The Angels Wash Their Faces, a middling "Dead End Kids" flic, is a slightly above-average movie, though decidedly a lesser film than Angels with Dirty Faces. (Despite the title -- an obvious attempt to cash in on that earlier, much better film -- Faces is not a sequel.) The plot is a bunch of hooey, providing for plenty of melodrama spread over with big dollops of low comedy, and the last portion is particularly unbelievable. It also teaches a strange moral lesson, namely that it's perfectly okay to use illegal means as long as you're on the side of the angels. Of course, no once watches something like Faces for the moral lesson. They watch it to see what Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall and the boys are up to this time. Being an early one of their films, Gorcey and Hall don't dominate the way they will in later films. As a matter of fact, the real protagonist isn't one of the "Kids" at all. It's Frankie Thomas, turning in a very nicely etched performance as the basically good kid with some bad breaks. But once Thomas gets blamed for the fires, the Kids get to come into their own, and they don't disappoint. All of this leaves Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan with little to do, although Sheridan still makes the most of every moment she has. Ray Enright directs with an eye on pacing and speed, and also makes the fire scene extremely effective. Faces is no great film, but fans of the Dead End Kids will definitely want to seek it out.