Angels with Dirty Faces

Colin Wiggins, September 2007

Colin Wiggins is Acting Head of Education at the National Gallery.

Whaddya do, whaddya say? The cocky greeting of Rocky Sullivan, played by the great Jimmy Cagney, regularly punctuates the plot of 'Angels with Dirty Faces'. Released by Warner Brothers in 1938 and directed by Michael Curtiz, this is a movie that was shot in a pictorial language that any historian of Italian Baroque painting would recognize immediately.

The narrative is conveyed in a series of stylised set pieces that culminate in the triumph of good over evil. This is beautifully symbolised in the final scene when Father Connolly (Pat O'Brien), shortly after Rocky's execution in the electric chair, leads his teenage charges (played in wonderfully caricatured performances by the Dead End Kids) from the dark squalor of their basement den, up towards the brilliant redemptive light of day.

Aside from the performances of the principal players, what makes this film so memorable is the cinematography. Two of the most talented cinematographers working for Warner Brothers in the 1930s were Tony Gaudio and Sol Polito. They were both Italian immigrants. Gaudio was born in Rome in 1883 and attended art school there before emigrating to the USA in 1906. Polito, born in 1892, spent his childhood in Palermo, Sicily, before his family joined those thousands of other Italians who made the trip west.

Caravaggio, 'The Supper at Emmaus', 1601. The National Gallery, London.

Gaudio and Polito both shared an artistic heritage that they took with them to Hollywood because their local churches in Rome and Palermo have one particular great artist in common: Caravaggio.

Caravaggio's epic dramas were first unveiled in Rome, in churches such as Santa Maria del Popolo and San Luigi de' Francesi, where they can still be seen today. In 1606 he famously murdered a rival in a street brawl and fled, firstly to Naples and Malta, and then to Sicily where, even though he was on the run for a capital offence, he found employment as a painter of altarpieces.

Almost 300 years later, Tony Gaudio and Sol Polito looked at Caravaggio's pictures, learnt from them and then moved to California, where they used their understanding of painting in the new medium of film.

Velázquez, 'Saint John the Evangelist on the Island of Patmos', about 1618. The National Gallery, London.

Rubens, 'Sunset Landscape with a Shepherd and his Flock', about 1638. The National Gallery, London.

Rembrandt, 'An Elderly Man as Saint Paul', probably 1659. The National Gallery, London.

Caravaggio, 'Salome receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist', 1607-10. The National Gallery, London.

Caravaggio, 'Boy bitten by a Lizard', 1595-1610. The National Gallery, London.

Caravaggio's influence on cinematography is an accepted fact with, most recently, Derek Jarman and Martin Scorsese acknowledging their debt. But his influence goes back further than that. At the beginning of the 17th century, Caravaggio's revolutionary style changed the course of European painting.

He became notorious for his use of low-life models and caused outrage by portraying the apostles with dirty feet and filthy fingernails. His mastery of lighting, with darkly-shadowed interiors illuminated with sudden bursts of light, found echoes throughout Europe in the work of Velázquez, Rubens, Rembrandt and many others.

Caravaggio worked when the Roman Catholic Church was demanding that artists should paint in a direct and clear manner for the faithful to instantly understand. His dramatic brand of realism made him ideally suited to become one of the most successful artists of the Italian Counter-Reformation.

Sol Polito is the credited cinematographer for 'Angels with Dirty Faces' and as such would have been responsible for much of the framing and lighting. The film is like a Counter-Reformation morality tale. A group of low-life street kids, immersed in a culture of casual violence, are led away from the perceived glamour of crime, as personified in the character of Rocky Sullivan.

They are cared for by the Catholic priest Father Sullivan, in much the same way that Saint Filippo Neri famously ministered to the street kids of 16th century Rome. Indeed, Neri was one of the key figures of Counter-Reformation Rome and his insistence on valuing the souls of the very poorest, surely gave encouragement to Caravaggio in his controversial depiction of Christ's apostles as poor and dirty.

The Dead End Kids are exactly the kind of lost souls that the saint would have worked with, and Pat O'Brien's depiction of Father Connolly as a latter day St Filippo Neri is one of the most affecting roles he played. Amusingly, this group of young character actors, many of whom were from poor backgrounds themselves, had been initially signed up to United Artists, but their contracts were sold on to Warner Brothers after they smashed up a set during a shoot!

The most starkly memorable and Caravaggesque sequence in the film, comes right at the end when Rocky goes to the electric chair. Father Connolly, knowing that Rocky is a hero to the street kids, visits him on death row. He begs him to betray his own memory, in order to prevent the kids from glamorising his lifestyle and being tempted to follow his example. At first Rocky refuses to humiliate himself but suddenly and without warning, witnessed by the assembled press corps, he throws an act and is dragged screaming to his death, pretending to die like a coward.

No one else but the great Jimmy Cagney could have pulled off this gut-twisting performance. When the ritual of his execution begins, Rocky is escorted along the corridor, past the other cells on death row which are populated by prisoners shouting encouragement. The slowly marching prison officials and their victim cast dark and foreboding shadows on their path to death.

At this moment, the design and lighting of the set are closely reminiscent of Caravaggio's great 'Execution of St John the Baptist', where the ritualistic murder of the saint is shown in a similar dark and bleak prison. Rocky is restrained by two brutish prison guards, one on either side of him. Then the victim and his two executioners begin grappling together but we do not actually see this happening.

Looking heavenward: Guido Reni, 'Saint Mary Magdalene', about 1634-5.

Looking heavenward: Domenichino, 'The Vision of Saint Jerome', before 1603.

Instead, in a modern reworking of Caravaggio's 'Christ at the Column', we are shown the three shadows of the figures as they struggle, cast onto the wall in a brief and brilliantly choreographed moment that has the power of a revelation. Through what is surely a direct quotation from Caravaggio, Rocky the hoodlum is suddenly transformed into a Christ-like figure, sacrificing himself to redeem the kids from living the same corrupt life that he has led.

As the switch is pulled, the deep hum of several thousand volts is heard. Rocky's screaming stops. The screen shows a close up of Father Connolly's face, bathed in a gentle light, looking heavenward. A tear forms in the corner of his eye and rolls down his face. This is a classic device of the Baroque and is usually reserved for depictions of ecstatic or suffering saints.

There are literally hundreds of paintings by contemporaries of Caravaggio - such as Guercino, Reni (insert image NG177), or Domenichino (insert image NG85) - which stand as a precedent for this unashamed sentiment. The meaning in the movie is clear: Father Connolly is achieving his own personal sainthood.

This film is a Baroque masterpiece and is a brilliant example of how this new 20th-century art form was drawing upon methods of communication that were invented in Rome, Naples, Malta and Sicily some three hundred years earlier, by an artist whose own violent life and forceful personality would have made him an ideal buddy for Rocky himself.

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Cinema at the National Gallery