Is the gangster flick Angels With Filthy Souls from Home Alone a real movie? Chris Columbus’ 1990 box office smash Home Alone is classic Christmastime viewing. It was the film that propelled a then ten-year-old Macaulay Culkin to fame as Kevin McCallister – a young boy left to defend his home from a burglarizing duo calling themselves the Wet Bandits after his parents accidentally leave him behind when they head off on vacation with his siblings to celebrate Christmas in Paris.
One of Home Alone's most quotable lines – “Keep the change, ya filthy animal” – doesn't come from the film itself, but the gangster movie Angels With Filthy Souls Kevin watches while binge-eating ice cream when he realizes his parents aren’t around to stop him viewing non-PG content. Later, Kevin uses dialogue from the movie to terrify a poor pizza delivery guy and to dupe the Wet Bandits - Harry and Marv, played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern - into thinking a quick-tempered, trigger-happy gangster lives in his house.
The gritty, film-noir tone of Angels With Filthy Souls had a lot of people convinced it was a bona fide gangster movie. The fact that in Home Alone 2: Lost In New York, Kevin watches its sequel Angels With Even Filthier Souls certainly suggested so too. But, believe it or not, Angels With Filthy Souls is a fictitious film-within-a-film shot specifically for Home Alone, whose title is a nod the real-life 1938 gangster flick Angels With Dirty Faces starring James Cagney.
Angels With Filthy Souls was filmed before principal photography began and – like much of Home Alone – was shot on a sound stage in an abandoned high school. The "movie" stars late character actor Ralph Foody, who starred alongside Chuck Norris in 1985's Code Of Silence, as tommy gun-toting gangster Johnny and Michael Guido (All My Children) as his ill-fated associate Snakes. The Home Alone crew took pains to make Angels With Filthy Souls look as authentic as possible, shooting the sequence in black and white and using realistic props like Johnny’s Colt 1921AC Thompson submachine gun to suggest an old-timey gangster epic.
Films fans feeling duped by Angels With Filthy Souls shouldn’t feel too bad. Actor Seth Rogen confessed in a tweet a year or so ago that he too was convinced it was a real movie, which prompted MCU star Chris Evans to admit the same. Even Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin admitted he thought was a real film. Now we all know Angels With Filthy Souls is a fake gangster movie, the big question is – will Disney’s forthcoming Home Alone reboot refer to it? Angels With The Filthiest Souls, perhaps?