Undertow (2004) – DVD

April 3, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound B- Extras A-
starring Jamie Bell, Josh Lucas, Dermot Mulroney, Devon Alan
screenplay by Joe Conway and David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

Undertowdvdcapby Walter Chaw David Gordon Green's collaboration with cinematographer Tim Orr has borne George Washington and All the Real Girls–fruit from the tree of Americana, nourished at its roots by the twilit legacy of Terrence Malick. Taking its cue from another source, Malick's progenitor Charles Laughton and Laughton's only film as a director, Night of the Hunter, Green's latest, Undertow, just isn't as good as his previous work: it's too sunny at its end, too mannered in its middle, and it fails to live up to the standards both it sets for itself and the limited oeuvre of Green sets for it.

Up and Down (2004) + The Upside of Anger (2005)

March 30, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Czech Republic, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, UK

Horem pádem (a.k.a. Loop the Loop)
**½/****
starring Petr Forman, Emília Vásáryová, Jan Tríska, Ingrid Timková
 screenplay by Jan Hrebejk & Petr Jarchovský
directed by Jan Hrebejk

THE UPSIDE OF ANGER
**½/****
starring Joan Allen, Kevin Costner, Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood
written and directed by Mike Binder

Upanddownupsideby Walter Chaw Packed to the gills with what ails Czech life, Jan Hrebejk's Up and Down (Horem pádem) is a roundelay of social dysfunction, encompassing in 108 frantic minutes what feels like everything that's gone wrong with the Republic in the last twenty years. Illegal immigration and the racism attendant to it, social groups morphing into organized hate groups, the disintegration of traditional bonds, organized crime, white slavery–all of it is tossed into a loud, anxious bundle and presented as a confused overview of the hell of modern life. Begin with a Muslim child accidentally abandoned by one of a truckload of smuggled aliens and continue into the story of poor simpleton Franta (Jiri Machacek) and his baby-crazy wife, Mila (Natasa Burger), who together channel the conflict of Raising Arizona. Then there's an old professor (Jan Tríska) trying to win a divorce from his long-estranged wife (Emilia Vasaryova) so that he can marry his long-time girlfriend (Igrid Timkova), and the whole thing climaxes with something like a wagged finger, with the professor's expat son (Petr Forman) bucking the reactionary provincialism of his homeland by revealing an aboriginal wife and a mulatto son.

What the Bleep Do We Know!? (2004) – DVD

March 30, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Sci-Fi

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras D
starring Marlee Matlin, Elaine Hendrix, Robert Bailey Jr., John Ross Bowie
screenplay by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Matthew Hoffman
directed by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Watching a bunch of young actresses knock themselves out with their Method masochism, Pauline Kael astutely noted how they “tried to find the motivation [where] actresses of an earlier generation would have merely provided it.” Little did she know that you could extend the exercise to philosophy: in its dogged attempt to confer genius on commonplace ideas, What the Bleep Do We Know!? proves that Method metaphysics is eminently possible. What the film doesn’t do is give us any point of view outside our own noggins, oversimplifying human experience as much as it mystifies it and dressing up self-involvement as enlightenment. It’s a movie that can’t let you see the man behind the curtain, lest you discover that he’s actually Dr. Phil.

After the Sunset (2004) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

March 30, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Pierce Brosnan, Salma Hayek, Woody Harrelson, Don Cheadle
screenplay by Paul Zbyszewski and Craig Rosenberg
directed by Brett Ratner

Afterthesunsetdvdcapby Walter Chaw Hard to know by their films whether Michael Bay or Brett Ratner is the bigger asshole, but when cold reaches a certain level it's just cold, so I'm comfortable calling it a draw. Ratner's latest, After the Sunset, is Trouble in Paradise by way of the Pierce Brosnan version of The Thomas Crown Affair: a joyless exercise in the sex-play heist genre featuring a plastic couple for whom, when they first met, it was grand larceny. Along the way, there's enough leering misogyny to satisfy a legion of folks either too young or too afraid of God to go rent some good old-fashioned, red-blooded porn. Audiences for this garbage choose instead to slake their venal lusts, to for a moment calm the roil of inadequacy and self-doubt at the public trough of screaming homophobia, queer gun-fondling, and enough women making bad decisions in front of a camera-wielding man to fill a "Girls Gone Wild" video.

