The New Pictures

Angels With Dirty Faces (Warner Bros.-First National). To Hollywood's Joe Breen. who does the dirty work of cinema self-censorship for Cinema Tsar Hays, this picture offered an interesting dilemma. Its hero, Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney), is a slum urchin who, sent to a reformatory for a prankish freight-car robbery, grows up to be a big-league desperado. Rocky's boyhood crony, Jerry Connolly (Pat O'Brien), grows up to be a priest, consecrates his career to preventing a new generation of slum urchins--who idolize Rocky Sullivan--from patterning their careers on his.

When Rocky Sullivan goes to the death house for murdering a racketeer (Humphrey Bogart), Jerry Connolly goes to his cell to make a last request: is Rocky man enough to forfeit the admiration of the parish guttersnipes by pretending to lose his nerve at the last moment? Breen had the choice of: 1) obeying the Hays production code, which frowns on moral defeats for crusading padres, or 2) permitting a conclusion which, in convincing a handful of make-believe urchins that Rocky Sullivan was a coward, would convince the hordes of real small boys of precisely the opposite.

Cinema morals aside, Angels With Dirty Faces is a fine job of cinema technique. Rowland Brown's story and Michael Curtiz' direction bring nothing new to racketeer melodrama, but the brisk rattle of Cagney's conversation and his associates' machine guns has a pleasantly nostalgic quality. The film lives up to one of the year's best titles.

Good shot: Sullivan and Connolly reminiscing about the day their paths separated--when Sullivan was nabbed by railroad detectives and Connolly got away because he could run faster.

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