In the dead of a winter’s night in an abandoned building in Winnetka, 20 miles north of Chicago, an actor named Michael Guido, wearing a trench coat and fedora, suddenly found himself having a tense exchange with an older man pointing a gun at him:
“I’m gonna give you to the count of 10 to get your ugly, yellow, no-good keister off my property before I pump your guts full of lead.”
“All right, Johnny, I’m sorry,” Guido replied, backing away. “I’m going.”
“One. Two. Ten!”
As far as beloved family Christmas movies go,
Angels with Filthy Souls is an unlikely one: a gritty, noirish gangster flick in which a crow-voiced curmudgeon abruptly unleashes a blaze of gunfire on his unsuspecting victim.
Even more unlikely, since it doesn’t exist.
Angels with Filthy Souls is the fictitious gangster movie tucked into the beloved John Hughes andChris Columbus family comedy
Home Alone, which turns 25 this year. It’s the forbidden flick nine-year-old Kevin McCallister at last indulges in while enjoying a tremendous helping of ice cream—“Guys, I’m eating junk and watching rubbish! You better come out and stop me!”—only to be horrified by what unfolds. Later, he uses it as a weapon in his arsenal against the Wet Bandits (and a hapless Little Nero’s Pizza delivery boy).
The movie title was created when art director Dan Webster realized they needed a label for the VHS tape.
HOME ALONE © 1990 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved. © 2015 FOX.
Reeking of authenticity,
Angels with Filthy Souls is not just a uniquely persuasive parody. It’s the perfect movie-within-a-movie: a one-minute-and-20-second noir-in-a-nutshell that feels like a fleeting glimpse of a long-lost classic. Its dialogue is crisp, the characters and performances credible, the rapid escalation of its drama enthralling. Plus it culminates in not just the most memorable utterance in
Home Alone but one of the great movie lines of all time: “Keep the change, ya filthy animal”—the sardonic invitation since emblazoned on many a Christmas sweater.
Angels with Filthy Souls was shot in one day, on the final “test day” before principal photography officially began on
Home Alone. “We had nothing to lose,” said director of photography Julio Macat. “We went for it.”
The script pages for the sequence turned up relatively late, referred to only as “the gangster film.” The eventual title—a tip of the fedora to the James Cagney’s
Angels with Dirty Faces—came later. “I believe the title was decided upon only because we needed to create a label for the tape Kevin puts in the VHS player,” said art director Dan Webster. “Now
that is a very old-fashioned sentence!”
It was Macat who persuaded Columbus to shoot the sequence using the techniques and black-and-white negative film stock of movies from the 40s. The high-key lighting, high-contrast aesthetic would evoke “a cross between film noir and the really crazy stuff you see in early television, like
Playhouse 90 or
One Step Beyond,” said production designer John Muto.
Like most of the other interior shots in
Home Alone, including all the scenes inside the McCallister family home, the sequence was shot on a sound stage in the abandoned New Trier West High School gymnasium. The entire set consisted of just a couple of walls. (Webster suspects that the walls were reused in the “real world” of the movie, for the set of the police office. “We didn’t have the biggest construction budget.”)
Johnny’s office was designed especially for maximum dramatic backlighting potential: pebbly-textured translucent glass on the door and a Palladian window that would sinisterly spotlight him at his desk through Venetian blinds.
Ralph Foody, who plays Johnny, at his desk between takes.
HOME ALONE © 1990 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved. © 2015 FOX.
Set decorators Eve Cauley and Dan Clancy fitted the room out with a private investigator’s tools of the trade: an old typewriter, a pair of binoculars at the window, a grabaphone (a style of cradle telephone partly made popular through its appearance in silent films), and a Colt 1921AC Thompson submachine gun—the very Tommy gun that Cagney himself totes in the 1935 mobster movie
G Men. There’s even steam rising from an obscured cup of coffee on Johnny’s desk.
For further ambience, artificial mist was pumped into the set. The lighting was intense: the old-style film stock required four times the amount of light to expose than normal film. The resulting heat from the lamps was considerable. Even in the Chicago winter, Macat said, the actors “were sweating up a storm.”
Consistent with the shooting style of
Home Alone, much of the scene was shot with low, wide angles that capture the action as if a child were perceiving it. Macat is still pleased with the way Snakes dies toward camera and continues to be sprayed with bullets face-down on the floor. “This seemed like stuff that could deliver a good fright to a kid,” he said, happily.
Sketches of the set design.
HOME ALONE © 1990 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved. © 2015 FOX.
Before the shoot, actor Michael Guido had been onstage, performing in a light-hearted theatrical comedy at the Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago. After his curtain call, he rushed out of the theater and into his car and drove 15 miles north, arriving in Winnetka for the most unusual of late-night acting gigs by 10 P.M.
According to casting director Janet Hirshenson, Guido had nailed the audition. He had the speech pattern, comic timing, and, crucially, the look and facial structure of someone from an earlier era. “People back then had different diets,” she told me. “The ideal look was more Ryan Gosling than Brad Pitt. Those lips were
not in vogue.”
“I was definitely channeling Cagney,” Guido remembers about his audition with Columbus. “Chris was laughing when I finished the scene and encouraged me to go a little further with it. It felt good and he must have liked it, because he gave me the part.”
Guido was actually cast not as doomed Snakes, but as sleeve-gartered Johnny. Columbus swapped the actors’ roles because Ralph Foody, the other, craggier character actor cast in the sequence, had recently undergone knee-replacement surgery and was unable to keel over for the dramatic death scene. (Foody died in 1999.)
“That was perfectly fine with me since they were both fun roles,” said Guido. “But a few years later I realized that I was just about the only actor from the original film who was not invited to be in the sequel because my character was ‘dead.’ Oh well.”
As for his understanding of how
Angels with Filthy Souls would fit into the context of
Home Alone, Guido was more or less in the dark. “Chris simply mentioned that it was a film played by the kid to scare the bad guys, which at the time didn’t mean much to me.”
On the night of the shoot, with Guido and Foody steadily camping up their performances for the camera, the on-set atmosphere was jocular. “Think about what a unique sequence it was within the film,” said Muto. “No children, a very simple shot plan, the exaggerated style of acting, the crazy action. . . . Given the rest of the film, it was kind of a party!”
Macat agrees. “The vignette turned out to be the fun set piece in the film. The actors’ energy was contagious to the crew, who bonded with laughter. After that, we were ready to go shoot our film.”
"One. Two. Ten!!"
HOME ALONE © 1990 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved. © 2015 FOX.
The day
Home Alone opened, Guido was on 66th Street in New York, taping his recurring role on
All My Children. His wife met him after work, and together they went to a 5.30 P.M. screening. “Our reaction was something like, ‘Well, that was fun…’ ”
Within days, however, Guido was being recognized in public. “I was getting stopped on the streets by kids who yelled ‘Snakes!’ and then proceeded to do dialogue from the scene in front of me. It was wild. This went on for several years.”
Now 65, Guido has thrilled at the dozens of
Angels with Filthy Soulsscene recreations uploaded to YouTube from all over the world. “Even more recently, I met young agents and casting people who rhapsodize about how significant
Home Alone, and that scene in particular, is to their childhood. Even though I’m pretty much retired from the business, every year at this time I get to enjoy my 15 minutes of fame thanks to my little scene.”
There was one more specific element of
Angels with Filthy Souls that resonated back in 1990—and has, along with the rest of it, stood the test of time.
“I so admired the trench coat that Snakes wore that the costume designer gave me one,” Muto said. “I’ve still got it. It still looks and fits great.”
. They don't make movies like this anymore.
