Production
When first offered the project, Cagney's agent was convinced that his star property would never consent to playing a role where he would be depicted as an abject coward being dragged to his execution. Cagney, however, was enthusiastic about the chance to play Rocky. He saw it as a suitable vehicle to prove to critics and front office honchos that he had a broad acting range that extended far beyond tough guy roles. Bogart, for one, was very impressed by the death house scene and informed Cagney as such.
When Jack Warner saw The Dead End Kids in a production of Samuel Goldwyn's Dead End, he quickly hired the cast. For the first test as The Dead End Kids, Warner cast them in the movie Crime School opposite Humphrey Bogart which was a success which led to the culmination of this movie.
After this movie, Michael Curtiz would work again with James Cagney in films such as Yankee Doodle Dandy and Captains of the Clouds. Curtiz would later reteam with Humphrey Bogart for his landmark film, that won him an Oscar, Casablanca.
The film would mark the first of three films with Bogart and Cagney, the next two films would be made the following year, The Oklahoma Kid and The Roaring Twenties.
Read more about this topic: Angels With Dirty Faces
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“The society based on production is only productive, not creative.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)