Angels With Dirty Faces: Epic, yet short

Were 1938’s Angels With Dirty Faces to be made today, it would be three hours long. All the seeds are there – it’s a gangster classic tracking the divergent paths of two friends from the same downbeat neighbourhood. They’re polar opposites, Pat O’Brien’s priest and James Cagney’s hoodlum – and in the centre are the next generation,
causing trouble and looking for role models. All the elements exist for grand, sweeping themes and epic storylines twisting through generations of blood debts – but no, it plays out in 97 minutes.

Consider Gangs Of New York (166 minutes) Once Upon A Time In America (229 minutes) and American Gangster (157 minutes), all of which take a more thematic approach to telling their stories – Angels With Dirty Faces just gets on stage, tells the story and gets off again, leaving you to draw your own conclusions. It’s clean, efficient and very effective, born of the noir-style school of storytelling – plot is emphasised over theme.