The boy who didn't run fast enough...
-Angels with Dirty Faces- (1938)
"Father Jerry asks his old pal Rocky to help him. Rocky agrees. Deterring the Dead End Kids from crime while still engaging in it himself, trying to convince them of its evil while being a living example of its benefits, Rocky is a contradiction. He would be a banality were it not for Cagney's magical performance.
He brought all of his boyhood into the part. Greeting everybody with, 'Whadya hear, whadya say," Cagney was both loose and tense, his body wound up tight, winding down in the hitches of his shoulders and the twitches of his neck. Fooling with the Dead End Kids in their "clubhouse," a place he uses to hide his money, he inevitably spars with them, throwing open-handed punches, mugging, jabbing, beating them down with his hat. Rocky is a manchild, an eternal adolescent to whom time and crime have been both kind and ravaging. The only adult burden he seems to carry is the inevitability of his death. Rocky is the most lovable gangster in all of movies. Tommy Powers grown older and wiser, at home in his city environment because the game is over. Rocky is no longer on the rise or even really on the lam; even as he settles accounts it seems a game he is playing from a distance. Rocky seems most at home as a superannuated member of the Dead End Kids."
"The Pictorial Treasury of Film Stars - James Cagney"
by Andrew Bergman