James Cagney being on screen for a healthy portion of the runtime is reason enough to watch this or any movie in which he stars. his dancerly grace and the bad-kid-with-gusto/lovable-bully persona that he captures are undeniably winning, even when his character is doing what can only be described as despicable. still, that character, Rocky Sullivan, is more resourceful than despicable, and you can't argue that he doesn't have a strong and relatively just (compared to the crooked cops and greedy lawyer) personal code of conduct. but that doesn't mean we don't sympathize with Jerry (Pat O'Brien) and his position. like other gangster films of the era, this acts as a PSA in regards to at-risk youth. yet unlike films like "the public enemy" (another Cagney-full gem with a few legendary scenes) and "scarface" (i'm talkin the original), the anti-hero criminal at the center of "Angels" isn't simply a figure for us to pity, wishing it didn't have to be this way as he spirals down to nothing, whimpering and cornered or disposed of at the hands of rivals. Rocky never seems too far gone, and we know that he isn't because of the final scene. the grey area occupied by this character is ostensibly the same area in which children who tend towards criminality live, too beaten down for the ideals embodied by the priest, but too good to transform completely into hedonistic brutes; this unwillingness to strictly polarize good and bad, saved and lost, citizen and criminal, makes "Angels with Dirty Faces" a compelling entreaty.
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