The Mayor of Hell

James Cagney, racketeer and political ward heeler, get to become a Deputy Commissioner of Corrections and visits a boys reform school. The catch is that Cagney is not in it for the graft, he genuinely wants to make a difference in the lives of the kids there because he comes from a background like their's.

The villain of the piece is Dudley Digges who is a grafting chiseler and a sanctimonious hypocrite to boot. One of the subtexts of the plot of The Mayor of Hell is that these kids are mostly immigrants and those that judge them and are in positions of power are those who are here a few generations. Note in the mess hall scene as Digges offers a prayer of thanks for the food they are about to receive, Digges is eating well, but the kids are getting quality you wouldn't feed to your pet.

Cagney has his own troubles back in the city with some of his henchmen and he has to take it on the lam. That puts Digges back in charge and setting up the film for it's climax.

The Mayor of Hell was a typical product from the working class studio. And because it was pre-Code it gets pretty gruesome at times. A later version of this, Crime School, with Humphrey Bogart and the Dead End Kids, was a more sanitized remake.

Although Cagney is fine in the lead role as is Madge Evans the school nurse, the acting honors go to Dudley Digges. Hard to believe that the same man could portray the drunken, but kindly, one legged ship's surgeon in Mutiny on the Bounty. But Digges is a fine player and a joy to watch in every film he's in.

This film is not shown too often because of the racial and ethnic stereotypes it portrays. A whole lot of minorities would be offended today. Still it's a fine film.

Interestingly enough a few years ago the film Sleepers came out and it touched on some of the same issues. I guess films about reform schools don't change in any time.

Five years before the film Dead End hit theaters, this film was produced. This was definitely a film that tried to show what reformatories were really like. In most cases, the kids who were sent there didn't become reformed, they only came out harder and moved on to bigger crimes. James Cagney is great in this early role as Patsy, the racketeer who tries to keep the kids from making some of the same mistakes that he did by making conditions better for the boys in the camp. Dudley Digges played the perfect villain in Thompson, the warden of the school. He pretty much showed how when the odds were against Thompson and his cronies that he was nothing more than a coward. Also Allen Jenkins, who ironically would appear a few years later in the aforementioned Dead End, provided a lot of the humor as Patsy's stooge "Uncle Mike". Too bad this little gem is rarely shown on television anymore or that it is currently not out on DVD.

Jimmy Smith leads a group of thieving kids. Jimmy and five others are caught in their hideout and sent to reform school run by the heartless superintendent Thompson. Dorothy, the nurse, is concerned about the conditions. Well-connected street gangster Patsy Gargan (James Cagney) had been appointed deputy commissioner as a political payoff. With no particular interest in the political work, he is tasked to write a report on the school. After witnessing Thompson's brutal treatment, he decides to take an interest in the kids.

This is Cagney playing his good guy gangster. It's solid. The kids are solid pre-Dead End Kids. The morality is pretty simple. My only complaint is nurse Dorothy would never quit. She needs to be outright fired and be carried out kicking and screaming. She's basically abandoning the boys. The guard who gives the boy his coat should be replaced with Dorothy. Patsy's call to Thompson should be replaced with a call to Dorothy. That way the story could still end the same way. This is a very simple moral gangster film.

The great James Cagney, top-billed in big letters, doesn't show up till the movie's second third, and probably has less screen time than Dudley Digges, who plays the eee-vill reform-school potentate. But when Jimmy arrives, as a deputy commissioner of something-or-other out to reform reform schools, he slashes the air with his hands and jumps on the balls of his feet and spits out punchy Warners-First National dialogue with all the customary, and expected, panache. The psychology in this crisp antique, one of Warners' many efforts to assert its place as the "socially conscious" studio, doesn't run deep: Digges is bad just because the script requires him to be, and there's the quaint notion that juvenile delinquents will turn into swell kids if they're just given a dash of autonomy. But it's made in that spare, fast style that the studio specialized in, and it never bores. Frankie Darro, who got into all kinds of onscreen trouble during a brief tenure as Warners' favorite Rotten Street Kid, is an ideal JD -- a handsome, charismatic toughie with a pug nose and a hate-filled stare that could wither steel. No kid actor today can touch him.

This one of those social dramas that WB knew how to put together and were guaranteed boxoffice hits in the thirties. This early "dead end kids" are sent to a reform school where they are mistreated. Cagney, a gangster as part of a deal is appointed as the commissioner of the school. He doesn't take it seriously at first but he changes and makes the necessary changes to improve the lives of the boys. The idea is to let the boys rule and administer their community. Whether this is sound social reform is beyond my belief but it's a movie. It's a lot like Boys Town with a slight darker tone. A useless happy ending deluges what impact the scene prior hard but is still good. WB would later make this same movies with Bogart in the Cagney/fatherly role.