A Film Canon

Angels With Dirty Faces signals the decline of the gangster craze, foregrounding the matrix of circumstances from which gangster Rocky Sullivan (Jimmy Cagney) emerges, rather than the emergence itself. This elides the sense of heroic initiative that defined earlier gangsters, forcing Sullivan to deflect the social mobility that accompanied it into bodily terms, as he accelerates voice and hands to a hyperactivity that renders them interchangeable. Simultaneously, gangsterdom is resolutely stripped of any residual fraternity, loyalty or sentimentality that could confuse it with family, placing an even greater onus on Sullivan to confront his origins. These are identified with his local 'neighbourhood', itself reified as a series of iconic spaces (streetscape, pool room, gym, drugstore), metaphorised as a series of responsibilities (especially to the 'younger generation', embodied in the gang of young hoodlums that Sullivan befriends) and, above all, personified in the figure of Father Jerry Connelly (Pat O'Brien). The dialectic between these two figures is bolstered by the fact that Connelly only avoided reform school - and so escaped a chain of circumstances conducive to gangsterdom - because of Sullivan's self-sacrifice. Nevertheless, his rejection of a donation of 'dirty money' to the church indicates his insistence on being the determining force in this dialectic, culminating with his coercive choreography of Sullivan's actions for the purpose of converting his hoodlum admirers. Yet it's possible that Sullivan does, ultimately, dominate, just because Connelly's crusade against gangsterdom subscribes to the individualistic structure, if not the amoral content, of gangsterdom itself. Despite being directed against a perceived conspiracy of politics, law and crime, Connelly's tirade ultimately takes place firmly within that medium - or, more accurately, within the media that sensationalises, sanitises and services it - necessitating a latent vigilantism that pits the neighbourhood against the whole world, itself reduced to so many agents of siege. In this way, Curtiz is ultimately more pessimistic than earlier gangster directors, replacing their conception of an individual that confronts the system with a system so elaborate that individuals can only mistake other individuals for it.