Childhood chums Rocky Sullivan and Jerry Connelly grow up on opposite sides of the fence: Rocky matures into a prominent gangster, while Jerry becomes a priest, tending to the needs of his old tenement neighborhood.
04 Apr Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)
Shoulder Driving
This movie works, and it interests me why.
Regular readers of my comments know that I am on a grand quest to map all the introspective and complex folding tricks used to ensnare viewers. I’m convinced they are important.
But along comes something like this that is so simple and pure, it throws all my obsessions with complexity into a cocked hat.
This is so exceedingly simple and sappy and dumb and ordinary and stupidly moralising that all of us would discard it if it were not for one thing: Cagney’s character. And not even the fact that he created a character in the usual whole sense. Instead, he created a character acting a character (so I suppose there is folding after all).
Cagney was essentially a dancer and here, he does some somewhat obvious posturing, especially the shoulder reset tick.
Can one motion carry a movie, even carry it into permanence? Yes, it seems so. Yes.
Posted in 2005
Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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