GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

mark.waltz Making the Dead End Kids mayor of New York for a week is a fatal mistake they may not recover from. In 2013, the race for mayor truly is a circus, so one of the mayoral candidates could be as intelligent as this mayor and his cabinet. The story originally focuses on reform school kid Gabriel Dell who moves to a new neighborhood with sister Ann Sheridan, finding he can't escape his past, even though he's quickly adopted by the Beale Street gang which consists of Dead End Kid veterans Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall. When a nasty criminal element takes over, Dell is framed for starting a tenement fire which kills a crippled young boy and results in Dell's being sentenced to ten years in adult prison. This leads to the rest of the gang to use their week in city government to prove Gabe innocent. Dell reforms thanks to an adult, here played by that master of screen art, Ronald Reagen. The boys are supported by Sheridan who is romanced by Reagen, and by Bonita Granville, with Margaret Hamilton as their judgmental teacher and Berton Churchill as the rolly-poly mayor who looks nothing like Fiorello La Guardia. Marjorie Main is particularly haunting as the mother of the dead boy who gets support by the entire neighborhood in a touching scene. Hamilton is initially seen chastising Dell for his past in front of the other boys, then discourages the gang's mayoral candidate, and is noticeably upset when he wins. She represents the type of teacher who discourages as opposed to encourages, a genuine problem in public school education. Some tough action sequences, particularly a fight between Dell and the gang when they first meet, the blazing fire which is blamed on the new kid on the block (resulting in a climactic trial which reveals the corruption in some parts of city government), add much needed excitement to the initially comic structure. The simple message of the film is to never under- estimate the young. They start fighting for their future the minute they see what's at stake and how past generations have screwed it up. Warner Brothers did their own version of MGM's "Babes in Arms", released the same year, which ironically featured Hamilton as a city busybody fighting to get kids off the street and into a reform school.

classicsoncall "Angels With Dirty Faces" is one of my favorite films going all the way back to when I was a kid, but today was the first time I ever saw "Angels Wash Their Faces". I've been waiting a long time, so kudos once again to Turner Classics. The picture's title borrows from it's precursor pretty much in name only; it's not a sequel per se, much like "The Curse of the Cat People" capitalized on "Cat People" to draw in movie goers who liked the original. The connecting link here is the presence of The Dead End Kids, the first and most serious portrayal of the street gang that evolved into The East Side Kids, and later the goofy and slapstick Bowery Boys. Funny, but I don't feel compelled to favor one portrayal over another, I like watching them all.The other returnee from "Angels With Dirty Faces" is Ann Sheridan, a completely different character here, moving into a new neighborhood with brother Gabe (Frankie Thomas) who was recently pardoned from reform school. I preferred her Laury Ferguson character in the prior film, where she showed more sass and parried her relationship with Cagney's Rocky Sullivan. Still, she lends good support here, which is kind of ironic because she's actually top billed above the Dead Enders, and romantically cast opposite Ronald Reagan as Assistant District Attorney Pat Remson.There's quite a lot of hi-jinks involved in the picture, particularly in the latter half when Billy Shafter (Billy Halop) wins a Boys Week Contest to become mayor of the city for a week. Swearing in his pals, the gang goes on a tear with a goal of getting their new buddy Gabe out of State's Prison, framed for an arson fire after circumstantial evidence and tainted witnesses produced a guilty verdict. Before the picture gets there however, there's a real grim sequence in which one of the boys (Bernard Punsley as Sleepy) dies in an apartment fire as the rest of the gang watches helplessly. The following scene comes as close to a tear jerker moment as you'll find, with his mother (Marjorie Main) delivering one of the most poignant lines I've ever heard. Trying to console her after the loss of her son, Joy Ryan (Sheridan) tells Mrs. Arkelian that she ought to cry for a measure of release. Her response - "It hurts too much for tears. Crying is for little things". That one put a lump in my throat.Considering that they were known as The Dead End Kids, I was a little surprised to hear the boys call themselves the Termites. The little buggers consisted of Halop, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, and Gabriel Dell, with an assist from Bonita Granville as Gorcey's sister. 'Sleepy' was made an honorary member after his death in the fire, adding another somber note to the story.In their own way, Warner Brothers did an effective job in presenting the character of an era to the big screen. Here they take on city government corruption using the Dead End Kids as foils using laws on the books against spitting in public and bowling on Sunday to bring bad guys to justice. What really got my attention however was the way a particular scene managed to highlight post-Depression poverty in an effective way. The boys were off on another escapade, and Bobby Jordan's character asks permission to opt out. It turns out his father just got back to work at a warehouse job, and having been paid, the family was going to have meat for supper. Think about that one for a while.

WarnersBrother I don't have much to add to what has been said before, but it's very much a film of it's time, and the first (and likely only) time that the studio hung the film totally on the Dead End Kids.The Warner's gave the boys plenty of help, from director Ray Enright and an 'A' budget, to an almost magical cast of supporting actors. At every turn, we get one of those gem performances from real pros. They are too many to list, but it seems like just about everybody on the Warner's lot (Sans the very biggest stars) walk through this picture. (See if you can spot John Ridgely)The only over the top performance is from the always reliable Eduardo Cianelli as a mob boss with a messianistic complex. He plays this character almost exactly like that of the Thuggie leader in "Gunga Din". He's something to watch! And Marjorie Main is excellent and gets her best role since "Dead End".My bid for this one is a second feature on a double bill with something like "City for Conquest".Hooray for Warners!

Randy_D A sequel to Angels With Dirty Faces in name only, The Angels Wash Their Faces suffers somewhat from the usual shenanigans of the Dead End Kids. As a matter of fact, with the presence of the Dead End Kids and Ann Sheridan this should have been treated as an actual sequel to Angels With Dirty Faces, at least for continuity's sake.Speaking of Ann Sheridan, she is the one true shining light of this movie. To paraphrase a cliché, Ann Sheridan could read from a phone book for two hours and I would buy the DVD!Another virtue of this movie is the chemistry between Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately , this aspect of the film is kept too far in the background. For a better example of the Sheridan-Reagan duo I would recommend Juke Girl or Kings Row.