The Extras - Angels With Dirty Faces

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

In part 1 of 2, Warner Bros executive and film historian George Feltenstein joins with Alan K. Rode, author of “Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film,” for a lively discussion of the 1938 classic gangster film ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES.  George gives background on the restoration process to bring the film to Blu-ray and explains why he was so adamant about releasing the film before the end of 2021.Alan K. Rode provides additional insights into the director of the film, Michael Curtiz, and his relationships with the star-studded cast of James Cagney as Jimmy Sullivan, Pat O’Brien as Father Jerry Connolly, Ann Sheridan as Laury Ferguson, Humphry Bogart as James Frazier, and The Dead End Kids (who first appeared with Bogart in the 1935 film DEAD END).In addition, they discuss the importance of this beloved film to Warner Bros and film history.www.alankrode.comwww.filmnoirfoundation.comOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers.  Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals.  www.otakumedia.tvThe Sitcom StudyWelcome to the Sitcom Study, where we contemplate the TV shows we grew up with and...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify The Extras Facebook pageThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv

Hi, I'm film historian and author John Fricke. I've written books about Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz movie, and you're listening to The Extras. Hello and welcome to The Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies, and animation, and their release on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Millard, your host. Today, I have two very special guests joining me on the podcast.

Listeners of the podcast know George Feltenstein very well. He's an executive at Warner Brothers Home Entertainment, a film historian, and possibly best known for his work with the Warner Archive. And it's a Warner Archive Blu-ray release that we will be talking about today. Welcome back to the show, George. Thank you, Tim. It's great to be here. And my next guest is an author and cinema impresario, Alan K. Rohde. Welcome to the show, Alan. Tim, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. And it's great to be here not only with you, but with George. I'm delighted

to be here. Thank you. And the delight is mutual. The best news I got all year was the news that George was back in the fold at Warner Brothers. Once I heard that news, I got all year, too. Of course. But when I heard it, George, I said there is hope for our world and our planet that you are back at Warner Brothers. So congratulations. I will not hide my gratitude or pleasure about that. Nor should you. Well, it's great also because we can do these podcasts now and hear about the new releases coming out from the Warner Archive and all the plans that you guys have. And the title we're going to be talking about today is a December release. But before,

George, you go into that, Alan, for our audience, I know you're the author of the excellent book, Michael Curtiz, A Life in Film. Maybe you can give us a little background on yourself and what led you to write that book. Oh, sure. I'd be glad to. I grew up in a showbiz family, even though I grew up on the East Coast. My mother was born in Hollywood, in Hollywood Hospital. My parents were married there, and her side of the family was involved in show business. So I grew up, as I like to say, with the movie DNA, even though I took a lot of detours in my life to get to where I am now. In writing the Curtiz book, I had finished a book on the character actor Charles McGraw, and I got approached to write a book about a director. And I settled on Curtiz because I was very aware of

him and had always loved his work. And I also knew that no one had ever written a serious biography of him. And while I was contemplating that, I was one of my good friends, the late actor Dick Erdman had been under contract at Warner Brothers starting in 1944 out of high school. And we were getting together for dinner or something. And I told him about my interest in the book. And he says, you need to write about Mike. And he told me the story of being on a cold audition in Curtiz's office and getting a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers. That's the apocryphal Hollywood story and his career that lasted 70 years.

And he said, Mike was the king of directors. You have to write a book about him. And so I did. And it took six years and it took me to Hungary and Italy and a lot of different places. But I'm really glad I did it. And it was so needed because we did a documentary that I believe, Alan, Alan, you're in it. Right. When we did Casablanca about 10 years ago for the 70th anniversary of the film, and it was coming out on Blu-ray for the second time. I had always wanted the team to do a documentary about Michael Curtiz because he's the greatest director you'd never heard of.

