THE MASTERPIESE
We reassess the greatest films of all ime, one film at a time
Gunning for trouble: Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney) with lawyer Jim Frazier (Humphrey Bogart).
Angels With Dirty Faces
WHEN JAMES CAGNEY was a dirt-poor kid growing up in inner-city New York, he would see a sharply dressed pimp called ‘Smoke’, standing on a Yorkville street corner.
Keeping one eye on his employees and the other out for the law, Smoke would hitch up his electric-blue suit, roll his shoulders, and greet passing friends with the words, “Whaddaya hear? Whaddaya say?”
When Cagney, now aged 38 and a major star at Warner Bros., set about reinventing the screen gangster with Rocky Sullivan in Angels With Dirty Faces, he appropriated the hitch, the shoulder-roll and the catchphrase. Rocky may have had a code of honour, a legitimate grievance with society, and a priest for a best pal, but he also had the manners and mannerisms of a street pimp.
Cagney’s breakthrough had come in The Public Enemy (1931), in which he was cast as a sneering sadist, but by 1938 the gangster-film boom was over, defanged by a censorship clampdown that outlawed the glamourising of criminals. Rowland Brown’s story for Angels With Dirty Faces circumvented that problem by fusing the crime picture with the social-message movie. In short: it was fine for Cagney to kidnap a lawyer, kill cops and execute his boss, if the audience realised in the end that gangsterism was bad.