Ma Kettle Meets the Bowery Boys

Ann Sheridan was TCM's Star of the Month back in June. One of her movies that I hadn't blogged about before is Angels Wash Their Faces. It's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I recently watched it to do a post on here.

Sheridan plays Joy Ryan, elder sister of high-school aged Gabe (Frankie Thomas). Gabe is set to get out of reform school, and he's going to live with Joy, their parents presumably being dead. In order to help Gabe, they're moving in to a new for him neighborhood. While they're moving in, a gang called the Termites (played by the Dead End Kids, who would go on to become the Bowery Boys) shows up and make themselves mild pests, although truth be told they're really not malicious, they just need some guidance.

The Termites decide to admit Gabe as a member, something that I'd think Joy wouldn't like just out of fear, but she doesn't seem to mind. One of the initiation rites involves making Gabe think the other guys are about to set him on fire, only for them not to. These guys ought to be old enough to know better than to play with fire, but then we wouldn't have much of a movie. They're in the basement of a building they think is abandoned, but the building owner Kroner finds out and wants them to stay out.

But it gives Kroner an idea. He's working for Martino (Eduardo Ciannelli), a mob leader who is burning down storage facilities his group owns for the insurance money -- they leave boxes filled with junk in the facility and take the good merchandise out, but collect on the merchandise. With Gabe recently having been released from reform school and the Termites playing with fire, Martino decides he can get Gabe blamed for the fires and sent to jail for arson.

Of course, the scheme doesn't quite work out that way. The fire spreads to a tenement building full of apartments, and in one of them is one of the Termites' friends, Sleepy Arkelian, who has a "glandular" issue as well as needing to use crutches. He burns to death in the fire, with Mrs. Arkelian (Marjorie Main) watching. Gabe is tried and convicted , and although the Termites know Gabe is innocent, they have no way of proving it.

That is, until the annual "Boys' Week" is announced. This is an initiative spearheaded by the mayor (Berton Churchill) to get adolescents interested in civics. One lucky young man who passes all the tests will get the chance to be honorary mayor for a week. The Termites think if they can get their member Billy (Billy Halop) named honorary mayor, the Termites can use the mayor's real powers to get the dirt on whoever really set the fires, with a little help from Joy and her boyfriend Remson (Ronald Reagan), son of the District Attorney.

Sheridan and Reagan are the nominal leads here, although the movie really belongs to the Dead End Kids. The movie starts off a bit slowly, but once we get to Billy trying to run for honorary mayor and then he and his "cabinet" of fellow Termites (plus Leo Gorcey's sister played by Bonita Granville), the movie gets really fun, even if the Termites take the law into their own hands (well, mostly; an obscure law not enforced in decades is a plot point) with surprising results.

Sheridan, and even more so Reagan, don't have much to do here, with Reagan more or less reprising his not-really-a-lead role from Girls on Probation. What what they do do they do just fine. The adult supporting actors are all quite good, although poor Marjorie Main has to overact pretty severely.

When the Dead End Kids were at Warner Bros., they got put in some pretty darn good vehicles, and while the others may be technically better thanks to having bigger stars, Angels Wash Their Faces still does quite well for what it is. It's definitely worth a watch.