My Five Year Plan

I love these Warner DVDs… all the gangster films Warner’s released come packaged with ‘Warner Night at the Movies’ including vintage newsreels, musical shorts, trailers, and even a classic pre-color cartoon. On this disc I was treated to the great Bob Clampett boxing short “Porky and Daffy,” which though not thematically related to the feature offers a nice companion to Michael Curtiz’s classic 73-minute saga Angels with Dirty Faces.

Starring Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Humphrey Bogart and Ann Sheridan (swoon!), the film’s a great entry into the gangster genre with impeccable performances, stylishly efficient storytelling (let me repeat: 73 minutes!), and the constantly wandering camera of Michael Curtiz (why haven’t we come to grips with the man’s genius? Is it because like Sidney Lumet after him, he’s so impossible to pin down through narrow auteurist trappings that we’re reluctant to fall down with fulsome overdetermined praise on his behalf? Because if any filmmaker from the golden age can and should be defined as an indispensible artist, Curtiz is high on my list.) Here Curtiz milks gold out of what should be a fairly formulaic gangster/social problems drama, deemphasizing what doesn’t work (the love plot, George Bancroft as the third big mobster in town) and focusing his camera around the strongly developed relationship between Cagney and O’Brien.

The film is almost Shakespearean in its tragic implications, but thoroughly grounded by an incredibly human performance by Cagney, whose own off-screen persona was remarkably in concert with his on-screen Rocky Sullivan. Cagney slaps around his adoring gang of teenage misfits, played by the hopelessly obnoxious Dead End Kids. Great bit of trivia: The Dead End Kids apparently terrorized the set during shooting, throwing other actors off with their ad-libbing and stealing Bogart’s trousers (right off of him!). But they were no match for Cagney. The first time Leo Gorcey tried throwing him off with an ad-lib, the star stiff-armed the young actor right above the nose. From then on, the gang behaved whenever Cagney was on-set.

What really gets me though is the absolutely transcendent ending, which I won’t spoil. Suffice it to say that whereas most of the work derives its power from Owen Marks’ incredible editing (including some Vorkapich-worthy montage sequences), the final scenes are all about light and its role in the mise-en-scene. Glorious shadows and evocative soft-light hazes fill the screen, lifting the film above its social-problem trappings into a meditation on faith in the modern world. I would have never guessed just how literally the title of the film would be evoked, but hell, even those Dead End Kids look like they’re filled with grace.