Correct. Because he doesn't roll off the tongue when they're talking about Hitchcock and Wells and Hawks and William Wellman and Vincent Minnelli. And no, Curtiz was never part of those auteurs and yet was responsible for probably more great films than really any, I can't think of any single director that made as many diverse, great films. And Alan's book is just so sensational. Well, thank you. And that's exactly right. What struck me about Curtiz going into this was the dichotomy

of how the work, his work, is venerated. I mean, let's look at it. We celebrate Yuletide with White Christmas. We celebrate Independence Day with Yankee Doodle Dandy, both the Curtiz films. And every time we see Casablanca, we fall in love with whoever were our significant other or whatever. And yet the man himself is really, was really not remembered or was the subject of anecdotal, you know, his language, malapropisms, his alleged temper and all this other stuff. But no one had ever done a soup-to-nuts biography. And the reputation, as George indicated, that, well, he wasn't an auteur. And I think a lot of this, like many things in life, had to do with timing because Curtiz died

in 1962. And this was right around the time of the renaissance of interest in Golden Age filmmakers when Peter Bogdanovich was writing an Esquire about Ford and Hawks and then Richard Schickel and his documentary. So Curtiz wasn't a part of that. And he also, quite frankly, didn't fit into the round peg, round hole definition of the auteur theory, which I think has in some cases been taken to a kind of absurd extreme by certain people. So I think for all of those reasons, Curtiz gets overlooked. But as George said, I don't know not only of anyone who has directed so many different fabulous movies, but he worked at Warner Brothers. He

came to Warner Brothers in 1926 and he left in 1954. And I don't know of any other director who had so much to do with establishing the style and brand of a singular movie studio as Curtiz did at Warner Brothers. That's absolutely true. Because so many of the greatest classics made at Warner Brothers were directed by Michael Curtiz. He wasn't the only great director who worked there, but he directed more of our greatest golden age classics than any one single director. And he became the cash cow

because all of his, when he finally broke up, you know, he was for a while, he was, I think the chapter, I call him a general foreman. And he was there with a lot of other directors. And that period in the early thirties, 33, 34, he was making like six movies a year. Just that was when, you know, the Depression and Warners had to feed their theater chain and the movies were like 65 to maybe 80 minutes. And he was just knocking them out one after another, after another. But after he made Captain Blood, which established Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, which was a huge hit, he started making hit after hit after hit. And he really was the go-to guy for Jack Warner to make films that kept the lights on and kept the studio

working. He was just very successful commercially, as well as making great films that have stood the test of time. Well, that's a great transition to, I think, the topic for today. George, maybe you can take us into the Warner Archive Blu-ray release, Angels with Dirty Faces. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Tim Millard, host of The of the extras podcast and i wanted to let you know that we have a new private facebook group for fans of the warner archive and warner brothers catalog physical media releases so if that interests you you can find the link on our facebook page or look for the link in the podcast show notes. Well, I would say this is probably one of the top 10 films most requested to appear on Blu-ray. Warner Archive has been doing Blu-rays for about nine

years now. And I would easily say that when people communicate with us and let us know what titles they want to see, Angels with Dirty Faces is always there. And there's an extra little caveat to that in that it wasn't available on DVD or anywhere else for a while due to complications that I really would rather not speak of. But fortunately, the complications are gone. And that led us to prepare for this release. And what makes this release so special is it comes from a 4K scan, a brand new 4K scan off the original nitrate camera negative. And since we distribute not only Warner Brothers films, but we have the MGM library up through 1986 and many of the MGM original nitrate negatives burnt in a very tragic fire at the George Eastman House in 1978. So there's no original to go back to.

And we also control the RKO library. And they got bought from Howard Hughes by General Tire. And they didn't take the best care of their negatives. And a lot of the original negatives to their films don't exist anymore. And when you don't have an original negative to go back to, you're at a disadvantage. We've been able to do some remarkable work from second generation elements, including films made by Michael Curtiz. But when you have that original camera negative, it is not looking at a copy. You're looking at the actual film that went through the camera.

And you're at your absolute best. And technology right now is really, it's never been better for being able to bring the motion picture experience into the home. And it continues to get better. So we had the opportunity to create this new master for Blu-ray and the disc carries over a lot of the special things that we had put together when it did come out on DVD, which I think was probably around 2004 or 2005, somewhere around there. And I like to do these programs called Warner Night at the Movies, where it recreated the experience of going to the movies in 1938 when this movie was released. So you'd see a short and a cartoon and the newsreel. And we carried over all of those special features for this release. It's coming out in December. We only have two December titles, the other one being

Ivanhoe with Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Taylor. So we have two really big pictures to close out the year. But Angels with Dirty Faces is what I consider the Christmas present because people have wanted this film so much. And you have this incredible combination of Curtiz directing Cagney in really, I would say, Alan, I'd be interested to see what you think of this.

