (Huntz Hall), and Hunky (Bernard Punsley). Tracking down his assailants in the rundown basement of a tenement, Rocky wins over these tough kids after revealing his true identity. Indeed, these boys look up to Rocky as a sort of God-like figure of the underworld. Bribing the boys with a hot meal, Rocky sets his sights on bigger plans – a move to alarm Father Connolly who has been hoping to channel the boys’ unchained energies into wholesome pursuits like basketball.

On route to his apartment, an attempt is made on Rocky’s life by Frazier’s goon squad. In response, Rocky hits Frazier’s place, taking Frazier at gunpoint, stealing his ledger plus a cool $2000. Frazier’s ‘business’ partner, Mac Keefer (George Bancroft) pays Rocky the $100,000 originally promised, but then informs police of Frazier’s kidnapping. In the ensuing raid, Rocky is arrested, but taken off the hook by Frazier who, knowing the ledger could implicate him in all sorts of criminal activities, instead suggests the whole incident was a misunderstanding between friends. Disgusted, Jerry plans to go to the press with these findings. After exposing the triumvirate of Rocky, Frazier and Keefer on the radio, Frazier and Keefer elect to murder the priest. Instead, Rocky kills the pair, escaping the casino into a nearby abandoned warehouse where, inadvertently, he also murders a police officer. At the standoff, Jerry sacrifices himself as a hostage to Rocky, begging him to reconsider his future. Rocky is wounded in the leg and taken into custody – tried and convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Embittered, yet determined to die the tough guy, thumbing his nose at the law, Rocky is visited by Jerry in prison. The old friends reconcile their differences and Jerry implores Rocky to feign cowardice as he is being led to electric chair to dissuade his youthful followers from glamorizing and deifying him as their valiant martyr. At first resisting the urge to do something noble, Rocky may or may not have second thoughts as he is being led away, and begins to scream for mercy. Later, Soapy and the gang read about the account in the paper and ask Father Connolly if any of it is true. Connolly confirms the incident. Their hero-worship shattered, Connelly now asks the boys if they will accompany him in a prayer for “the boy who couldn’t run as fast as I could.”

Angels with Dirty Faces is a grade ‘A’ crime drama from the studio that invented this sub-genre. While Hollywood’s self-governing code of ethics precluded the sort of high-octane and usually brutal gangland adventures of the early thirties, tacking on a morality play to cleanse the palette of its more palpable sins proved the magic elixir to skirt around these stringencies and deliver an otherwise hard-hitting story, easily as ripped from the headlines of contemporary society. The picture’s whopping success was proof enough the public had not tired of such salacious exposés, and, it put Cagney right back into the top-tier of Warner Bros. leading tough guys. Viewed today, the picture has lost none of its potency, chiefly because Cagney’s vim and vigor in the lead remains a powerhouse of vengeance remade as only slightly glamorous. In fact, Angels with Dirty Faces continues to be ranked among the finest gangster pics of all time – unquestionably, of its own golden epoch in the picture-making biz when true icons strutted their stuff on the silver screen. In the shadow of Cagney’s titanic turn is Pat O’Brien’s more sustained, though no less nuanced performance as the steadying rock of morality – or, the Code incarnate – a true man of the cloth whose desire to reform an old friend comes too late in the life-cycle of their friendship for Rocky Sullivan’s own ultimate salvation. Does Rocky ‘turn yellow’ in the end? Or does he merely find redemption in the brief counsel given to him by an old friend? Nobody’s talking. And thus, we have one of the all-time great bits of speculation, presented to us by two consummate actors playing it to the hilt in an irrefutably solid ‘crime must pay’ story with an uncannily softcore emotional center. Truly, one for the ages.  

The Warner Archive’s new-to-Blu easily bests the tired old DVD from 2001 in so many ways, it is barely worth mentioning, except to state that the Blu is superior in virtually every way. The virtues of this 4K scan from an original camera negative are immediately distinguishable – a crisp and refined B&W image with exceptional nuances revealed in Sol Polito’s superb cinematography, gorgeous contrast, and no hint of age-related artifacts or the subtle flicker and shimmer that once affected the standard DVD release. The image here is rock solid and will surely impress. The DTS mono audio is equally impressive. While the masters of cinema were decidedly working with technologies inferior to our own, particularly where vintage sound recording was concerned, the results they achieved with their oversized mics, dubbing and mixing techniques, created a sound field with startling ambience – albeit, in mono – that endures to perfection here, with Max Steiner’s hard-edge score a standout. WAC has ported over all of the ‘Warner Night at the Movies’ extras that once accompanied the DVD: an intro from film historian/critic, Leonard Maltin, a 22-min. featurette, featuring many historians commenting on the picture’s ever-lasting appeal, a comprehensive audio commentary from historian, Dana Polan, and a bunch of trailers, shorts and newsreels that were a part of the original theatrical ‘night out’ at the movies. Be forewarned, all of these extras remain in less than pristine condition. Some are not even in native 1080p, and, are presented herein for archival purposes only. Bottom line: Angels with Dirty Faces on Blu-ray is another top-flight effort from WAC that deserves our praise and consideration, and one of the crown jewels in Warner Bros./Cagney and O’Brien’s careers. Buy today. Treasure forever!

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

5+

VIDEO/AUDIO

5

EXTRAS

3.5