Fat Albert (2004) – DVD

March 23, 2005Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Kenan Thompson, Kyla Pratt, Dania Ramirez, Bill Cosby
screenplay by William H. Cosby, Jr. & Charles Kipps
directed by Joel Zwick

by Bill Chambers The memory I have of watching Bill Cosby's "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" as a wee lad is that it always left me a little bit depressed, like listening to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" or dining at the Ponderosa restaurant. (Doesn't "ponderosa" mean "weighty" in English?) Subtext is a kind of phantom presence when you're five or six years old: you're too young to be able to read it but also young enough that you've not yet been blinded by anti-intellectualism to everything below the surface. I realize now that it was probably through the Saturday-morning buzzkill of "Fat Albert…" that I became cognizant of poverty, and just the fact that the show was populated with an all-black cast of ragamuffins (almost all of whom suffered from learning disabilities) took the patronizing sting out of its NBC Life Lessons–it was less pious than it was possessed of an old soul. I'm happy to report that Fat Albert, an anachronism of a live-action feature film based on the long-running (and long-cancelled) cartoon, captures a lot of its source's melancholy appeal. Moreover, its ideas are provocative verging on profound, although they're shackled to a sketchy screenplay (by Cosby and Charles Kipps) and an aesthetic that is as paint-by-numbers as the animation that inspired it. No surprise that director Joel Zwick hails from television–multi-camera sitcoms, to be precise.

Carnivàle: The Complete First Season (2003) – DVD

March 22, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Fantasy, Television

Image A Sound A Extras C
"Milfay," "After the Ball Is Over," "Tipton," "Black Blizzard," "Babylon," "Pick a Number," "The River," "Lonnigan, Texas," "Insomnia," "Hot and Bothered," "The Day of the Dead," "The Day That Was the Day"

by Walter Chaw It's the Depression in Dust Bowl United States, and Ben (Nick Stahl) really needs a bath: His mother's just died (but not before hissing at him to keep his distance, Mr. Antichrist) and he's in the act of burying her when a traveling carnival happens along to spirit him away before the local constabulary can. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy threatens briefly to break out as a bulldozer shows up to raze Ben's ramshackle homestead, but hey diddley hee, the roustie's life for me, says Ben. In a way, comparisons of HBO's handsomely-mounted "Carnivàle" to Douglas Adams's brilliant stuff is apt as Ben, like Adams's everyman Arthur, is orphaned from his home, set adrift in an absurd universe in the company of freaks, and burdened with the responsibility for the salvation of all mankind. A parallel story, joined to Ben's by a couple of early dream sequences, involves preacher-man Brother Crowe (Clancy Brown) navigating some tricky incestual straits with spinster sister Iris (Amy Madigan) in the midst of trying to establish a mission for the dislocated Okies flooding the Golden State–a purpose at odds with a Church hierarchy represented by kindly Father Balthus (Ralph Waite). In almost no time (well, actually, just barely in time for the end of the first season), the opening narration provided by Management liaison Samson (Michael J. Anderson) telling of one avatar for good and one for evil born into each generation comes into focus with Ben on one side and Brother Crowe on the other. No prize for guessing who's who.

Panic in the Streets (1950) – DVD

March 21, 2005Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Directors: Elia Kazan, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Richard Widmark, Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes, Jack Palance
screenplay by Richard Murphy
directed by Elia Kazan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Did Elia Kazan really direct Panic in the Streets? Nothing in his grandstanding filmography–not the staring-at-particle-board virtue of Gentleman's Agreement, not the prosaic rationalizing of On the Waterfront, not the great but still morally show-offy A Streetcar Named Desire–describes the scene, evokes the mood, or gets to the point quicker than this marginalized but delicious 1950 semi-noir. For once, Kazan isn't telling you how to sympathize, opting instead to show you the issue and let you draw your own conclusions. The result is speedy, gripping, and affecting like nothing in his turgid oeuvre, and makes the people stick with you longer than the pasteboard symbols in Kazan's other films.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) – DVD

March 21, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Ellen Burstyn, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Green Bush, Diane Ladd
screenplay by Robert Getchell
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers The zeitgeist made Martin Scorsese and his mentor John Cassavetes artistically simpatico in 1974, when the two helmed "women's pictures" independent of each other's counsel. It was the beginning of women's lib, and Warner hoped to corner the market via Ellen Burstyn and her pet project Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, while it would seem that with his brilliant A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes just wanted to say something hopeful about marriage to counter the prevailing propaganda. Both pictures were demonized in certain feminist circles for yoking their heroines to knights in tarnished armour, but in the case of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, they were preaching to the compromised.

