Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) — Whaddya hear, whaddya say?

It's the same every time. My recent annual re-watching of Yankee Doodle Dandy only whetted my appetite for more James Cagney. (Is he my favorite actor of the "classic" Hollywood era? He may have to arm wrestle Cary Grant for the title. Certainly both occupy a shifting cloud of my top-of-the-tops from the 1930s-'50s.) This time, though, I was ready for that whetting and so had a neighboring DVD already pulled from the shelf. It's one I hadn't seen in years, and I was pleased to discover that it still holds up to my memory of it.

In 1938 Warner Brothers took a stand in the nature/nurture debate, pointing a gangster melodrama, Michael Curtiz's Angels With Dirty Faces, squarely at the poverty, social dysfunction, and ineffectual judicial system that mold and ultimately doom gangland's Rocky Sullivan, memorably played by Cagney because, hey, who else?

It's a random dice-toss of chance — Rocky, a boy from the New York City slums, can't run as fast as his best pal Jerry on the day it counts most — that preordains the boy to come of age in reform schools and prisons, which educate him only in how to become a top-dog hoodlum.

Fifteen years later, Rocky is a natty, snazzy, hardened gangster newly released from prison when he visits his old tenement neighborhood to reunite with his boyhood pal Jerry, who's now a priest (Pat O'Brien, Cagney's real-life friend and frequent co-star).

Even through its contrived sentimentality and its position as the ground zero for generations' worth of Hollywood tropes, Angels remains a pinnacle achievement from the heyday of the Hollywood gangster cycle. Rocky Sullivan, like other toughs played by the charismatic Cagney in The Public Enemy and other hits, so sculpted the actor's public image that not even his footloose spin playing George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy could shake it. The way Rocky hitches his shoulders remains a staple of Cagney impressions. Cagney took the mannerism, along with Rocky's catch-phrase "Whaddya hear, whaddya say?," from a streetcorner pimp he recalled from his own hard growing-up in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen.

When Rocky returns to his old haunts, he encounters the new generation of young street thugs, played well by the Dead End Kids. It isn't long before the ruffians take the dapper, famous, and (in their eyes) enviably successful Rocky as a role model. Like Cagney himself, Rocky is spirited, often funny, and entirely self-directed. There's nothing false about his cocky swagger and rat-a-tat delivery.

His yin/yang equal is Father Jerry, now an activist social reformer as savvy and resolute as Rocky, and who's willing to manifest his compassion for his old pal through a right hook when the occasion calls for it.

While Rocky enjoys his Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangster celebrity, Father Jerry is doing his best to keep the kids' hearts and minds out of harm's way. Therefore he's duty-bound (and divinely sanctioned) to disapprove and try to influence his friend — even while admitting that in the crap shoot of life Rocky has, outwardly if not inwardly, won the toss. Although fate split Rocky and Jerry on their divergent destinies long ago, the kids can still choose which path to take, and nobody sees that better than Jerry.

Meanwhile, Rocky attempts a hard-boiled romance with steely Ann Sheridan (another reunion from the old hood), and catches up with the racketeering gang that he took the fall for years ago. That's when he runs afoul of Humphrey Bogart as the slick, crooked lawyer who owes Rocky a hundred G's in stolen loot. When Bogart's bad-bad guy sets out to bump off Cagney's good-bad guy, we're rooting for Rocky all the way.

However, as the kids trade basketball in the parish church gym — Rocky's tough insistence that they play by the rules makes for one of my favorite scenes in '30s cinema — in exchange for high-profile living with ill-gotten dough and racking 'em up at the pool hall, we see that Father Jerry is correct and Rocky's influence on the vulnerable street kids can make a literally life or death difference.

The way Rocky takes care of his former cronies puts the cops on his tail. New York is gripped with gangster panic, the kids following his headline exploits as if he's a sports star. A blazing gunfight dovetails smoothly into one of the great Hollywood endings: Rocky's "last mile" walk and Jerry's appeal to his humanity for the sake of the kids who worship him as a hero. Rocky's final moments before the electric chair's sizzle — all shadows and the sound of Rocky's last words — pump up a climax that's as riveting as it is famously ambiguous.

