Ronald Reagan Appears as Deputy District Attorney Patrick "Pat" Remson in "The Angels Wash Their Faces"

The Angels Wash Their Faces, a lively 1939 comedy-drama directed by Ray Enright, features 28-year-old Ronald Reagan in the kind of second-banana part that Hollywood used to call a “juvenile” role. Instead of having a conventional top banana, the picture has no fewer than six collective stars: the Dead End Kids, a scruffy but lively group who made dozens of movies between 1937 and 1958. In his autobiography Where’s the Rest of Me? the future president said working with them was like “going over Niagara Falls in a barrel the hard way—upstream.” Maybe so, but their obstreperous antics energize the movie a lot more than Reagan’s movie-style respectability does.

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