11th - 12th April, 2006
revised 17th April, 20th April & 23rd May, 2006
The Main Films Considered:
Dr Mabuse, der Spieler, Fritz Lang, Germany, 1922
The Racketeer, Howard Higgin, 1929
The Public Enemy, William Wellman, 1931
Hell's House, Howard Higgin, 1932
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Fritz Lang, Germany, 1933
The Roaring Twenties, Raoul Walsh, 1938
Angels with Dirty Faces, Michael Curtiz, 1939
Brighton Rock, Boulting Brothers, UK, 1948
The Third Man, Carol Reed, UK, 1949
White Heat, Raoul Walsh, 1949
The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola, 1972
1: The Infernal Machinery of Angels
2: The Racket of Invisible Strings
6: Hard as Rock, Pink as Candy-Floss
1: The Infernal Machinery of Angels
"Honey, the kids are spending a lot of time in a criminal's bed-sit. I'm worried."
"So you'd rather they were hanging out with priests or something? Button it!"
Angels with Dirty Faces, Michael Curtiz, 1938, version with commentary by Dana Polan
The commentary goes at a great pace but it is mainly on one note: according to Dana Polan, this is essentially a film about the mass media and manipulation. The communications theme is developed in the legal and illegal uses of technology, notably the telephone to symbolise the growing corporate nature of organized crime. It is a theme which could have been developed further, though. What about the electric chair itself? Did it not arise from the competition between direct and alternating current?
The final scenes of the film retain their power to shock. When Cagney loses his nerve, faking or not, we see only his pathetic grasp at a radiator, his silhouette, the shadow of the infernal machine. The hand on the pipes is an especially moving shot: at one level, viewers may well be reminded of incidents in childhood when a stubborn tantrum has been countered by superior strength. By crying and resisting, Cagney is regressing to childhood and touching universal memories of infancy. The pipes are notably ornate and decorative, suggestive not only of an earlier more leisurely age but also of the way in which new technologies were once dressed in older skins. The workings of the electric chair are in contrast skeletal and frightening. The dipping of the lights as the surge of current is diverted through the condemned man's body became a cliché of the movies. Did it ever happen?
The elaborate radiators are also in evidence in White Heat - a small tight-looking one figures in the cell where Cagney is in a strait-jacket. Later we see them at the refinery where he will meet his doom. Maybe they are just a pleasing sculptural form and maybe Warners just hired the same set decorators drawing on a limited vocabulary or limited reserves or props. Yet White Heat profiles technology even more than Angels with Dirty Faces. It is true that all Hollywood liked the latest gadgets in contemporary-set films - eg the baby alarm in Father's Little Dividend so it was not the sole reserve of the hard-nosed picture. Still, there is a brutalist celebration of the man-made environment in Walsh's gangster world, from giant regimented prison to the emptier spaces of the refinery, there are suggestions that a scary new world is closing in on everyone, not just the criminal element. - paragraph added 22.4.2006
If the climax of this film is about losing face, then the minute Cagney loses his bravado, we lose his complete image. His fate is painted in a classic montage of powerful images and sounds.
For the Front Office, the involvement of the Dead End Kids was an excuse for light relief - they argued for longer, looser takes so that their comedy could have freer reign. For the Legion of Decency the young gang-members were perhaps representative of audience members. The Catholics were presented with the boys as potential angels whom the care of the Church might rescue from a life of crime. Yet I don't think this film was ever so innocent or simple as it pretends.
Without dwelling on the perverse sexuality which haunts the gangster genre, Polan's commentary mentions the way in which the female love interest is marginal to this tale It is ironic that some of Hollywood's most suggestive films were driven into perversity by blocking direct expressions of sexuality.
For a start, the Prologue establishes that the dfference between Good and Evil may be a simple question of who runs faster. It is the boy who escapes the penalty of the Law who becomes the priest. Rocky goes to the juvenile detention centre and the die is cast. Not much hope of redemption through secular means, then. By underlining the religious path, the film can paint a bleak view of the Law as belonging to the fallen world. In this picture, there are no police or detective heroes and the prison officers are viewed as being fully as nasty as the men they guard.
