Angels With Dirty Faces (DVD)

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But Jerry has high hopes of straightening out Rocky, too. He's never given up on his oldest friend and sees only the good in him. The plot thickens, though, when Father Jerry goes on a crusade against crime in the city, and not even his old pal Rocky is about to stand in his way of doing right.

The movie gets preachy, as the Production Code demanded, but, hey, Jerry's a priest. He's got a right to be preachy. Then, the climax comes in a hail of bullets, and Rocky is taken away, this time to the chair. Yet, it provides another one of WB's great, unforgettable gangster-movie endings as Rocky does one last and highly unexpected good deed for Jerry and the kids.

"I think that in order to be afraid," says Rocky to Jerry at the end of the film, "you gotta have a heart. I don't think I got one. Had that cut out of me a long time ago." Yeah, but this film has a heart a mile wide, and the final scene proves it: A guaranteed, old-fashioned heartbreaker.

Video:
The first reel of the film starts out looking pretty ordinary for an old movie, a little light and faded and slightly rough, with the occasional age fleck here and there. But as the film goes along, its appearance improves considerably, the print looking almost ageless. No scratches, no lines, hardly any flecks, and a black-and-white contrast that is sometimes crystalline, interspersed with a few fuzzy edges. The screen size approximates the Academy Standard 1.37:1 ratio of the day, here rendered at 1.33:1. When this picture looks good, which is most of the time, it's as good as any B&W film ever.

Audio:
The monaural audio of the times is reproduced via Dolby Digital 1.0, and it, too, is as about as good as can be expected of it. The sound is clear and clean, with nary a trace of background noise unless cranked up way past the threshold of pain. It's limited sound, of course, limited in frequency and dynamics and bass, but it's probably better sounding on this disc than it ever was in a movie house of 1938.

Extras:
As with all the discs in the "WB Gangsters" series, this one has Leonard Maltin hosting a Warner Night at the Movies," 1938. It includes a nineteen-minute mini-musical, "Out Where the Stars Begin," that takes us into the Warner studio and introduces us to some of the studio's stars; a seven-minute, black-and-white Looney Tunes cartoon, "Porky and Daffy," with an early Daffy you'd hardly recognize today; a trailer for a contemporary film, "Boy Meets Girl," with Cagney, O'Brien, and Marie Wilson; and a vintage newsreel.

After that is a newly made featurette, "Angels With Dirty Faces: Whaddya Hear? Whaddya Say?" It's twenty-two minutes long and includes observations on the film from film historian Rudy Behlmer, author Mark Vieira, and film professors Lincoln Hurst, UC Davis, and Drew Casper, USC. As usual, the combination of the background documentary plus a helpful and informative audio commentary by film historian Dana Polan give us a fascinating glimpse into the film, its stars, and its significance in the annals of moviemaking. The extras continue with an audio-only bonus, the May 22, 1939, Lux Radio Theater broadcast of "Angels," with the film's two stars, Cagney and O'Brien; it's fifty-nine minutes long and divided into twenty-one chapters. The extras conclude with a theatrical trailer for "Angels with Dirty Faces" and twenty-three scene selections. English and French are provided as spoken languages, with English, French, and Spanish subtitles.

Parting Thoughts:
Today, a person can look at "Angels With Dirty Faces" any number of ways. It's a sociological drama, providing us with a glimpse at the ways society creates criminals. It's an action adventure, with plenty of gun play, fights, and chases. It's a story of human relationships, of friendships lost and won. And it's a melodrama in the best sense, the kind where everything ends up the way we think life should always end up. But most of all, it's Cagney: At the top of his game, the bad guy we have to love. He makes it all happen.

"Angels With Dirty Faces" is available separately or in a six-disc box set, the "Warner Bros. Pictures Gangsters Collection." The other five discs, listed chronologically, are "Little Caesar" (1930) with Edward G. Robinson and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; "The Public Enemy (1931) with James Cagney, Jean Harlow, and Joan Blondell; "The Petrified Forest" (1936) with Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart; "The Roaring Twenties" (1939) with Cagney, Bogart, and Priscilla Lane; and "White Heat" (1949) with Cagney and Virginia Mayo.

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