Angels With Dirty Faces sure has aged well. There's a bowlful of old chestnuts in this pulpy parable where hardcore street toughs are named Soapy, Swing, Mim, Patsy, Hunky, and Crabface, but it's saved from the terminal trites by its prime-rib casting and ear-pleasing screenplay, to which Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur contributed without credit. One of my favorite exchanges is apparently also one of Quentin Tarantino's, who modified it only slightly for the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs:

Soapy: "Hey! Call a fair game or I'll slap you right in the kisser!"
Rocky: "You'll slap me? You slap me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize."

It all moves crisply forward under the gifted hand of director Curtiz, who kept the pace lively and the imagery genre-perfect. (1938 saw four more Curtiz films, including The Adventures of Robin Hood.) Even clichés such as the kids' dime paperback street patois ("I didn't say a woid!") and the newspaper headlines rushing toward the camera still somehow feel fresh and appropriate.

I want to give a special shout-out here to actor Frankie Burke, who at the old age of 23 appears in the early scenes playing young Rocky as a boy. Although he made other films after Angels, this is the role he's remembered for. And there's no wondering why — the guy's such a dead ringer for Cagney that I found myself wondering if the part was actually Cagney somehow playing Rocky as a teenager. The look, the talk, the mannerisms, it's all there and there's no question that this kid is going to grow up to be Cagney's character. Apparently it was a role Frankie (real name Francis Vaselle Aiello) was born to play. According to his IMDb bio, he was a Brooklyn kid who grew up hooked on Cagney in the movies.

"He imitated Cagney for a long time to his friends and family, much to their approval, before deciding to hitchhike to Hollywood to get an interview with Cagney, but this attempt failed, so he returned home to New York. Later he tried it again, and this time he landed a job on the vaudeville circuit doing impressions of Cagney. A Warner Bros. talent scout saw his act and hired him for the role of the young version of Cagney's Rocky Sullivan' in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)."

Some 17 mostly forgotten films later, his story takes a spin toward the peculiar:

"His whereabouts from 1941 to about 1961 are unknown, but sometime in the early 1960s, he decided to ride the rails as what he, himself, called a 'Hobo' until he became too ill and was taken from a train when it pulled into Junction City, Kansas. He was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and sent to a long term care facility in Chapman, Kansas where he passed away only weeks later on April 7th, 1983."

The bio is hardly official and not what we'd call professionally written ("he sat in the lobby for weeks every day"). It was apparently provided by the proprietor of a (rather, the) Frankie Burke fan site, so while there's no other way to authenticate the info, there's no doubting its earnestness — or Burke's uncanny turn in the role.

Then there's Leo Gorcey, the pugnacious leader of the original Dead End Kids, who almost gained another vector of immortality by almost making it onto the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album cover, complete with his Angels Jughead hat. It seems that a paltry fee of $400 demanded by either Gorcey or his agent (accounts differ) was the sticking point.

Angels With Dirty Faces shows that the studios — particularly Warner Bros. with its distinctive house style and contract players — could produce good work even when knuckling under to the Thou-Shalt-Nots of the Production Code's killjoy moralizing (the original conformist "PC"). There's plenty of gunfire, but no blood or corpses; the "coppers" are shown as embodiments of Law & Order while Rocky and the other criminals are punished by early death and ignominy. It's suggested that Ann Sheridan's Laury didn't exactly live the wholesome life before her husband got gunned down and Father Jerry rescued her, but the script dodges any unsavory details.

And yet that obeisance to the Code pushed the screenplay toward its most interesting highlight — the unveiling of murderous thug Rocky Sullivan's layers and nuances, the "good kid" he could have been showing through the hardened outer shell he grew while bouncing in and out of the joint. His final seconds in the Death House, and the sacrifice they represent, turn the character inside out, potentially making this brutal gangster one of Hollywood's great screen heroes.

Cagney leaped at the role as a means to stretch his range on the screen, and everybody noticed. It earned him the New York Film Critics Award and his first Best Actor Oscar nomination.

As a Cagney gangster picture with a marshmallow center, it contrasts in interesting ways alongside The Public Enemy from seven years earlier and especially White Heat eleven years later. What a fine triple-feature DVD night that would be.