In the very opening scene - which reflects one at the start of the Public Enemy - the young actors portraying Cagney and O'Brien are seen on a fire-escape. The opposite sex are maybe out of reach - the girls seem clean and orderly, almost of a different class. Faced with inevitable rejection, Rocky scorns and mocks them. In the shape of Ann Sheridan, one will come back to haunt him and have her revenge. Yet the optimism of the book-carrying schoolgirl has given way to a weary knowledge of the world's ways. Meeting Rocky again brings out a brief upsurge of schoolgirl mischief but any part she hopes to play in his life is very quickly usurped by an invasion of boys and priest. Crime has grown up and got serious while Rocky's formative years were spent with boys. His nose pushed out of the grown-up trough, Rocky regresses to street-crime level and surrounds himself with an admiring harem of boys.
2: The Racket of Invisible Strings
The Racketeer is a very early talkie, produced by Pathé in 1929. It suffers from the static and expositional style of the time with the cameras' movement restricted by soundproofing. It is an odd melodrama in which a girl sacrifices herself for the sake of her boyfriend's musical career. She agrees to marry a gangster who can give the boy his big break. There may be shades of La Traviata here but both gangster and violinist are soft characters and it is hard to see why Carole Lombard is so keen on the epicene, self-centred Tony. The style of his performance reminds us that at this date the leading men in Hollywood were still under the thrall of Valentino. The Godfather is often stated to be an alternative Sinatra Story but, already in 1929, The Racketeer plot revolves around the rehabilitation and promotion of a musican by a mobster. By the end of the picture, the violinist has achieved his wish of playing at a major concert venue. On the same night, his sponsor pays the ultimate price as he tries to escape the police. As the temperamental artist has also cut his ties with his former girl-friend we could see the movie as a reminder that invisible strings have pulled the visible world into its current shape.
From the early days of the gangster and social concern movie we have Hell's House, from 1932, revived occasionally on the strength of Bette Davies' appearance in a supporting rôle. The strikingly homo-emotional tone of the central relationship stands out, over and above the reforming agenda which questioned the efficacy of delinquent homes. Pat O'Brien is here a bootlegger who sees the light and becomes a campaigner for reform. The star of the picture is the forgotten Junior Durkin, who could be seen as a sort of place-holder, keeping warm the seat of juvenile delinquency which Cagney would occupy. The names - and that of the stricken Shorty - played by Frank Coghlan Jr - establish the Irish ethnicity. Lacking Cagney's nervous energy and charisma, the central male romance appears exposed and sentimental. It could also be viewed as redemptive because it brings about an investigation into the system. Needless to say, a happy ending to the relationship itself is not permitted.
The story of Hell's House emerged during the first wave of social concern pictures which followed in the wake of the book, later film, "I was a fugitive from a (Georgia) chain gang". Though pre-code, this independently-produced picture has none of the brio of Public Enemy, though the influence of that picture can clearly be seen in the cartoon-style titles. The code was far-reaching and covered not just graphic acts of sex and violence but the way the Law and social institutions were depicted. In practice a certain amount of horse-trading went on: the wicked prison warder in Angels with Dirty Faces and the altogether critical view of social institutions in that picture seem to have crept past the censors whose eyes were distracted by the seeming religious wholesomeness of its message.
These days we might worry less if the kids were spending time with a criminal than hanging around with priests. We can see Cagney's behaviour towards the gang as being a form of grooming. They are already apprentice criminals and through him they become journeymen. At their first bite of real success they go wild and blow it on display. It is nice to know that Cagney put the horrid cartoon-voiced Leo Gorcey in his place early in filming, when he atempted to upstage the star by some unscripted asides. Not everyone stood up to the pugnacious Gorcey whose thin but assertive persona came to dominate the Kids on their ever-downward later career. It is notable that he is not Cagney's chosen favourite in Angels. It is not his pants the star penetrates with his hidden secrets.