Cagney had left Warner Brothers over a contractual dispute with Jack Warner and tried to go on his own at a small studio. And it was a bad move on his part. He came back to Warner Brothers soon after realizing his error. And the first film that he made when he came back was not Angels with Dirty Faces, I don't believe. It was hard to handle. And reputedly, when the title of that film reached Jack Warner's desk with Cagney, he said, hard to handle the very definition of that SOB. to handle the very definition of that SOB. Jack Warner and Cagney did not like each other. And I think that's putting it politely. And you had said Cagney recognized the error of his ways by coming back to Warner Brothers. I think that's one perspective. I think from the Cagney perspective, he wasn't getting paid in any way commensurate with what his movies were making.

And he couldn't reach a accommodation with Jack Warner. So he walked out on his contract and Jack Warner actually sued him. And then he went to that company, as you said, made several independent movies. But remember who controlled the theaters in those days. Right. The theaters were controlled by the studio. So guess what? Jack somehow managed that Cagney's films didn't get independent films, didn't get full distribution in many theaters owned by Warner Brothers and MGM and so forth.

So Cagney came back to the fold, as you said, but his contract gave him an unprecedented amount of power for a movie star in the 1930s, in addition to getting paid $125,000 a year, which was, that was when it was 125,000, no, 125,000 per picture, which was a lot of money in 1938. He got a lot of vacation time to go to his farm in Martha's Vineyard. He got script approval. His brother, Bill Cagney, would be his line producer under Hal Wallace. And most importantly, Cagney's new contract included what's called a happiness clause, where if he was unhappy with the situation at Warner Brothers, he could leave without getting sued, without any penalty. So this gave Cagney an extraordinary

amount of influence during an era where the talent was really bound to the studios and the studios really had all the leverage. This was before Olivia de Havilland successfully sued and got changed a lot of the system there. So it was a marriage of convenience because Cagney was a big star. His films made a lot of money. Jack Warner smartly got him back into the fold and reunited him with Michael Curtiz for this movie. And you also have Anne Sheridan as leading lady. And she was really making a name for herself. She had risen pretty quickly from Warner B pictures to Warner

A pictures. And then there's another guy in the movie who would play a much more leading role at Warner Brothers, a guy by the name of Bogart. This is where you have the combination of Cagney and Bogart, not the first, not the last. That's the beauty of Warner Brothers. And you have the combination of Cagney and Bogart, not the first, not the last, that's the beauty of Warner brothers. And you have the appearance of a group of hooligans that are, were referred to at the time as the dead end kids, right? They were the actors that were in the film version and stage version of a dead end, The film version and stage version of Dead End, which was a Samuel Goldwyn film. And Warner Brothers wisely put all those kids under contract and started putting them in films.

And they eventually went on to other series at other studios and ended as the Bowery Boys and made 48 movies. as the Bowery Boys and made 48 movies. But putting them all together, and this was, again, Warner Brothers, I always refer to as the proletariat studio. Very much so. This is about kids dealing with poverty, families dealing with not having enough money. This is the end of the Depression. But the characters are very believable. The dialogue is very well written.

Like everything Curtiz did, it was directed with extreme precision. There isn't a wasted frame in the movie. And it reeks of Warner Brothers. Oh, it is. It's the apocryphal, I think, Warner Brothers 30s film. And you mentioned Anne Sheridan. This was her first A production. She had labored in B films.

This was Angels with Dirty Faces was Sheridan's first A production. And this was right. She, in an interview, she gave credit to John Stahl, who somehow said something to somebody to get her in this movie. But this was also launched this publicity campaign on the part of Warners calling her the oomph girl. And that began this thing. She grew to really dislike that whole aura about herself because she thought of herself as an actress. But she also had her photographs were taken by Hurl, who was fabulous of lighting and taking photos of movie stars.

So this Angels with Dirty Faces really elevated Ann Sheridan. You talked about the dead end kids. Now, they were in the stage play. Goldwyn brought them out for the movie in 1937, the stage play. Goldwyn brought him out for the movie in 1937, directed by William Wyler. But interestingly, Roland Brown wrote the original story for Angels with Dirty Faces, and he wrote it originally for Mervyn LeRoy, who was going to do a film with the dead-end kids that never came about. So that original story was bought by Hal Wallace on January 22nd, 1938. story was bought by Hal Wallace on January 22nd, 1938. And then you had John Wexley and Warren Duff rewrite the script. The Roland Brown touch, he was what you would call in the 20s and 30s, a knock around guy. He sparred with Jack Dempsey. He ran a speakeasy in Detroit and supposedly knew the Purple Gang and rubbed elbows with gangsters and so on and so forth. And he came to Hollywood, was kicking around,

