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:
“... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“To expect to increase prices and then to maintain them at a higher level by means of a plan which must of necessity increase production while decreasing consumption is to fly in the face of an economic law as well established as any law of nature.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)