These days, we note wryly that this Depression-era film's "society is to blame" text, and the Code's dictates on how lawmen and criminals must be portrayed, make a perhaps humbling red-state/blue-state unity. The whole "crime doesn't pay" trope has never felt more quaint than it does today, but the way Angels With Dirty Faces balances hard-bitten gangster drama with warmly stage-managed religiosity gives us an entertaining period piece, one which shows that after more than seventy years you still can't go wrong with a Jimmy Cagney movie.

Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) — It's a grand ol' film

This movie, on this particular U.S. national holiday weekend, is such an obvious title I'm almost embarrassed. Still, this musical biopic's apple pie Americana is to Independence Day what It's a Wonderful Life is to Christmas. Turner Classic Movies once again has it scheduled on the big day, as traditional as turkey at Thanksgiving.

Far be it from me to knock such a fine tradition.

It may be as corny as the Uncle Sam on stilts leading a Flag Day parade, but Yankee Doodle Dandy stars the irresistibly watchable James Cagney in a high-flying hagiography of actor-hoofer-songwriter-playwright George M. Cohan, the vaudevillian child star who grew into the brassy toast of the Great White Way. Today he's best known for composing standards such as "Give My Regards to Broadway," "Over There," "Grand Ol' Flag," and "Yankee Doodle Dandy," songs that helped a nation get through World War I and beyond.

Now, in any alternate universe where this movie was never made, I wouldn't give George M. Cohan a second thought. Even a first would be a peculiar occurrence. And my personal patriotism, which comes with a benign foundation of measured cynicism, desires little truck with the sort of treacly sentiment that comes thick as Vermont molasses in January.

And yet. Every year at this time I give Yankee Doodle Dandy a spin and there's Cagney getting me to sing along — or at least hum and toe-tap — with his only-in-Hollywood incarnation of that bygone era's Broadway triple threat. It doesn't hurt that he comes packaged in the high level of movie-making craft that you expect from Warner Brothers in its era of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.



Hollywood never let facts get in the way of a good story (e.g., Cohan had two wives, neither first-named Mary), and this is Hollywood at its myth-making, revisionist best. Yes, the material is hackneyed. The opening setup with the the gray-haired, long-established Cohan meeting with FDR in the White House includes both a discomfiting black servant stereotype and FDR's voice unconvincingly overdubbed by an uncredited Art Gilmore. The way that scene kicks off the remaining film's structure — "It started with a pretty funny incident about sixty years ago..." cue flashback — might elicit a stifled chuckle.

But you can't take your eyes off that powerhouse Cagney for a second. He reached back to his Broadway roots to play song-and-dance man Cohan. He infuses his interpretation of Cohan with the ka-pow! energy and charisma that make his gangster roles so memorable. Favorite scenes include Cohan and his future wife Mary (Joan Leslie) meeting cute, the deathbed moment with his father (Walter Huston), and Cohan taking Broadway by storm.

Production began the day after Pearl Harbor, which the cast heard about huddled around the studio radio. When the movie premiered on Memorial Day 1942, the war was not going well for U.S. forces, so the upbeat story and musical numbers were the Fourth of July sparklers that World War II audiences needed. Yankee Doodle Dandy became Warner Brothers' top-grossing movie of the year and its top-grosser to that time.

Directed by Warner's versatile workhorse Michael Curtiz, Yankee Doodle Dandy is as much a part of America-at-war 1942 as Curtiz's Casablanca, which premiered the same year. Like that Bogart classic, Yankee Doodle Dandy represents the best of its breed, in this case the rags-to-riches, feel-good story of success achieved through equal parts determination, talent, and good ol' American pluck.

Because Curtiz allowed him to improvise while the cameras rolled, Cagney proved that he was more than just the hard-bitten gangsters that had made him a top screen tough guy in hits such as The Public Enemy and Angels With Dirty Faces.

At only 5'-6" he was a nimble and agile dynamo. When his Cohan performs "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on Broadway we get one of the great Hollywood musical numbers. During the scene in which Cohan says goodbye to his dying father, Cagney's performance so moved the typically imperturbable Curtiz that the director began bawling and ruined a take.

A clear moment of Cagney's spontaneity occurs at the end when George, descending the White House stairs after a happy meeting with FDR, glides effortlessly into a tap-dance.