O'Brien's potato-faced inertia serves as a foil to Cagney's trademark energy but there was room for ambiguities he cannot muster. Since spiritual certainties are inexpressible, he doesn't try. His explicit expression of love for Rocky is - in the context of his dull performance - reduced to being just a pious form of words.
Ann Sheridan begins well but she is abandoned by the script as well as by Rocky and the boys. She has no part at all in the final struggle for Cagney's soul. We can imagine that he is just the latest in a string of life's disappointments for her character.
The Fagin-like corrupters of youth were in the gangster cycle from early on. Maybe the Dickensian prototype was recalled in the name of Putty Nose who hosts a criminal den under the guise of a boys' club in The Public Enemy. In this later development, Cagney becomes the figure of corruption. In the earlier picture, Putty Nose plays the piano in the hope it will nostalgically revive their relationship. In the pleasure he takes in this execution, Cagney appears to be exorcising an old demon, punishing the old relationship itself as much as any later betrayal. The context of the murder of Putty-nose is significant: it is the night of Matt's wedding and the narcissistic Nails Nathan has the whole gang put on the style for a celebration at a night-club. As Cagney takes to the floor with his already-betrayed Kitty, the newly-wed couple watch. She wonders if they will ever follow them down the aisle but Matt confirms that Tommy is not the marrying kind. Cagney's dancefloor embrace is abruptly terminated: he has spotted Putty Nose at a table. Like a shadow, this character from the past interrupts his romantic interlude just as the news of the death of Nails Nathan will throw a spanner in the works when he belatedly has the go-ahead to make love to Gwen.
The mysogenistic gloat of the song is reflected in Tommy's behaviour: we have seen him attempt to trip up a girl, even as she tries out the skates he has stolen. Later he will famously crush the grapefruit in the face of Mae Marsh. When Putty Nose gets his come-uppance, it's suggested that the difficulties in relations with women date back to his influence. In fact, we have seen Tommy pull faces and act shy in the face of women before that, so we have the suggestion of a tendency which the perverter of youth has spotted and encouraged.
Well the t-word is left out but the innuendo seems to have survived the code and the reissue. The song, first played to the juveniles, is recapped by Putty Nose on the night of his killing. In place of the offending word, we get the report of the gun, as if one obscenity stands in for the other. Nearly all the violence of the Public Enemy is off-stage but it is only just off-stage. A horse is slaughtered in its own stable, a man is slaughtered at his own piano, a rival gang is mown down in their own headquarters. Finally, Tommy is returned home dead.
It is notable that the famous grapefruit-squashing scene comes in the wake of Kitty's nagging, wifely behaviour. But she has also intimated that he has found somebody else. At this point he hasn't met Gwen, so who can she mean? He has just come off the telephone in the friendliest of moods, laughing with Nails Nathan. So close is their relationship, that Tommy needs to kill the horse which is responsible for Nathan's death.
6: Hard as Rock, Pink as Candy-Floss
"It may be sticky but I never complain, it's nice to have a nibble at it now and again!"
Though only a few notices of his minor films will be found in his collected film criticism, Graham Greene was a great admirer of James Cagney, I think it is safe to assume that he knew the gangster pictures well. It would have been mainly the pre-code pictures which influenced his own English take on the gangster novel. The Catholicism of Pinky in Brighton Rock can seem in a Protestant country to be a somewhat contrived sign of alienation and spiritual destiny. Cagney's Irish ethnicity and the gang context of America translated somewhat awkwardly to Brighton. For Greene, as for T. S. Eliot, there was always a feeling that keeping one foot firmly in the religious camp was like a reserved seat in a gentleman's club, a tradition to be upheld to guard against greater more unwashed weirdness outside the gates.
