“This very afternoon, I was approached with a sugarcoated proposition…a bribe offered me by this corrupt officialdom. $100,000 for the building and equipment of a recreation centre in my parish if I would agree to refrain from further attacks…if I would sabotage this campaign…if I would shut my eyes, stop my ears and hold my tongue. But the building of an isolated playground to shield my boys from crime is not rooting out the crime itself. We must wipe out those we have ignorantly elected and those who control and manipulate this diseased officialdom behind locked doors. We must rid ourselves of the criminal parasites that feed on us. We must wipe out those we have ignorantly elected and those who manipulate this diseased officialdom behind locked doors.”

At either end of the 1930s, James Cagney starred in two gangster movies that cemented his status as an actor specialising in tough, brutal but surprisingly sympathetic roles. It’s not a coincidence that both movies, The Public Enemy (1931) and Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) begin with the depiction of Cagney’s character as a tearaway kid, embarking on a life of crime with a small-time misdemeanour that spirals out of control.

In The Public Enemy, directed by William A Wellman, Cagney plays Tom Powers, a hoodlum who achieves success in bootlegging but finds that the violence he uses in his business crosses over into his family life and his relationships. In Angels With Dirty Faces, directed by Michael Curtiz, Cagney plays Rocky Sullivan, a far more rounded character who, following stints in reform school and prison, takes up crime again and finds himself outmanoeuvred by bigger criminals. In both films, Cagney’s character is balanced by a moral counterpart (in the earlier film it’s his brother, in the latter it’s his childhood friend turned priest).

Of the two, Angels With Dirty Faces has more to say. The addition of Humphrey Bogart as a sleazy lawyer and the ‘Dead End Kids’, a group of juvenile actors specialising in anarchic roles, gives the film an edge that, at times, veers into Three Stooges slapstick. The character of the priest played by  Pat O’Brien, gives the film a moral gravity that Sullivan is shown to be constantly pulling against. The Public Enemy is simpler, cleaner and therefore more brutal, a scene in which Powers violently rams a grapefruit into his wife’s face has become a touchstone of domestic abuse onscreen.

Of the two, I’d favour Angels With Dirty Faces as the more rounded movie and the one to go to first.