Said Cagney about it later, "I didn't think of it till five minutes before I went on. And I didn't check with the director or anything; I just did it." It's said to have been Cagney's personal favorite bit in the film. (I've stopped trying to replicate the moves while going down the steps to my Movie Room. It frightened the dog.)

Granted, besides Cagney the rest of the movie can be ... well, not a slog, really, but there is a reason why nowadays I do the Favorite Parts shuffle by fast-forwarding or chapter-skipping between the scenes where Cagney shows his stuff. Much of the narrative is too pat and by-the-book, and the hokum can get layered on like the dessert special at Applebee's. The romance between George M. and Mary is perfunctory, with Cagney and Joan Leslie generating little spark while still charmingly and obligingly fulfilling that requisite part of the plot.

Toward the end, the musical extravaganzas "Over There" and (the most shameless) "Grand Ol' Flag" (TCM clip) are magnificently produced but plainly aimed at rousing a movie-going audience to full-throated patriotic singalong — which is nice and "rah rah" and successful in their wartime, flag-waving, "America, Fuck Yeah!" aspirations, but they do shovel the corn into our laps while simultaneously hoping we stand up and cheer.

No matter. They're worth having if it means we also get Cagney's electric, spring-loaded, tour de force Broadway number surrounding the title song and "Give My Regards to Broadway," a scene that never fails to jolt me out of any torpor I might be in. A partial TCM clip is here.

I always love seeing S. K. Sakall again, the same year he immortalized Carl the headwaiter at Rick's Cafe.

As George M.'s showbiz family, the Four Cohans, rises from a traveling vaudeville act to bright lights fame and acclaim, Cagney's contribution to our collective Movie Quotes memory — "My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you" — is a moving leitmotif, especially during Walter Huston's final scene, when George becomes the last of the Four Cohans left.

In George and Mary's "Harrigan" audition scene (TCM clip) Richard Whorf plays Sam Harris, Cohan’s long-time partner who ultimately became a famously prodigious Broadway theatrical producer. (My wife Elizabeth's mother, who as a young woman was a sometimes actress alongside Henry Fonda and Lloyd Bridges at the Westchester Playhouse summer rep, received an invitation to audition for Sam Harris, but her starched and conservative family forbade it; it's now one of our family's great "What if?" ponderables that always comes up during Yankee Doodle Dandy.)

Its eight Academy Award nominations included Best Picture, Director, and Writing. It won three, with Cagney's only Best Actor statue being the biggie.

Cagney regarded this as his favorite film. The Budapest-born, English-challenged Curtiz described it as "the pinochle of my career."

Quaint and nostalgic and with no hint of postmodern irony, Yankee Doodle Dandy points to that More Innocent Time™ we keep hearing about but that never really existed outside of selective, revisionist memory. It delivers its red-white-and-blue patriotism to you by the exuberant bushel, yet this grand old film reminds us that there was a time when, for some, patriotism was more heartfelt and joyful than bullying and teabagged.


As a DVD, Warner Brothers' two-disc Special Edition stands up and salutes with a gorgeous print and transfer that make the black-and-white cinematography, by the masterful James Wong Howe, a thing of beauty all by itself. Likewise, the Dolby Digital 1.0 monaural audio has been cleaned and bolstered to the hilt. (The film won the Oscar for Best Sound, Recording.)

The disc's list of supplements starts with film historian Rudy Behlmer's enthusiastic, info-packed commentary track. 

James Cagney: Top of the World is a fine biographical documentary hosted by Michael J. Fox.  

Let Freedom Sing!: The Story of Yankee Doodle Dandy offers a comprehensive production retrospective with insights from Joan Leslie, John Travolta, Joel Grey, film historians Behlmer, Bob Thomas, and Robert Osborne, biographer David Collins, and more.

In a five-minute solo piece, Travolta movingly reveals how Cagney influenced his life professionally and personally.

Finally, Warner Night at the Movies takes us back to 1942, when a ticket stub bought you Looney Tunes shorts (in this instance a theme-matched pairing, Yankee Doodle Daffy and Yankee Doodle Bugs), a newsreel, and coming attractions before the feature. You, John Jones is an inspirational wartime propaganda short starring Cagney and directed by Mervyn LeRoy.

Music: Howard Hanson, Symphony No. 2
Near at hand: Pub sign reading "The Sherlock Holmes, London, England"