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Poster for Angels with Dirty Faces
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Released
1938 · FILM

Angels with Dirty Faces

A reformed priest returns to his gritty hometown to keep a gang of wayward kids from idolizing his old friend, notorious mobster Rocky Sullivan, who’s racing against time to claim a fortune that could cement his criminal empire.

The saga of America’s dirty faced kids... and the breaks that life won’t give them!

Directed by
Runtime
97 min
CrimeDramaFilm-Noir

Synopsis

Rocky Sullivan and Jerry Connelly, childhood friends, grow up in the same neighborhood but take vastly different paths in life. Rocky becomes a prominent gangster, while Jerry enters the priesthood and returns to their old tenement district to serve as a pastor.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 17

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Owen MarksShot by Sol PolitoScored by Max Steiner

Box Office

1938 · Box office

Made its money back — grossed 2.7× its budget

Why 2.5×?

Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).

Worldwide gross

$1.7M

Budget$633K
Worldwide gross$1.7M
break-even (2.5×)

Also known as

  • Chicago - Engel mit schmutzigen Gesichternde
  • Chikagode
  • Ángeles con caras suciases
  • Les Anges aux figures salesfr
  • Gli angeli con la faccia sporcait

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