You may recall that in the popular family Christmas film “Home Alone”, Kevin (Macaulay Culkin “The Good Son”) watches a gangster film. The film is titled “Angels With Filthy Souls” and it appears to be a relatively violent black and white crime flick. Kevin famously uses the film’s audio in a clever way to trick people including a pizza delivery man so that he can get out of paying for the pizza.

You may well have thought that this was a real movie but it’s actually all made for “Home Alone”. There was a terrific 1938 gangster film by the name of “Angels With Dirty Faces”. It stars James Cagney (“Yankee Doodle Dandy”) is a pretty violent picture for its era. “Angels With Filthy Souls” is clearly a homage to this. The “Home Alone” filmmakers did an excellent job at making their fake film look and feel authentic.

In “Home Alone 2: Lost In New York”, Kevin watches and makes use of its sequel, “Angels With Filthier Souls”. Again, this is a fake film yet it looks genuine.

To this day, many people never realised that “Angels With Filthy Souls” was just made for “Home Alone”. There is sadly no full version, what you see in “Home Alone” is probably all that there ever was. Of course, I hope it does inspire people to check out the brilliant “Angels With Dirty Faces”.