and he wrote a story called A Handful of Clouds. And Zanuck, who was the head of production, Daryl F. Zanuck at Warner Brothers in his 20s glommed onto it and said, this is great. And he offered Brown, who was broke, five thousand dollars. And Brown said, it's not enough money. And he didn't have Brown didn't have enough money to pay his rent, but he still stood by us. And Zanuck originally got mad and then said, look, get in here. We'll cut a deal. And so they did. then said, look, get in here, we'll cut a deal. And so they did. And that movie became The Doorway to Hell, which was a big hit and really initiated the whole Daryl F. Zanuck, Warner Brothers,

ripped from the headlines, gangster pictures with the public enemy and Little Caesar and so forth. I think the other thing that's notable about this film, Tim and George, is this is the film where Cagney really created the persona of the character of Rocky Sullivan. What do you know? What do you say? And the rocking back and forth and film, when Curtiz was published, I did a program to Curtiz retrospective at UCLA in 2018. And then I did a month of Michael Curtiz films on TCM. And I couldn't get Angels with Dirty Faces, which was grievously wounding to me. But I just showed it at my festival in Palm Springs on October 22nd, just passed. And I was able to get a print. And thanks to the great people at Warner Brothers Classics, Christy Nakamura and Nikki Woods,

let me show a 35 millimeter print of Angels with Dirty Faces. And the audience just went absolutely bonkers with Cagney. The audience just went absolutely bonkers with Cagney. And when I introduced the film, I talked about the Rocky Sullivan character, George. And then I said, rather than me describe this, let me let the master talk. getting his AFI Life Achievement Award, describing how he created the characterization of Rocky Sullivan by watching some guy that used to hang out on Sixth Avenue when he was a kid. And Cagney said, he was most interesting to me because this is what he did all day. And he rocked on his heels and he moved his hips and everything. And he said, and if someone approached him, he didn't deign to talk to him. He just pointed his finger at him like, I got you. And so I actually had Cagney introduce part of Angels, which went over big with the crowd. But it's a

seminal film. I think you also can't undersell the whole story of the two boys that grow up and one is good and one is evil. One becomes the gangster and Pat O'Brien becomes the priest, right? Yeah. When I was talking about the cast, you know, I neglected to talk about Pat O'Brien, which is basically heresy because they were best friends in real life. The Irish Mafia. Pat O'Brien. Right.

And if you want to see a different side of them, it's not out on Blu-ray, but it's out on DVD. They made a film called Boy Meets Girl, which is a delightful Hollywood satire. And again, it shows a completely different side of Cagney, a completely different side of Pat O'Brien. And if you only think of Pat O'Brien from, let's say, some Like It Hot or Doan's Pills commercials, if you're as old as I am. George, you have to be a certain age to even know what Doan's Pills are or were. I know. I'm of that age, I must say. I must confess. But yeah, they were great friends. They were great. Pat O'Brien and Cagney were great friends. Yeah, they were great friends. And the other thing about this film that I discovered

that was so fascinating is because of the leverage that Jim Cagney had, and he had his brother on the set as the line producer under Wallace, which Wallace wasn't overjoyed with. James Cagney didn't care for Wallace. He saw him as a representative of Jack Warner and kind of considered him a suit, which I think was unfair because one of the memos in the production file is a memorandum from Wallace to Curtiz and so forth saying, we need to have a meeting with Cagney to incorporate some of his gutty ideas into the script. So far from being the intrangent, uncooperative producer, I think Hal Wallace was very collaborative in recognizing that Cagney had a lot of good ideas.

The scene with Cagney in the movie, without giving anything away, where he's penned up with the police and the tear gas and everything, that was Cagney's notion to do that. Just as Curtiz, where Pat O'Brien launches a reform crusade and they have him on a radio station broadcasting about reforming the city's crooked politics and so forth. That was Curtiz's notion to do that. And there's a memo from Tenney Wright, who was the studio manager for many years at Warner Brothers, complaining about Curtiz building a radio station set that was not budgeted for this. But there was a lot of creativity and give and take with all the cast members, except

the dead end kids. Because one story that Cagney told his biographer, John McCabe, is that Gorsy tried to upstage him, Leo Gorsy, and made a smart remark. And Cagney turned around and just belted him one right on top of the forehead and knocked him into Gabriel Dell and said, that'll be enough of that. So there was no doubt as to who was in charge on the set. And to an extent, it was Curtiz because he was the director. But it was actually Cagney was the one with the authority, the shaping authority of this film. I mean, it's it. I think about how Betty Davis, you know, left Warner's. She went to London, tried to break her contract. Right. But when she came back, she came back to better scripts. Correct. And, you know, Marked Woman, Jezebel, you know, she

