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The opening is a memory of The Public Enemy itself remembered in Once Upon a Time in America, a curving 180° pan cranes down in a detailed panorama of Hell's Kitchen. Rough and tumble chums, one (James Cagney) bounces from reformatory to penitentiary while the other (Pat O'Brien) turns padre, a matter of who could run faster from the cops. "Whaddya hear, whaddya say," the released hoodlum back home and thriving after collecting extra dues from the mob lawyer (Humphrey Bogart). The neighborhood tomboy has grown into a tough beauty (Ann Sheridan) but the main relationship is with the ecclesiastical pal on a crusade against crime. "Morning, gentlemen. Nice day for a murder." The gangster cycle closer to Boys Town than to Scarface, a creeping conformism from bullets to sermons camouflaged by the fluidity of Michael Curtiz's camera. The soiled cherubs of the title are the Dead End Kids, natch, Leo Gorcey and Billy Halop and the rest in continuous guttersnipe vaudeville. (The protagonist gets to know the gang by swatting them during a basketball game.) A "Men at Work" sign gives way to the lads trying to pry open a slot machine, the underworld honcho (George Bancroft) is shot and tumbles onto a pamphlet that reads "Voice Your Protest Against Corruption," "chromium-plated brass knuckles" might describe the Curtiz technique. The racketeer can still mouth the words from the church chorus and the priest never lost his wallop, their heart-to-heart unfolds in a haze of tear gas after a shootout. Nothing like a yellow streak for curing hero-worship, one last display of Cagney fireworks in shadow play provides the miracle, "the kind that you and I and God know about." Walsh keeps the fellas and ditches the kids for a masterly genre elegy the following year, The Roaring Twenties. With Bobby Jordan, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell, Bernard Punsly, Adrian Morris, and Frankie Burke. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |