itsnotmymind | Angels With Dirty Faces

When I was a child, I made up fanfiction in my head. I didn't know the word "fanfiction" - I called them "secret thoughts". They were secret because I was embarrassed by them. Looking back I don't think I could explain to you why I found these thoughts so embarrassing - but I did, so I didn't talk about them. Maybe it was the intense emotions they inspired in me.

When I was twelve, the movie Angels With Dirty Faces took over my mind. Angels With Dirty Faces is a 1938 gangster film. The premise is two childhood best friends that go different ways as adults - one become a gangster, the other becomes a priest. James Cagney and Pat O'Brien were good friends in real life and bring chemistry to their roles. It is a good movie - it is not a great movie.

I saw the movie because of Humphrey Bogart. Our parents made sure my sister and me saw Casablanca - twice. The first time I, the younger sister, couldn't have been more than eight or nine. It was playing at a nearby theater and my parents couldn't resist giving us the opportunity to see it on the big screen. We were warned we wouldn't understand parts of it, and we pretty much didn't, but I still walked away from the movie with a positive opinion.

The second time we watched it at home, when I was eleven or twelve. I enjoyed it again - with better comprehension. My sister, twenty-one months older, was smitten. She had up to this point been enthralled with actor Jimmy Stewart. Now, she turned her attention to Humphrey Bogart. My father helped her track down his movies, and I watched many of them with her.

Angels With Dirty Faces is not a movie that often comes to mind when listing Bogart classics. It came out after he had proved himself adept at playing a gangster in Petrified Forest, but before The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca revealed his potential as a lead. In Angels With Dirty Faces, as in another film at around the same time called The Roaring Twenties, Bogart's role is to be the less sympathetic gangster who makes the Cagney character look good.

But my sister was a completist. So we watched Angels With Dirty Faces - and perhaps it affected her as much me, because James Cagney became her next favorite actor whose entire work she had to see.

The first time I watched Angels With Dirty Faces, my sister and I in our parents' room watching our family's only TV, I walked out near the end because I was enjoying it too much. I was then spoiled for the end in some Cagney biography. I also remember the first time I watched it was a colorized version. I first saw one of the original black-and-white scenes in a Cagney documentary, and my mind was just blown by how much better it looked.

I'd had secret thoughts for years, but was increasingly embarrassed by the stories that took over my brain. Also, with Angels With Dirty Faces, I vaguely understood my limitations, that I couldn't really imagine what it would be like to grow up poor in New York City in the early 1900s.

One thing that really embarrassed me was when I found myself giving the characters daemons, from His Dark Materials. Now I look back, and am just proud that I am probably the only person in the world who came up with that fandom fusion.

Rocky had a small cat, a lynx or something. I think her name was Mary. Jerry had a deer, and I have no memory of what her name was.