Amongst Friends (1993) – DVD

March 14, 2005Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Gangster

½*/**** Image A Sound A
starring Steve Parlavecchio, Joseph Lindsey, Patrick McGaw, Mira Sorvino
written and directed by Rob Weiss

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In 1973, Martin Scorsese made Mean Streets, a film that related the agony of someone with actual problems: Scorsese had lived in a world where the only way out of becoming a victim was to be a gangster or a priest; his inability to accept the wasting of himself and the people he knew gave his film infinite potency. Exactly twenty years later came Rob Weiss's Amongst Friends, in which a bunch of spoiled Long Island kids opt for crime out of boredom and lack of imagination–it's about people who stupidly want to have Scorsese's hellish problems, and it's about as thought through as its protagonists' boneheaded dreams. Unable to get past post-Scorsese gangster chic, the movie's shallow ineptitude is painful reminder that imitation is the sincerest form of incomprehension.

In My Country (2005)

March 11, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Ireland, Romance, South Africa, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Juliette Binoche, Brendan Gleeson, Menzi Ngubane
screenplay by Ann Peacock, based on the novel Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog
directed by John Boorman

by Walter Chaw A wrongheaded film from a director responsible for a couple of masterpieces (Deliverance, Point Blank), a couple of cult classics (Excalibur, Zardoz), one of the best films of the '90s (The General), a couple of unqualified disasters (Exorcist II: The Heretic, Leo the Last), and a few flicks that are just sort of middling there in-between grotesque (Where the Heart Is), winsome (Hope and Glory), and generally freaky (The Emerald Forest), In My Country–originally more provocatively titled Country of My Skull–finds itself closer to a disaster than to a noodle. It makes the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in post-Apartheid South Africa something of a Western problem instead of an African one (better were it elevated into a human one) and, worse, makes an illicit romance between two fictional characters, public radio journalist Anna Malan (Juliette Binoche, atrociously cast) and WASHINGTON POST journalist Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson), a metaphor for South Africa endeavouring to make love, not war.

Hostage (2005)

March 11, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller
½*/****starring Bruce Willis, Kevin Pollak, Jonathan Tucker, Ben Fosterscreenplay by Doug Richardson, based on the novel by Robert Craisdirected by Florent Emilio Siri by Walter Chaw A film about child endangerment that is not otherwise about child endangerment, videogame director Florent Siri's Hostage is a package advertised by its trailers as being about a terror cell when it is, in fact, about three juvenile delinquents looking for a car to jack who accidentally find themselves the heavies in a hostage situation. Maybe "terror cell" applies to the filmmakers, as "hostage situation" pretty accurately describes the experience of being trapped in…

Nobody Knows (2004)

March 9, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, Japan, Theatrical

****/****
starring Yûya Yagira, Ayu Kitaura, Hiei Kimura, Momoko Shimizu
written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

by Walter Chaw Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows appears so effortless that the weight of it by its closing credits is just astonishing. It’s classical, formal filmmaking of the kind in which the Japanese seem to specialize, full of silences and long takes while featuring a quartet of performances from children that are so natural they feel stolen. Filmed between autumn 2002 and summer 2003, the picture was edited as it was shot, with the structure taking on the progression and characteristics of the four seasons and Kore-eda devising the shape of the next quarter as the previous one finished. No script was written for the children, who were advised before every shot of the substance of what they were to portray. Its evolution was organic, and evidence of that fluidity in its birth is, in the greatest stroke, never betrayed by telltale awkwardness. Nobody Knows feels like the truth unadorned and it feels like poetry–it’s not often that the two share a breath. Between this and Hungarian director Nimród Antal’s Kontroll, I’ve already seen two of the best films of 2005.

The Iron Giant (1999) [Special Edition] – DVD

March 7, 2005Posted in****/****, 1990s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Family, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
screenplay by Tim McCanlies, based on The Iron Man by Ted Hughes
directed by Brad Bird

