Maliejandra Kay Gabe Ryan (Frankie Thomas) gets out of reform school and goes back to the slums. His sister (Ann Sheridan) does her best to keep him out of trouble, but it just seems to follow him. Aside from his associations with the Termite gang, Gabe is followed by real-life gangsters who have a scheme to set fire to random buildings to collect the insurance. They need someone to blame for the arson, and Gabe is it. It is up to the Termites to work the law in their favor and give the gangsters their just desserts.The the scene that introduces the Dead End Kids is really quite good. The boys wander on over to the new resident's furniture on the street, and proceed to make it their own. They talk to each other in phoney posh accents and talk about drinking tea together; Bernard Punsley takes a nap in a chair. The boys then proceed to start a fight with the new boy, but after he proves himself a good fighter, they ask him to join their club.The initiation scene is rather good too, filled with mischief that seems dangerous at first, but is really rather clever and innocent.Later, when Billy Halop studies to become the boy mayor, he has a dream about schoolwork. This is wonderfully staged, with tiny holograms of the kids walking on his face and firing questions at him.Angels Wash Their Faces is a great title because it plays off of the success of Angels With Dirty Faces, and really tells what the kids are doing. Notorious for bad behavior on and off the set, these boys make nice in this film. But rather than seem disingenuous, it makes for some great laughs. This is a preview of what many of the boys would become in The Bowery Boys series. We even get a few garbled words from Leo Gorcey.

WarnersBrother I don't have much to add to what has been said before, but it's very much a film of it's time, and the first (and likely only) time that the studio hung the film totally on the Dead End Kids.The Warner's gave the boys plenty of help, from director Ray Enright and an 'A' budget, to an almost magical cast of supporting actors. At every turn, we get one of those gem performances from real pros. They are too many to list, but it seems like just about everybody on the Warner's lot (Sans the very biggest stars) walk through this picture. (See if you can spot John Ridgely)The only over the top performance is from the always reliable Eduardo Cianelli as a mob boss with a messianistic complex. He plays this character almost exactly like that of the Thuggie leader in "Gunga Din". He's something to watch! And Marjorie Main is excellent and gets her best role since "Dead End".My bid for this one is a second feature on a double bill with something like "City for Conquest".Hooray for Warners!

MartinHafer The film begins with a bunch of kids in reform school and focuses on a kid named 'Gabe', who has apparently worked hard to earn his parole. Gabe and his sister move to a new neighborhood to make a fresh start and soon Gabe meets up with the Dead End Kids. The Kids in this film are little punks, but they are much less antisocial than they'd been in other previous films and down deep, they are well-meaning punks. However, in this neighborhood there are also some criminals who are perpetrating insurance fraud through arson and see Gabe as a convenient scapegoat--after all, he'd been to reform school and no one would believe he was innocent once he was framed. So, when Gabe is about ready to be sent back to "The Big House", it's up to the rest of the gang to save him and expose the real crooks.The "Dead End Kids" appeared in several Warner Brothers films in the late 1930s and the films were generally very good (particularly ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES). However, after the boys' contracts expired, they went on to Monogram Studios and the films, to put it charitably, were very weak and formulaic--with Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey being pretty much the whole show and the group being renamed "The Bowery Boys". Because ANGELS WASH THEIR FACES had the excellent writing and production values AND Hall and Gorcey were not constantly mugging for the camera, it's a pretty good film--and almost earns a score of 7 (it's REAL close). In fact, while this isn't a great film aesthetically, it's sure a lot of fun to watch, so I will give it a 7! Sure, it was a tad hokey-particularly towards the end when the kids take the law into their own hands and Reagan ignores the Bill of Rights--but it was also quite entertaining. The Dead End Kids are doing their best performances and Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan provided excellent support. Sure, this part of the film was illogical and impossible but somehow it was still funny and rather charming--so if you can suspend disbelief, it works well.

jotix100 This 1939 film tried to capitalize on the much better Michael Curtiz's film "Angels with Dirty Faces". As directed by Ray Enright, the only interesting thing is how tamed these kids were in comparison with what's going on with the youth in America's inner cities today.The film is only worth seeing because of the presence of Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan, who showed they were well paired together. The Dead End kids have larger parts as the plot concentrates on them rather than in the older folks.In a way it's curious how arson was used in the same way some scrupulous landlords did in later years right here in New York. It was the quickest way to turn a property around never considering the social problems it created. In today's climate with so many guns around there is a new reality. The young kids of the story seemed mere pranksters rather than criminals. How times change!