James Cagney was only 5 foot 5 inches tall, but he commanded the attention and wielded the presence of a giant. When he walks on screen in a movie everyone focuses on him. He has that confident swagger, that “don’t mess me with me” attitude you can’t look away from.
Every movie I’ve watched this winter for my Winter of Cagney marathon/feature (whatever you want to call it) has only solidified for me what a brilliant actor Cagney was. Were there times that Cagney was Cagney no matter the role? Yeah. Sure. Happens with any actor.
But did that subtle smirk and those heavy-lidded eyes often bring a smile to my face because I knew some sharp or smart-mouth comment was about to come out and I didn’t care if he does it every movie? Absolutely.
I had to wait two months to watch Angels With Dirty Faces with him, Pat O’Brien and novice at the time, Humphrey Bogart, and had to buy it on DVD but it was worth it. The movie wasn’t what I expected and part of me wanted it to end differently but ultimately, it was a movie about loyalty and friendship between two childhood friends and how even when you think a person can’t change or do the right thing they will for those they love.
That’s why the ending had to be what it was.
It was hard, but it was necessary.
Enough about the ending for now, though, let’s talk a bit about the beginning of the movie and what it is all about overall.
Rocky Sullivan and his best friend Jerry Connelly have gotten into crime at a young age. They try to rob a railroad car and are caught. Rocky ends up getting caught and sent to reform school while Jerry escapes.
This sends the two down different paths, and 15 years later, Rocky is a hardened criminal who just got out of jail for armed robbery, and Jerry has become a priest.
Rocky comes back to the old neighborhood, but not for good reasons. He’s back for the $100,000 his crooked lawyer, Jim Frazier (Bogart), said he’d hold for him until he got out of jail, as long as he took the full blame for the robbery. Frazier helped set up the robbery and is in control of a lot of the crime world, keeps a lot of criminals out of jail, and also blackmails city officials and law enforcement.
Jerry is thrilled to see Rocky, but has no idea how deep he’s still into the crime world.
He encourages him to turn his life around and even lets Rocky get involved with mentoring a group of boys known as The Dead End gang.
Here is something interesting my husband read about the “gang.” They were actually an acting troupe who didn’t only appear in this movie, but started on Broadway in a play called Dead End in 1935. From there, producer Samuel Goldwyn brought them to Hollywood to turn the play into a film and then their popularity grew until they were making movies under various names, including the Little Tough Guys, the East Side Kids, and the Bowery Boys, until 1958.
Unfortunately, Jerry learns the hard way that Rocky has not turned his life around and begins a campaign to expose Frazier, Rocky, and everyone who is corrupt in the city.
What will result is two old friends both wanting to save each other from deadly fates.
This aspect of the film is what makes this movie more than your average gangster film. It becomes a psychological study on what two good friends will do for each other.
The film might not have become this if it weren’t for the Hays Code, which was a code set in place in …. By the film industry that required movies to not allow a variety of things to be seen, including glorification of criminals, violence, or sex.
No movie was to make the audience sympathetic to a criminal under the code.
That’s why this movie ended the way that it did and because I wasn’t sure if some of you would want to watch this film, I wasn’t going to show how it ended, but I feel like I have to talk with someone about this ending so this is your WARNING! that I am going to discuss the ending.
Skip this section if you don’t want to know what happens!
Are you ready?
Okay….
Here goes…
Rocky honestly might have been able to go straight or only serve a little time for one of his crimes after he got out of jail but when he overhears Frazier and another criminal say they are going to gun Jerry down to stop him from trying to expose them, Rocky takes matters into his own hands.
He guns them both down, runs off, and is cornered by the police in a warehouse.
Long story short, Jerry convinces him to come out, and Rocky goes to jail for murder.
He doesn’t receive a pardon from the governor, so he has to go to the electric chair. Jerry sees that the boys from The Dead End gang see Rocky as a hero, and he knows that the media is going to be there for the execution (what a different time) so he asks Rocky not to be strong at the end. He asks him to, instead, going yellow — act like a coward. He wants Rocky to look weak at the end so the boys say, “Aw man. That guy was a loser. Being tough didn’t get him anywhere. He died a criminal and a coward. I don’t want to be that way.”
Rocky refuses. He isn’t going out that way and he tells Jerry that.
There is this long walk down a dimly lit hallway (the cinematography is just great here by the way) and we viewers are wondering the whole time what choice Rocky is going to make. As he walks into the room with the electric chair he breaks the fourth wall a bit by staring us down.
Then in the end, right before he’s tied into the chair, he cracks. He begs for mercy, says he doesn’t want to die. All we see his shadow on the wall and Jerry’s face, tears in his eyes. He isn’t praying out loud. Rocky didn’t want him to.
“If you’re going to pray, do it silently, okay?”
I actually teared up at the end and again when I was telling my son about the ending because the Hays Code may have forced an ending where Cagney’s character couldn’t look like a good guy but ultimately he still looked good.
It forced an ending where we saw Cagney’s sacrificial love for his friend. He gave up looking like a tough guy with his dying breath because he knew looking like a coward would make his friend happy, make him feel like he was helping those young men.
