The character:	Rocky Sullivan
The actor:	James Cagney
The movie:	Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus differentiates between the reward that a person receives for doing good publicly versus doing good privately. Let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing, he tells us. It is only in giving secretly, humbly, that we may be rewarded by our Father in Heaven.

If God was there on the day of the Sermon on the Mount, that’s no great surprise. People have given that idea credence for many centuries now. If God is in Sing Sing, or in the crusty basements or disgusting streets of ’30s New York, that’s something much more up for debate. At the end of Angels with Dirty Faces, Cagney commits to one of the most disturbing film endings I know. Rocky Sullivan, the notorious gangster, one of those tough customers who has lived a life without compunction or shame, is given a choice by a childhood friend turned priest. Father Connolly (Pat O’Brien, the ol’ Christofascist) knows that Rocky, imprisoned though he is, has great sway over a number of impressionable youngsters, kids who see themselves as tough customers in the making, perhaps a few good scores away from being Rocky Sullivan himself. When you go to the chair, Connolly tells Rocky, go yellow. Do something for those kids. Show them that crime doesn’t pay.

This is easy advice for Father Connolly to give. For one thing, he doesn’t have to give up his last moments and sully a reputation that, benighted or otherwise, he has spent his life building. For another, he isn’t repudiating his whole life going back. Perhaps most importantly, there’s no payoff for Rocky here. If God exists, then Rocky hasn’t seen the guy anywhere. The Sermon on the Mount is nothing more than pretty words written in elegant cursive as far as he can tell. There’s never really been proof of God for any of us, but where Rocky would have even found that proof is beyond me. Impoverished from the start. Sent to reform school when Jerry Connolly got away with the crime they both did together. Bad elements become worse. The payoff for virtue, whatever that is, is puny, perhaps even negative. Father Connolly wants Rocky to take it on faith that there’s something better than the life he lived, and that there’s something better waiting for the Dead End Kids (appearing en masse here). Maybe they, having the same background as Jerry had, could all be priest themselves. Wouldn’t that be a lulu?

When Rocky does start screaming and crying, turning coward at this glimpse of mortality, I suppose you could read it as an honest reaction. Maybe after all of these years of always finding a way to get away with his misdeeds, he has never really learned how to cope with the ultimate disappointment on the other side of the switch. But I don’t read the movie that way. Rocky, who gets along with the Dead End Kids and likes their spunk, may well have their best interests at heart. He understands, in that final conversation with Connolly, that he’s going to die. He’s leaving nothing behind besides his reputation, that carefully crafted mask that he’s worn for his whole adult life and more. I wouldn’t say that he’s made peace with it, precisely, but he’s realistic. That realism gives way to fantasy, the fantasy of a deathbed confession, a deathbed confession that by definition he cannot take credit for. A single hint that he’s giving up his reputation renders the whole thing moot. So he takes it on faith. His left hand does not know what his right does.