The Devil is a Sissy (1936)

Freddy Bartholomew plays an English boy, Claude, who is staying with his American Father in New York -- his parents have separated. Claude goes to the ordinary local public school, and his naivety and innocence do him no favours with the hard-bitten local boys. Nonetheless Claude's determination to make friends of them wins through, and he is made a member of a gang. Unfortunately the gang is trying to make some money stealing cars, and Claude doesn't object to helping with this, although their efforts quickly fail and they turn to other devices. The whole plot doesn't really stack up, and Claude's forthright innocence doesn't really ring true.

Late in the film, the three are trying to hitch a lift back to town, and they get picked up by three gangsters on the run from the police. One of them has dressed as a woman -- not very convincingly -- as a ruse to get through police roadblocks, and they think the three boys, put forward as their own children, will be a good cover. It's all very indistinct, in the back of a car at night, and then briefly in a cafe.

The sissy reference is to a moral explanation: it's tough to be a good angel and do the right thing, and the devil was a weak, sissy angel, who was not strong enough to make good.

HF September 2008

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