Mustownby Walter Chaw Brad Bird's The Iron Giant, based on a children's book, The Iron Man, that British poet laureate (and Mr. Sylvia Plath) Ted Hughes wrote after his wife's suicide, is improbably transformed from the dark and Anglocentric source into a throughline pure and sweet to the rapturous Americana of Richard Donner's Superman. It captures an impossible period existing between the idealism of Rockwell and the lonely realist decompositions of Edward Hopper in a flurry of animated cels, telling the tale of a boy and his robot in the month or so when Sputnik was scaring the bejesus out of a suddenly-humbled, suddenly-Luddite United States. Accordingly, the Colour from Outer Space that was the monstrous bad guy in the book is transformed in the film into the paranoia of a country taught to fear an invisible (or barely visible) foe–marking The Iron Giant as something of a timeless picture particularly topical for a country embroiled in a war on foreign soil, a war with an invisible enemy, and the makings of a cold war with a country that has decided the only way to combat American aggression is with nuclear weapons. Tellingly, it's the appearance of nukes at the end of The Iron Giant that coaxes out the heart of the titular tin man–the last word that he has in the picture–"Superman"–whispered with something like awe that has never failed to bring a tear to my secretly-patriotic eye.

Boxcar Bertha (1972) [The Martin Scorsese Film Collection] – DVD

March 7, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Barbara Hershey, David Carradine, Barry Primus, Bernie Casey
screenplay by Joyce H. Corrington & John William Corrington, based on Sisters of the Road by Bertha Thompson, as told to Ben L. Reitman
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers Although a Martin Scorsese retrospective could easily survive the absence of Boxcar Bertha, the film is a cornerstone of the director's filmography: Without it, there is conceivably no The Last Temptation of Christ–Bertha herself, Barbara Hershey, introduced Scorsese to the Nikos Kazantzakis source novel during production–and no Mean Streets. Because he'd been toiling away on the Hollywood fringe after getting fired from his would-be sophomore effort, 1970's The Honeymoon Killers, for shooting everything in master (an experiment he would repeat to great acclaim with The King of Comedy), Scorsese agreed to helm AIP's umpteenth Bonnie and Clyde wannabe, an in-name-only sequel to the drive-in sensation Bloody Mama (which incidentally starred his future muse, Robert De Niro). "You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit," went John Cassavetes's immortal response to the results, a critique not so much of the work itself as of Scorsese's decision to play the hired gun. Thus aborted his mission to position himself as one of the California film brats conquering the industry, as Cassavetes's tough-love approach spurred him to return to New York and resurrect the idea for Season of the Witch, a thematic follow-up to Who's That Knocking At My Door that eventually became Mean Streets.

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976) [Special Edition] + The Loveless (1982) – DVDs

March 5, 2005Posted in1970s, 1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blue Underground, Drama, DVD, Horror, Thriller

THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring Millie Perkins, Lonny Chapman, Vanessa Brown, George "Buck" Flowers
screenplay by Robert Thom
directed by Matt Cimber

THE LOVELESS
***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Willem Dafoe, Marin Kanter, Robert Gordon, J. Don Ferguson
written and directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw Looking and feeling a lot like a classic 1970s Seka porno flick, Matt Cimber's seedy, disquieting The Witch Who Came from the Sea straddles an exploitation line in telling a simple tale with an unexpected degree of pretense and, if only occasionally, artistry. History suggests that most of this is due to the contribution of cinematographer Dean Cundey, working here early in his career in his preferred 'scope format and offering the sort of stunning seaside-tableaux counterweight he would employ to greater success in John Carpenter's underestimated The Fog. His landscapes dwarf the lost heroine of the picture, swallowing her whole in the ocean of her past, her obsession with television commercials, and the culture of machismo that manifests itself in 1976 Southern California as muscle beaches and professional football. Opening with Molly (Millie Perkins) telling a tale of her long lost sea captain father to her two nephews (shades, again, of The Fog), The Witch Who Came from the Sea finds its themes topical even when its presentation skews often and badly into the unfortunately-dated.

The Jacket (2005)

March 4, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh
screenplay by Massy Tadjedin
directed by John Maybury

Jacketby Walter Chaw Lyrical, dislocated, and grim in the fashion of a Derek Jarman film (and director John Maybury served as editor on Jarman's The Last of England), The Jacket, like Altered States, Miracle Mile, Jacob's Ladder, and 12 Monkeys before it, is the sort of doom-filled genre romance that's regularly underestimated in popular contemporary conversation. Peter Deming (the cinematographer on David Lynch's Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive and on the Hughes Brothers' From Hell) shoots the film in a straightforward, beautifully-(under)lit fashion that is equally adept at underscoring the claustrophobia in some sequences and the breathless expanse of others. A scene where Adrien Brody, as Gulf War I vet Jack Starks, wanders away from his loony bin down a long tunnel in a Robert Frost wood and Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh) stumbles after him demonstrates both, with Deming painting a beautiful landscape from paint pots full of bleak, oppressive isolation. Scored lightly by a series of Brian Eno compositions, The Jacket is an apocalyptic poem of love and loss that's unusually wise about its visual vocabulary–about ways of looking, the line between dreaming and reality, and how eyes on film can be a powerful and elastic metaphor for the audience engaged in a kind of liquid dreaming.

