“Angels With Dirty Faces” (1938)
The dawning of the Production Code era meant that, however popular the gangster picture was, it would always end the same way: the antihero would meet his demise, normally through a hail of bullets, to demonstrate to the audience that crime didn’t pay. But that ending’s rarely been pulled off with as much a sense of genuine tragedy as Curtiz managed with “Angels With Dirty Faces.” It’s a familiar tale by now, following two kids from the wrong side of the tracks who take divergent paths. After Rocky (James Cagney) takes the fall for a streetcar robbery pulled with his pal Jerry (the actor’s great friend Pat O’Brien, who would co-star in nine films across nearly forty-five years, up to 1981’s “Ragtime“), the former would grow up to be a powerful mobster, the latter a priest, trying to keep kids — played by the young actors who would go on to be the Dead End Kids/Bowery Boys — on the straight-and-narrow. But Jerry’s drawn back in when Rocky comes up against a pair of sinister businessmen, Frazier (Humphrey Bogart) and Keefer (George Bancroft); Rocky kills them when they target Jerry, who’s about to expose their corruption, and is sentenced to death. To stop his death becoming a martyrdom to the kids, Jerry persuades Rocky to go the electric chair as a coward, and he dies screaming. It’s undoubtedly moralistic, but the relationship between Cagney and O’Brien feels so etched in truth that it carries a weight and heft that’s rare for even the golden era of gangster movies. Curtiz is in fine, noirish form, particular in the climactic shootout, and the rat-a-tat script (thanks in part to a polish from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur) remains eminently quotable.
“The Sea Wolf” (1941)
Never released on DVD in the U.S., and mostly forgotten by this point, surviving principally through rare TV airings, Curtiz’s adaptation of Jack London‘s sea-set adventure is probably the best candidate for the hidden gem of the director’s filmography. The story follows a writer (Alexander Knox) and an escaped convict (Ida Lupino, excellent as a character invented for the screen by writer Robert Rossen of “All The King’s Men” and “The Hustler” fame), who are caught in a shipwreck, and retrieved by the tyrannical Captain Wolf Larsen (Edward G. Robinson), who faces mutiny from his cabin boy, George Leach (John Garfield). Rossen’s script is a model of great adaptation, departing from London’s text to make it more cinematic while still capturing its spirit and its characters, and given it was released as the Second World War was underway, Larsen’s near-fascistic figurehead has a resonance that still rings today. It’s one of Curtiz’s most complex works — a world away from another Flynn vehicle, swashbuckler “The Sea Hawk,” which landed the year before — with a psychological realism that would pave the way towards the likes of “Mildred Pierce.” And once more, there’s a titanic star performance at its center. Edward G. Robinson was best known for gangster movies like his star turn in “Little Caesar,” but he gives arguably his finest performance here as Larsen, a complex monster who isn’t without his moments of sympathy; his final scene, blind and raging, going down with the boat, is staggeringly brilliant work. The film suffers a little from a rather bland protagonist in Alexander Knox, but for the most part it’s a forgotten classic that we hope turns up on the Warner Archive sooner rather than later.