For more than a year now, I’ve doing a bit on The Chris Vernon Show ever-so-creatively dubbed “Movies” where I give five rental recommendations based on a topic presumably connected to one of the new releases in theaters. (Though more and more the lists are connected to some other topical idea I can muster — there are only so many superhero or robot movie lists one can come up with.)
I’ve been asked a lot to post the lists online somewhere, so I’m going to start trying to do so here each week after they’ve debuted on the show. Yesterday I did Gangster Movies based on Public Enemies. The list:
1. Angels with Dirty Faces (1938): To my mind the best of the many good James Cagney gangster flicks, in which Cagney and Pat O’Brien play old neighborhood pals who grow up in separate directions — one a gangster, the other a priest — and end up battling over the hearts, minds, and futures of a new generation of neighborhood kids. A young(ish) Humphrey Bogart is here in a small role. He and director Michael Curtiz would collaborate a few years later on a little thing called Casablanca.