Carrie (1952) – DVD

March 2, 2005Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance

**/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Laurence Olivier, Jennifer Jones, Miriam Hopkins, Eddie Albert
screenplay by Ruth Goetz and Augustus Goetz
directed by William Wyler

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie is a masterpiece of interiority, which makes adapting it for the screen rather tricky. The book's characters say things they don't mean and do things they don't understand while the author interprets the buried motives behind their casually destructive actions. So much editorializing goes on that a straight-up regurgitation of the narrative simply won't suffice: it's a novel for a director versed in atmospherics, one who can counter the spoken word with visual information to the contrary–Fritz Lang would have been right, likewise Douglas Sirk or Max Ophüls. But there's nobody less suited to the task than William Wyler. The master of long-take, deep-focus literalism, he knows nothing that he can't see and hear and thus sees and hears nothing. Wyler takes in the scenery, notes the mangled verbiage of the screenwriters, and fails completely to evoke what's essential about the work being translated.

I Can’t Sleep (1994) – DVD

February 28, 2005Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Germany, Mystery, Romance, Switzerland, Thriller

J'ai pas sommeil
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Katerina Golubeva, Richard Courcet, Vincent Dupont, Laurent Grevill
screenplay by Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau
directed by Claire Denis

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Claire Denis thinks the world is a lot like Paris–which is to say, a morally bankrupt no-man's land that chews you up and spits you out. Nobody seems to know how to get by in Denis's fifth feature, I Can't Sleep: not Daiga (Katerina Golubeva), the young refugee from a perestroika-ravaged Lithuania looking for a new chance; not Theo (Alex Descas), the put-upon furniture deliveryman who's been taken advantage of once too often; and certainly not the old ladies victimized by a ruthless serial killer. Apparently, anything goes in Paris, standing in for the corrupt void faced after the fall of some once-eternal verities, and everything is up for grabs for the ideological clean-slate capable of seeing the odds. The only one enjoying himself at all is Theo's brother, Camille (Richard Courcet). Did I mention that he's the killer?

Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1968) – DVD

February 28, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Zina Bethune, Harvey Keitel, Anne Collette, Lennard Kuras
written and directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers All of the scenes that constitute the plot of Martin Scorsese's directorial debut Who's That Knocking at My Door look washed-out and indistinct in comparison to the rest of the feature. This is because the project began life as Bring on the Dancing Girls, a 35mm, hour-long thesis short so poorly received that Scorsese went back to the drawing board, but with only enough money to shoot fresh material in 16mm. And yet the disconnect seems oddly premeditated, especially since almost every 16mm passage is a veritable non sequitur. An extended riff on the mores of youth raised in Little Italy, Who's That Knocking at My Door charts a parallel course for Scorsese avatar J.R. (Harvey Keitel), a practising Catholic who, when not clowning around with punks from the neighbourhood, spends lazy afternoons in the company of a secular, middle-class blonde (soap star Zina Bethune, her character billed only as "the girl") he meets on the Staten Island ferry by striking up a conversation about a Scorsese touchstone, John Ford's The Searchers. As wishful thinking goes, it's cute.

Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) – DVD

February 17, 2005Posted in1930s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Gangster, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, The "Dead End" Kids, Humphrey Bogart
screenplay by John Wexley and Warren Duff
directed by Michael Curtiz

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover For those who hold to the dubious belief that the Production Code produced better filmmaking through deviousness, there is no better ammunition than 1938's Angels with Dirty Faces. On the surface satisfying the crime-doesn't-pay, no-bad-deed-shall-go-unpunished virtuousness so beloved by censorship organizations and humourless types, the film succeeds in pushing to the margins that which seems reckless or corrosive by comparison. But there's subtext all over the place in this singularly agonized gangster melodrama, with the dreams and desperation of slum dwellers bubbling forth to envelop its platitudes and pieties. Angels with Dirty Faces is locked in mortal combat with itself, a repressed sinner wanting to do good while needing to blow its top, resulting in one hell of a potent "classic" that goes well beyond the standard pleasures of studio craftsmanship.