Angels with Dirty Faces

Did

you ever see the movie Angels with Dirty Faces? I have not.

It's with Jimmy Cagney.

It's a late 1930s movie.

It's actually quite good.

It's these two boys that are stealing things from freight cars, from the train yards.

He gets hardened in prison.

It's actually quite a lovely story about how like the one that ended up in jail, got hardened, was around all these criminals, became a mobster.

I said, you're wrong there.

I said, it was Angels with Dirty Faces, 1938.

And they looked at me like that.

So my partner says, do you ever hear Neil imitate James Cagney? You imitate James Cagney? So I proceeded to imitate James.

They'd know the police.

It's like Jimmy Cagney, Angels with Dirty Faces.

The priest used to play with the kids.

Uh, [laughs] I don't mean it in that way, but I mean he used to do social things, youth clubs, the rest of it.

Correct.

What is the title of the fictional gangster film Kevin watches in the first Home Alone? Angels with Dirty Faces.

Filthy Souls, but same thing.

Um- No, it is Angels with Dirty Faces, is it not? It says Filthy Souls.

Okay.

I don't think it would be Dirty Faces if we really think about it logically.

Pat O'Brien stars and was often cast as a priest in his career and when he was younger actually considered the priesthood.

But in the movies, he also played cops, coaches, and reporters, most memorably in Knute Rockne All American 1940 and Angels with Dirty Faces with Jimmy Cagney in 1938.

Speaking of which, he and James Cagney co-starred in nine films together, had a friendship that lasted from 1926 until O'Brien's death.

He and Cagney were part of what was called the Irish Mafia.

Korngold was joined the following year by Max Steiner and orchestrator Hugo Friedhofer of Warner Brothers, who became the gold standard of Hollywood studio music departments.

And after Captain Blood, followed by Charge of the Light Brigade, Mike Curtiz ascended as the top director on the Warner lot, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Four Daughters, Angels with Dirty Faces, The Sea Hawk.

In nineteen forty-two, he made Yankee Doodle Dandy, which, uh, won James Cagney the Best Actor Oscar.

He was nominated as a writing candidate for Captain Blood in nineteen thirty-five, winning most aggrieved votes, but splitting it between Four Daughters and Angels with Dirty Faces, so he got nothing.

And he finally won for Casablanca in nineteen forty-four, and before that, using his gar-- uniquely garbled, uh, syntax, he said, "Academy Awards always surprise me, never the mother."

[laughing]

What comes after AB, see? See?

But the thing, that's what we're going to do for the Dixon Levy Christmas special is Pat has to recreate the angels with dirty faces scene from Home Alone.

Yeah, we're in here smooching with my brother, see?

Yeah.

Get on your knees and tell me you love me.

You got to do better than that.

That's Angels with Dirty Faces from Home Alone 2.

We're getting very Christmassy tonight.

1939, Michael Curtiz, we mentioned him earlier.

This time, he's got Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters.

And then, of course, Soderbergh was nominated for both Traffic and Erin Berkovich.

Yeah.

I bet he gets sick of writing that.

Angels with Dirty Faces was a good old gangster film.

Yeah.

Any of those Jimmy Cagney ones are really good.

And if there's a tie-in between the cartoon and the feature, it can be where it's a spoof of the feature.

Like, you know, Angels with Dirty Faces having Thugs with Dirty Mugs, you know?

Right [laughs].

That's kind of an obvious one.