So the rosary beads speech and religious earnestness of Pinky is a poor substitute for the social context in which the American gangster arose. It is difficult to understand quite how Pinky has become the leader of even a small-time gang, unless we piece together the back-story.
We enter the story of Brighton Rock in medias res, with the revenge for the betrayal of a man, Kite, we do not see. If the unstable fanatacism of the latter-day Cagney seems to qualify him for leadership because he offers obsessive certainties which inspire respect and fear, Pinky seems to gather those qualities or expose those failings as the story gathers pace. In the end, he will find himself out on a limb - literally out on the pier and betrayed by one of his own. As for why Pinky is undisputed leader at the start, it can surely only be because he was the annointed adopted son and heir of Kite, the only man he ever cared for.
If the Catholicism of Pinky seems like something stuck-on, giving his wretched behaviour an aura of special doom, which we can only liken to the Protestant notion of the Elect, the sexual non-conformity also is present in the early Gangster films, more or less codified to suit the times. If the name of the picture is explicitly explained as being about a nature stamped through with evil in every slice, the phallic significance of rock was a commonplace of the time - you have only to listen to the words of George Formby's song about Blackpool Rock: "It may be sticky but I never complain, it's nice to have a nibble at it now and again!" The song was recorded in January 1937 and was maybe a trifle risqué for the movies or the BBC. However, Formby was at the height of his fame around this time. I have no evidence that Greene knew it but he was well-informed about popular culture. Brighton Rock, the novel dates from 1938.
The association of the seaside with sexual licence was deep-rooted and Brighton's bijou architecture had marked it out as a resort of sexual adventurers for many years. In his aversion to beer and women, Pinky is an odd anti-hero but one of the striking images of The Public Enemy is of Cagney spitting out the beer at an illegal bar. Even when the keg of beer of placed an obstacle on the table at his brother's homecoming, Cagney is not seen swilling it. Yet in a few seconds at the start of the film, he is seen to sample the beer as a child and gain a moustache of foam. Immediately, the assumption of manhood is put to the test by his companion, who leads the way in sexual adventures. He suggests they try to kiss the girls but Cagney backs away in embarrassment. The switch of rôles may obscure the fact that the boy who plays Tommy in this juvenile Prologue is the boy who does not resemble Cagney! Later, in the Prohibitiion drama The Roaring Twenties, Cagney is drawn into bootlegging by accident. Ostentatiously innocent at heart, he drinks milk in the speakeasies. Maybe he is dubious about his own product. Notably, when his protogée decamps with his lawyer, Cagney hits the bottle and goes downhill fast. He has to be tracked down in a seedy bar an asked to make one last pathetic stand against the forces he cannot control.
In this context the drinking of milk is double-edged. Its wholesomeness seems to provide a degree of moral protection yet its innocence seems a temporary state and a vulnerable one in a world where real men drink alcohol. Pinky samples beer in Greene's novel and its sour taste revolts him so he is never weaned. The irony is that for these characters to drink milk represents their resistance to alcoholic conformity so it confers strength but it is a temporary food whose protection will give way to a world of harder knocks and harder drink.
Early in The Public Enemy, Tommy gets a good hiding from his cop-father. As he winces under the blows, it is ambiguous whether we are to take this "tough love" as an example of the stern moral guidance he later lacks or as a perverse stimulation which he desires to re-enact by bringing punishment on himself. He certainly comes under the sway of a series of bad parent-figures throughout the film. Each strips him of something. When is about to receive his beating, it seems to be routine for he cockily asks of his father, "How do you want them this time, up or down?"
His failure in the furs store is a comedic moment. He opens fire on the suddenly revealed figure of a stuffed bear. Yet it could also be read as a sign of how young he still is and how easily scared by something we are taught to cuddle. Shooting too soon could also be a metaphore for sexual dysfunction.
