Most helpful customer reviews
|
|
5.0 out of 5 stars
don't see this for Bogie, Jan 8 2004
By A Customer
Humphrey Bogart's part is minor. ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES is a Cagney movie. Sure, it does seem dated. See it for the old boys' gymnasium, the boys playing basketball in their gym clothes, the trapezes hanging from the gymnasium ceiling above the basketball court. See it for Cagney helping the priest by refereeing a game, and punching the kids around when they commit fouls. Cagney looks good as Rocky Sullivan, famous gangster put away for years, only to return to the streets. Doublecrossed by two former allies, he guns them down, only to be hunted down by police. Cagney's the real McCoy. This is classic Cagney and not to be missed by fans of gangster movies. ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES: 5 stars
|
|
|
5.0 out of 5 stars
One Of The Best Gangster Movies Ever Made, Jun 15 2003
What do you get when you mix James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Pat O'Brien and the Dead End Kids?
Just about the best gangster movie ever made!
Cagney plays a gangster trying to go straight, who is idolized by the Dead End Kids.
Bogie is a psycho gangster and Cagney's ex partner-in-crime.
Pat O'Brien is the priest who is trying to keep the Kids on the straight-and-narrow.
Cagney is forced to gun down Bogie and winds up going to the chair.
At the end, director Michael Curtiz makes you wonder if Cagney really turned yellow or not.
Classic gangster melodrama and among the top 100 films ever made.
|
|
|
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Angels: Their Dirt Washes Off, Jul 5 2002
ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES is no by the numbers gangster melodrama of the 1930s. It is a penetrating insight into a number of well-known character types. Director Michael Curtiz portrays a bulls-eye of distinct personalities with Rocky Sullivan centered on ground zero. James Cagney, who plays Sullivan with the bravura performance of a long and distinguished career, absolutely dominates each scene with his tongue and flashing arms. Sullivan is a recently released convict from Brooklyn who returns to the scene of his youth and finds that the local youth gangs have elevated him to heroic stature. He takes this adulation in stride; he has business to take care of. He plans to regain money taken from him by a former cohort in crime (Humphrey Bogart), or failing that, to kill him. Yet, despite his criminal life, there is much good within him. At one time early in life, the merest of chances pushed him down the wrong path of a one way street while allowing another (Pat O'Brien) to take the right one. His life after that was predictable: reform school, the criminal life, back to jail, a hard-nosed attitude about life. Now he walks the streets, attempting to have it all, money, a good-looking dame (sweetly played by Ann Sheridan), and the respect of his peers, even if those peers are the Dead End Kids. These kids form the first outer circle around Rocky. They are both literally and emotionally around him. In Sullivan's interactions with them, he is squarely centered, tossing out bills as if they were candy bars, smacking them on the head with his fedora hat, exhorting them with words to upgrade their lives. And they, of course, tough as they are, lionize him, protecting him and his property from the common enemy--the cops--, and setting in motion the wheels to wind up just like him. In the third and final circle orbiting Sullivan lie the trio of Sullivan's girlfriend (Ann Sheridan), his crooked business partner (Bogie) and the other boy whom fate pushed down the right path to grow up to be a priest (O'Brien).
Try as hard as he can, Rocky cannot escape the bulls-eye painted plainly on his forehead. His girlfriend badgers him to go straight. The Dead End Kids are contstantly in trouble, trying to emulate their hoodlum god. Bogie has sicced both his own hoods and the cops in a vain attempt to eliminate Sullivan. And Father Jerry (O'Brien) tells Sullivan up front that he will go after him using the power of the media. It would have been easy for Sullivan to despair and act meanly, but he adheres to his own moral code that demands that all debts be paid. To his surprise, when he is arrested by the police and is ready to face the electric chair, Father Jerry reminds him of one more debt to be paid. This debt is to kids like those who idolize him and expect him to, in Rocky's own words, 'to walk up to the executioner and spit in his eye.' Father Jerry asks a great deal of him, to pretend fear and die seen as a gutless coward. Some debts, Father Jerry reminds him, are tougher to pay than others. The movie ends with the Dead End Kids emotionally flattened, their hero as just another yellow punk who could not walk that last walk unaided. ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES is a character drama that uses crime and hero worship as a backdrop against which a flavor of a decade is portrayed. The angels at the close of this movie have been convinced that one of their own had been permanently covered with the dirt of cowardice. Yet the audience knows that the dirt of crime can be washed off if the one facing his destiny can only scrub hard enough.
|
|
|
Most recent customer reviews
|
