Comment by Magic Marmalade:
Having seen Angels With Dirty Faces, and been more impressed than I thought I would be by James Cagney, I found a DVD box-set of four of his films - this amongst them... And it's a curious one to summarise my feelings about really...
...Right away, having seen White Heat just before this, I now see the pattern, dare I say : Schtick that Cagney was about - repeated themes of the troubled archetypal gangster type, what with minor twists and variations on that theme, and also, as an actor, repeated patterns of some of the most over the top, hammy and cartoonish acting ever, among other moments of genuine excellence (subtlety etc.).
This whole movie seems to be the same: Moments, indeed whole sections and ideas that are truly inspired and brilliant, among some otherwise generally awful acting, directing, and storytelling.
I partly put the "ouch" factor down to the fact that this is in talkies a relatively early attempt at such subject matter, and so a lot of the road maps and practices that would develop later just weren't around at this time, so the movie makers were at once "winging it" in being daring and innovative, but still within the constraints of more traditional, conservative, and even clunky methods.
Half the cast here either can't act a bean, or simply were not actors at all... just thought they'd "have a stab at it" - The guy who plays Cagney's brother is mind-bendingly bad, mumbling his way through lines in some stifled monotone, which would suffer by contrast to any other actor, let alone one of the most unique actors ever...
(There's a great monologue in this where a woman says to Cagney's: Tom, how strange and unique he is... how different form other guys, and it says better than anyone else can all that needs be said about Cagney himself - in fact, you get the distinct feeling, while watching it, that she is actually talking to him, not his character)
...And James Cagney is certainly that, you may love him or hate him as an actor, or sometimes, as I am both at the same time! - but he most certainly is perhaps the most distinctive, and singular actors ever- presence, and some powerfully compelling quality to him, despite all the cartoonish-ness.
The fact that this brother is almost a ringer for Al Pacino in The Godfather can't be entirely an accident though...
(He is even a brother of a gangster who joins the marines, and is even called Michael!)
...And this was my prevailing feeling throughout this movie, that I could see so many later movies of this type echoing right through it, that this has clearly been an enormously influential movie, and doubtless is where Coppola (and whoever wrote the Godfather book) Scorcese and countless others have taken huge chunks of inspiration.
So because of those later movies, you've probably seen all this before, and better, but this seems to be one to watch to grasp it's cultural impact alone, in terms of sourcing the origins of so much more that came after.
