NR | 1h 37min | Drama | 1938
Director Michael Curtiz’s film shows that it may be hard, but never impossible, to challenge a culture that idolizes lawless violence, greed, and selfishness.
Three boys and a girl grow up together in a rough 1920s New York City neighborhood. “Rocky” Sullivan (James Cagney) becomes a gangster, Jerry Connolly (Pat O’Brien), a Catholic priest; and James Frazier (Humphrey Bogart), a self-serving lawyer. Lovely Laury Ferguson (Ann Sheridan) stays Sullivan’s sweetheart.
As a truant teenager, Rocky did not implicate his childhood buddy Frazier and endured juvenile detention alone for years, while Frazier kept the stolen loot. Now, Rocky is fresh out of prison. He wants his share—in cash and as part of the empire of gambling and graft that Frazier has since built with mob boss, Mac Keefer (George Bancroft).
At first skeptical, Ferguson succumbs to Sullivan’s charms. Father Connolly is initially hopeful that Sullivan’s street smarts merely hide a golden heart. He allows Sullivan to bond with the boys over basketball, only to find them imitating Sullivan’s swagger: By force or fraud, the boys, too, start taking what they believe is theirs.
As Sullivan’s tryst with the mob unravels, and Frazier and Keefer try to neutralize the threat he represents, Father Connolly changes tack. He begs Sullivan to stop brainwashing the boys, yet Sullivan remains resolute. An equally resolute Father Connolly uses a broadcasting media and civil society campaign to discredit Sullivan in what becomes an outright war on underworld vice.
To the mob’s horror, the public rallies around Father Connolly. But Sullivan’s single-handed face-off with the police cements his stature in the boys’ eyes. They think he’s courageous, and everyone else is cowardly. As the law closes in on Sullivan, however, Father Connolly has one final favor to ask. Will it break Sullivan’s spell over the boys?
Combustible Cagney
If words are like bullets, Cagney fires his lines like a machine gun. He walks legs apart, arms splayed, as if ready to deliver an uppercut at any hint of trouble. His depiction of the explosive Sullivan plays off against O’Brien’s calm and calming Father Connolly. Frankie Burke, who plays a teenage Sullivan, anticipates Cagney. Burke’s wild mop of hair, arched eyebrows, the way he hitches up his shoulders as he thinks, and his trousers as he talks and walks, are all outward signs of Sullivan’s inner restlessness.
Ferguson and Connolly agree, the boys are worth shielding from lawlessness; she calls them “our precious angels.” Ferguson, however, sees Sullivan as a victim. She blames society for making a criminal out of him. Father Connolly too cares for Sullivan, but he won’t tolerate teenagers under his watch revering Sullivan. He knows Sullivan’s rapacious refrain: “What we don’t take, we ain’t got.”
Father Connolly wants to build a recreation center so the children are preoccupied enough to stay off the streets, but he won’t build it on “rotten foundations.” It’s why he refuses Sullivan’s gift of $10,000. What’s the point, he asks, of a priest teaching the kids honesty, when a hoodlum is all the while demonstrating that dishonesty pays better?
Instead of using the basketball game as a filler scene, Curtiz puts it in the foreground. It lasts a full seven minutes. Father Connolly wants his boys to learn that the principles of sport (rules, fair play, sportsmanship, give-and-take, and team spirit) are like drills for the real thing: life. It’s why he disapproves of Sullivan’s methods, teaching them to foul all over the place.
Father Connolly is clear: Victory at any cost is no victory at all.