I do, however, wonder how the movie would have ended if it hadn’t been for the Hays Code. Would Cagney have done the same thing or would he have essentially flipped his friend off (without the actual gesture) and died the way he wanted to? I’m not sure… I think either ending would have made the movie intriguing and thought provoking.
I really like the thoughts of Joseph D’Onfrio in his article for TCM on this:
“Whether the Hays Office was satisfied with the results of Angels with Dirty Faces now means very little. The fact is that audiences have debated the final climactic scenes of the movie for generations. In those scenes, Pat O’Brien, the former child-thief turned priest, asks his old pal Cagney to perform an act of cowardice so The Dead End Kids would not follow in his footsteps. The ending seems to indicate that Cagney finally sees the light and redeems himself by playing role model to the nth degree. Or does he? Are the actions of Cagney only a feeble attempt at mock-redemption? Are the pronouncements given by Pat O’Brien at the picture’s end merely pious bromides? Cagney said he wanted to leave it up to the audience to judge if Rocky Sullivan does what he does at the end to help the Kids or whether he does it simply out of fear and despair.”
Cagney was highly praised for his performance in this film and won his first Oscar for his portrayal of Rocky, which, he wrote in his autobiography Cagney on Cagney, was actually him imitating someone he’d seen on the streets of New York City when he was growing up.
“Rocky Sullivan, was in part modeled on a fella I used to see when I was a kid,” Cagney wrote. “He was a hophead and a pimp…He worked out of a Hungarian rathskeller on First Avenue between Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth Streets…All day he would stand on that corner, hitch up his trousers, twist his neck and move his necktie, lift his shoulders, snap his fingers, then bring his hands together in a soft smack. His invariable greeting was “Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya say?” The capacity for observation is something every actor must have to some degree, so I recalled this fella and his mannerisms, and gave them to Rocky Sullivan just to bring some modicum of difference to this roughneck. I did that gesturing maybe six times in the picture – that was over thirty years ago – and the impressionists are still doing me doing him.”
Like other movies Cagney was in, there was some shooting going on and like movies back then, real bullets were used in at least one scene. Cagney had learned his lesson after he was almost gunned down during the filming of The Public Enemy in 1931.
This time he told the director, Michael Curtiz, that he wouldn’t stand in front of a window as ordered and let a machine-gun expert fire away at him, which worked out well since a hail of live bullets shattered a window pane where Cagney’s head was supposed to be.
This would be Cagney and Bogart’s first, but not last time, working together. They appeared together in two more movies in 1939: The Roaring Twenties (1939) and The Oklahoma Kid (1939). In each of the three movies they portrayed rivals.
A little trivia:
Here is a funny tidbit pulled right from an article by D’Onfrio on TCM.com: “The genuine article, the Dead End Kids were hard nosed guys from the slums, who enjoyed being pranksters, and gave everyone a playful hard time while making Angels With Dirty Faces. Rumor had it that on a previous film with Bogart, the Kids poked fun of Bogie’s tough guy movie image and even tore the actor’s pants off in an off-the-set incident, which encouraged him to steer clear of the Kids thereafter. Only Cagney, with a similar background to the Kids, would stand up to them. One day the Dead End ringleader, Leo Gorcey, decided to play around and ad-lib a scene with Cagney. In his autobiography, the actor wrote, “I gave Leo Gorcey a stiff arm right above the nose – bang! His head went back, hitting the kid behind him, stunning them both momentarily. Then I said, “Now listen here, we’ve got some work to do, so let’s have none of this ******* nonsense….Understood?” “Yeah,” they said. One of the kids turned to Gorcey and said, “Who the hell you think you got there – Bogart?”
***
Pat O’Brien and James Cagney were good friends in real life and made several movies together, including a screwball comedy about Hollywood producers called Boy Meets Girl.
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The original previews for the movie included a newsreel that featured the signing of the Munich Peace Pact and a speech by FDR about peace at the World Fair.
I often forget to share where I found a movie, but I will tell you that this time I could not find this movie streaming anywhere. I had to buy a Blu-Ray of it off of Amazon but it was worth it. There are extras on the Blu-Ray that I watched last night.
The original trailer and the cartoon that was shown at the beginning in theaters were on there, along with the trailer for Boy Meets Girl, the newsreel, a musical short, “Out Where The Stars Begin”, a looney toons feature called Porky & Daffy, commentary by Dana Polan, and the Lux Radio Theater Broadcast of the movie from 1939.
My husband said we should buy more Blu-Ray’s and DVDs so we can get the extras and I agree. We decided we will be buying one or a set once a month.
So this is the end of my Winter of Cagney. I didn’t get to watch Man of Many Faces since I couldn’t find it streaming but I hope to buy the Blu-Ray of it soon.
Up next I’ll be watching some Bette Davis movies but I won’t be starting them until April.
If you would like to read about the other movies I watched, you can see them here: https://lisahoweler.com/winter-of-cagney/
Sources:
https://www.tcm.com/articles/18627/angels-with-dirty-faces
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