What do you hear? What do you say? For this week’s Disc Dive, I’m taking a look at Angels with Dirty Faces (1938).
Title: Angels with Dirty Faces
Director: Michael Curtiz
Released: November 26, 1938 (Theatrical – United States)
Runtime: 1 hour 37 minutes
Disc Format: Blu-ray
Childhood friends Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney) and Jerry Connolly (Pat O’Brien) spend their days getting into trouble on the streets of New York. During a botched theft, Jerry escapes while Rocky is caught and sent to reform school. That one instance becomes a fork that sends their lives in opposite directions.
Rocky cycles through prisons and becomes a notorious gangster. Jerry finds the Church and becomes a priest. Fifteen years later, Rocky returns to his old neighborhood and runs into Father Jerry, bringing them face to face with who they’ve each become.
Angels with Dirty Faces has a script that moves at a quick beat from beginning to end, never really letting up. Yes, there are multiple smaller subplots, but the Rocky and Jerry story is where the writing shines. Despite the very different lives they’ve chosen, there’s a mutual respect between them. Rocky holds Jerry in higher regard than almost anyone else in his life. Meanwhile, Jerry can see that there’s still good in Rocky and holds out hope he’ll find it again. That kind of dynamic is easy to sketch yet hard to make feel real.
Luckily for Michael Curtiz, he gets real performances out of both Cagney and O’Brien. The friendship reads as genuine and effortless, which is exactly what a story like this needs to work. I’m admittedly not well-versed in either of their filmographies, but I’ll be making an effort to correct that after this.
We also get Humphrey Bogart in a limited role as crooked lawyer Frazier. While his screen time is brief, the weight he brings to it tells you everything about why his moment was coming.
Angels with Dirty Faces absolutely sticks the landing. It’s a morality story dressed as a mob picture, and is absolutely worth seeking out.