Angels with Dirty Faces Details

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One of the Best endings ever

How a movie like this can go unnoticed is beyond belief. You have two friends on the opposite side of the law. Ones a gangster and the others a Priest. Both have influences on the younger generation but the ending has the Priest ask James Cagney who is about to be executed to scream like a coward so that children hate and despise him. Cagney refuses his best friends advice and says he'll die like a hero.

What occurs next is confusing (and brilliant acting). Cagney DOES start screaming for mercy but the viewer has no idea if its an act or is he genuinly scared.

Brilliant stuff

Great Movie !!!

Childhood chums Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney) and Jerry Connelly (Pat O'Brien) grow up on opposite sides of the fence: Rocky matures into a prominent gangster, while Jerry becomes a priest, tending to the needs of his old tenement neighborhood. Rocky becomes a hero to a gang of teenaged boys (played by Dead End Kids Billy Halop, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell, Bobby Jordan and Bernard Punsley). Father Jerry despairs at this, asking Rocky to lay off so he can keep the kids on the straight and narrow. Then Rocky's crooked business associates George Bancroft and Humphrey Bogart attempt to end Father Jerry's radio campaign against the rackets by killing the priest. Rocky (whose cynical outlook on life has been softened by his romance with true-blue Anne Sheridan) shoots them down and takes it on the lam. Arrested and convicted of murder, Rocky sits smugly on death row, fully intending to go to the chair with a smile on his face. A few moments before the execution, Father Jerry pleads with Rocky to 'turn yellow' so that the tenement kids will despise his memory.