THE GOAT WITH THE DIRTY FACE

"All right, fellas... let's go and say a prayer for a boy who couldn't run as fast as I could."

So ends the 1938 Michael Curtiz film ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES. Though conceived as a rough sequel to DEAD END, which starred Humphrey Bogart, the narrative of ANGELS was pattered after earlier pictures made by ANGELS' male co-stars: James Cagney and Pat O'Brien. In some though not all of these earlier pictures (particularly THE IRISH IN US and CEILING ZERO), the two actors respectively portrayed the archetypes of the Scalawag and the Straight Shooter. Usually the scalawag was portrayed as far more charming and virile than the straight shooter, but at some point the scalawag had to get religion and become just as altruistic as his more sober brother, which some have seen as a 'taming' of the rebellious gangster archetype Cagney had helped pioneer in PUBLIC ENEMY, his breakthrough film.

In ANGELS Cagney is a gangster once again, but this time he and O'Brien share a checkered past. As kids the two of them were petty thieves, but during one attempted robbery, Cagney was caught and sent to reform school, while O'Brien, scared straight by his near-brush with the law, reforms for real and becomes a Catholic priest.

This "origin story" unfolds so quickly that one hardly has time to realize the subversiveness of the concept: the kid who goes to reform school is the one who becomes the gangster, while the escapee becomes the representative of a Law greater than the secular one that condemns his friend. And this dichotomy, born of a melodrama influenced by American Christian ethics, recalled to me of a more archaic ritual in which one is saved and one is sacrificed:

'Leviticus 16:8-10: "8and Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Aza'zel. 9And Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord, and offer it as a sin offering; 10but the goat on which the lot fell for Aza'zel shall be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness to Aza'zel."'

To be sure, this sacrificial pattern isn't the sole narrative thrust of ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, but it is the most central one. The adult version of Cagney's character, the roguish but principled gangster, is sacrificed for the greater good at the picture's climax, while O'Brien's priest survives to use him as an object lesson for reforming young kids who might've followed his example-- though in that final line, the priest is quite aware that Cagney was set up for sacrifice by a factor as chimerical as not being able to run fast.

I was tempted at first to view Cagney as the goat who is sacrificed, but in a way he more resembles the one that's driven into the wilderness, taking the sin of society with him (i.e., the corruptions learned in reform school and jail). O'Brien doesn't die as does the Levitical sacrifice, but as a Catholic priest he does sacrifice the passions of normal life, and so remains outside society even while continuing to live within it, existing mostly to keep the ordinary denizens of society on the straight and narrow. So he lives on, but it's the one who passes out of society's bounds that ANGELS really venerates.