fought against what Warner was trying to do to their players. And she was triumphant and Cagney, he didn't go to London. He went to grand national pictures, right? But he came back triumphant because he got, I mean, every picture he made after he came back is at least good. If not great. I mean, movies like the Oklahoma kid or torrid zone, they're not up there with like the greatest Warner Brothers classics ever made, but they're three and a half star movies as opposed to four star movies. I think Torrid Zone is a fabulous movie. I mean, it's completely ridiculous,

but it's such great entertainment. And you can tell that Pat O'Brien and Cagney, they're all having fun doing this. I mean, George Tobias as a Hispanic bandit in Central America, I mean, it's far-fetched. But it's the quintessential Warner films where it's just good entertainment, enjoyable entertainment. And I think Angels with Dirty Faces just really is fabulous. And George, I'm so delighted that you were able to bring this out and the camera negative, which means I will have to buy yet another Blu-ray to add to the ever mounting pile all over my house of Blu-rays because I have to buy yet another Blu-ray to add to the ever mounting pile all over my house of Blu-rays. I have to get it. It's really remarkable because I grew up watching these films as I'm sure you did as well. We saw them in battered 16 millimeter prints in syndication, cut up, footage missing.

You know, nobody with a brain at the local stations was looking to present these films in any kind of meaningful way. Even with that kind of constraint, you could still, at least I could as a kid, pick up the greatness. still, at least I could as a kid, pick up the greatness, you know, and I grew up in New York and Angels with Dirty Faces very often would play at like one o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. And the local Channel 5 in New York was known for having that package of Warner movies from the 30s and 40s. And they would sometimes have a Cagney week. They'd sometimes have a Bogart week. But this was the way I got exposed to them. And then as I got older and finally had the ability,

I actually did this before I got parental permission. I would sneak onto the train and go into Manhattan and go to revival houses and see these movies on the big screen and go out of my mind. And then my parents found out about it and I got in a lot of trouble. So most kids got in trouble for, you know, doing other things. I got in trouble for trying to go to see movies. George, you and I had a similar upbringing because I grew up around New York City. And you're right. W.N.E.W. Channel five had the Warner Brothers package. So you watched Angels with Dirty Faces and White Heat and those movies. And then Channel

Nine had Million Dollar Movie, where they would show the RKO movies and some of the other ones, but they would show the same movie like for a week. So you'd watch part of it or all of it. And then two days later, you turn on the TV and it would be on again. So it was a very unique concept. It was. And, you know, I've been accused of being a savant at times because if my life was on the line to recite most of the dialogue from movies like House on Haunted Hill, Caged and King Kong, I would walk away a free man for doing this. But at the same token, your comment about the commercials and being cut up, I think RKO sold their library, as you mentioned, to General Tire, which was General Tele Radio, CNC Television.

So you'd watch King Kong, and you'd have Robert Armstrong saying, they're going to have to think up a whole lot of adjectives when I come back. And then they cut to a commercial. And when they came back, they were already at Skull Island. They cut out like 15 minutes out of the film. And of course, we didn't know any better. I didn't know any better at the time, you know, but yeah, that was that was how it's done. One of the interesting things in writing the book, Curtiz's reputation with actors was not wonderful. I think the common complaint aside from his habit of venting pressure by losing his temper and yelling, although not at the stars, was that he paid more attention to the camera than he did to the actors, which I think is, in some cases, inaccurate because Curtiz

himself started as an actor and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1906 and was quite an accomplished actor. But I thought it was interesting on how Cagney worked with him and what he thought of him because Cagney was not a fellow, he really, Cagney really directed himself after a fashion. And he did not have a lot of respect for a lot of directors. For example, he thought Mervyn LeRoy was someone who just married Harry Warner's daughter. And he didn't really have a respect for directors. But he told John McCabe, his biographer, that he said, you know, Mike was a pompous bastard. He didn't know how to treat actors, but he sure as hell knew how to treat a camera. And if you got through a picture with Curtiz, you knew it would be

