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.

Watching James Cagney

Towards the end of his career, James Cagney began to resemble Ernest Borgnine. This is especially notable in A Lion Is In The Streets – a 1953 tract about the corrupting power of politics in the Deep South, although one that starts out looking like a misguided Disney venture. Stick with it, it’s more complex than it looks.

Wind back two decades, and Cagney’s features were sharper – partly down to youth, partly down to being filmed in black and white. He’d strut from scene to scene, ready to explode with that fiery brand of bitterness – small in stature, he became a byword for the gangster with the Napoleon complex, and what’s interesting is that you actually notice his size, that there’s no sensitivity about having larger actors around him. How often are today’s actors given flatteringly flat-footed companions on the red carpet?

Cagney played against type in 1935’s G-Men, as a lawyer raised by a good-hearted gangster who winds up hunting his old associates. G-Men feels remarkably modern, and recalls Michael Mann’s Public Enemies in its structure. It’s arguably the superior movie, and certainly more enjoyable – perhaps the temporal proximity to the subject matter helps? So much easier to do that sort of thing when everyone on set remembers it.