Thugs with Dirty Mugs


Thugs with Dirty Mugs is a 1939 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon directed by Tex Avery. The short was released on May 6, 1939.

Title

The title is derived from the Warner Bros.' 1938 acclaimed feature film, Angels with Dirty Faces. It is similar to Avery's later MGM crime/detective-oriented cartoon Who Killed Who?.

Plot

The film takes place in the fictional New York town of Everyville, which is home to a vast total of 112 banks.
The title card and technical credits are followed by introductions of the two lead characters: "F.H.A. Homes" as police chief "Flat-Foot Flanigan with a Floy Floy," and "Edward G. Robemsome" as notorious gang leader "Killer Diller." After these introductions, Killer and his gang are seen robbing every bank in the town in numerical order — with the newspaper Telegraph Post reporting the criminals' every move, and even declaring that they have robbed 87 banks in a single day. Despite the criminals' predictability and their endless sight gags, the police are unable to arrest them. However, after so much bafflement, Flanigan himself gets help from an unlikely source: a man in the front of the theatre who had been sitting through the whole picture; he tells him that Killer is making plans to go to the estate of Mrs. Lotta Jewels at 10:00 in the evening. While Killer and his gang are spending time in said estate, listening to "The Lone Stranger" on radio, Flanigan and his men find the criminals and fire at them. Thus, Killer is captured, convicted, and given a long sentence — which is revealed to be a prison term in which he must write standards on a blackboard one thousand times, much like schoolkids of that era. The imprisoned Killer blows a raspberry as the cartoon irises out.

DVD release