well done. But he added, you know, Curtiz didn't mess with me because he knew if he did, I'd knock him on his ass. You know, a little bit of Rocky Sullivan coming out of Cagney in his old age. But they both respected each other. And I think they stayed in their creative lanes. Cagney was not going to tell Curtiz how to do a camera setup or about composition or how to how to shoot a scene. And I don't think Curtiz was inclined to tell Cagney very much about acting. the late Joan Leslie, who I got to talk to and knew after a fashion when they made Yankee Doodle Dandy, the death scene of Walter Houston as Cagney's father and Cagney saying, you know, my mother, thank you. My father, thank you. And he breaks down into tears. Leslie, Joan Leslie said that Cagney was actually crying and Curtiz was sitting there behind the camera crying too. And then when he cut it, he goes, geez, Jimmy, beautiful,

beautiful, you know, and he was just so affected emotionally by Cagney's acting in that scene. So I think Cagney and Curtiz were very much simpatico, although certainly James Cagney didn't approve of Curtiz's temperament that he would take out on lesser people like the sound guy or somebody like that. Wouldn't you say also that there are certain performers, Cagney was one of them, but I think Joan Crawford spoke well of him. Oh, Joan. You know, Doris Day spoke well of him. Doris Day in her 90s still called him Mr. Curtiz. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, there was so much respect. And Anne Blythe, God bless her, is still with us. And I talked to her extensively. And when I first got her on the phone and started talking to her about Curtiz, she said, I adored Mike. And I almost dropped the telephone. This was not something I was used to hearing. And I said, why did you feel that way? And he said,

because he was always in my corner. He was always in my corner. And it turned out that Ann Blythe and her mother became great friends with Michael Curtiz and his wife, Bess Meredith. They were, the four of them were very close. And Ann told me when she did the test for, it was either Mildred Pierce or the Helen Morgan story, which was about 12 years later. I can't rightly remember which one. But when she did the test for Mildred Pierce, it was a long line of actresses trying to Curtis was looking because think about that part. You had to go from playing a character who's walking with her little sister in school with school books from school to seducing Joan Crawford's husband, Zachary Scott.

So that was a really, really tough role. And when Anne did her test with Crawford, by the way, when she finished, Curtiz cut it and winked at her and nodded her, nodded his head, meaning you got the part. So there were a lot of people that liked Curtiz, although I would have to say he was more respected than liked. And when Humphrey Bogart signed his last contract with Warner Brothers, he had the privilege of naming like four or five directors that he could choose. naming like four or five directors that he could choose. And one was Delmer Daves and a few others. And then one was Michael Curtiz. So Bogart, although he might not have approved of Curtiz personally, in some aspects, he knew how good he was. They all respected the work he turned out because his name was on a film.

The likelihood is it was going to turn out to be a good film yeah and a successful one and it's yeah yeah you know uh angels with dirty faces is in that pantheon of the top warner titles which is why it was so frustrating that it was unavailable for so long. So to bring it back and to bring it back with this kind of quality is the closest thing to being there and watching a nitrate print on opening night. You know, it's it's really, really remarkable. And we're so excited to be able to end the year with this, because normally for Warner Archive, on Blu-ray, which is a great kind of segue from our humble roots. We had a choice and we could have held this till next year. And I said, I've got to get this in the year. We have to release it at the beginning of the month. It will sell itself.

People will know that it's coming out. And that's why, Tim, I'm so grateful to you. And Alan, I'm so grateful to you for this experience to be able to talk about this release for people to know that it's coming. Because this film means a lot to generations of people. You've been listening to part one of two podcasts with Warner Brothers executive George Feltenstein and author Alan K. Rohde. Be sure and look for part two where George and Alan share stories from more Michael Curtiz films such as Mildred Pierce, Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Adventures of Robin Hood. That will be coming soon. So be sure and follow the show at your favorite podcast provider so that you don't miss it. the show at your favorite podcast provider so that you don't miss it. For those of you interested in learning more about some of the releases discussed in the show today, there will be detailed

information on the website at www.theextras.tv, including links to Alan K. Rohde's website, where you can purchase his fantastic book on Michael Curtiz. Also follow the show on Facebook or Twitter at TheExtrasTV or Instagram at at The Extras.TV to stay up to date on the latest episodes and for exclusive images and behind the scenes information about the episodes and upcoming guests. And if you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave us a review at iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast provider. Until next time, you've been listening to The Extras with Tim Millard. Stay slightly obsessed. The Extras is a production of Otaku Media, producers of podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras,

and media that connects creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals at www.otakumedia.tv or look for the link in the show notes.