He is confined to the house by Paddy. The childlike trust with which the gang give up their arms and money does stretch credibility so this scene seems more symbolic than realistic. We are led to expect that Paddy might be sacrificing his former associates in some arcane act of accommodation with competing gangs. In fact, the safe house seems curiously in the thick of things and they have been traced without Paddy changing sides. Later, he will offer to remove himself from the city as ransom for Tommy. This makes him an inadequate parent more than an evil one by the criminal's own scale of values.
The voluntary house-arrest brings Tommy under the influence of the bad mother. He pushes her away on the grounds she is Paddy's girl but she persists in the seduction, asking if he thinks she is too old. His powers have been ritually stripped from him - guns, money, now his power to resist seduction has been taken away by strong drink. He is effectively raped. In disgust at this act, he leaves the house. In the ambush, he loses his friend.
The girls who go with gangsters in the American pictures usually know what to expect. the good girls leave and the molls move in. Cagney has three women in The Public Enemy - Mae Clarke, Jean Harlow and Mia Marvin. The last is left as a kind of mother-figure to tend to the boys' needs, while the trusted Paddy effectively emasculates them of guns and money. She is a bad mother and she seduces Tommy, to his disgust, while he is drunk. While hardly explicit by modern standards, this is a disconcerting sequence. At the breakfast table next day, she cannot help boasting of her conquest. This matches the earlier breakfast scene and contrasts with it. If Mae Clarke is rewarded with violence for her breakfast-time allusions to his impotence, Mia Marvin who has molested him as he is rendered helpless by drink seems to get off lightly. His response is to flee.
His horizons have closed in completely. By the time he arrives, armed to the teeth to exact revenge on gang, his mind is set on pay-back not mastery or even self-preservation. As he shows us his teeth, we see a cornered rat.
When he staggers out injured, it looks as if he will die in the gutter like Edward G. Robinson's Rocco in Little Caesar. Only now the film lurches into grand guignol territory. First he is swaddled in bandages and it looks as if he is shaping up to be returned to the bosom of his enveloping family or the hands of God. A moment of hope is dangled when he seems to rally. Then he is abducted from the hospital - a scene merely reported here but it will be greatly expanded and made explicit in The Godfather. Finally he is returned to his family as a mummy. His freedom of movement completely restricted, it symbolises his final total impotence - the bandages a reminder of the swaddling clothes of infancy. The return to the family is the final insult, representing his rejection by the real powers of this world.
We might expect the violent mobster to be represented as suffering from an excess of testosterone but these early gangster pictures see their sociopathic tendencies as indicating sexual dysfunction. Absent fathers and indulgent mothers feature in The Public Enemy. Angels with Dirty Faces leaves out the family completely and shows the hoodlum in relation to institutions: the law, the press, the church.
"They shoot horses don't they?" was the title of Sydney Pollack's 1969 film about the thirties dance marathons. However I want to look at horses killed and mistreated in other movies.
The most obvious place to start might be with Equus or The Godfather. The famous horse-head in the bed routine has entered popular mythology so totally. This mafia insult was meant to have symbolic power: we can get to you and the things you love. Placing it in the bed seems to suggest that the owner's sexuality was embodied in the horse. The Freudian horse-blinding in Equus is discussed at length in the picture itself. So let's move on.
Gangster's taking their revenge on dumb animals wasn't an invention of Mario Puzo nor of Coppola. Tom Powers, incensed by the death of his boss Nails Nathan, slaughters the horse which killed him. Yet he pays for it first in an act of scrupulous, regal pride. The horror of the act is strangely enhanced by the outward control of the character. This is the act of a deranged and haughty prince. The power of life and death has gone to his head and he becomes a street Caligula. He is finely dressed and gives no outward display of grief. The act itself is kept off camera, but we hear the cry of the horse or the reaction of its stable-mates in a pre-echo of the scene where Powers will enter the gathering of a rival gang and slaughter them.
Two Hitchcock films feature the deaths of horses - Marnie and Under Capricorn. In the one, the death of a favourite horse which has symbolised Marnie's self sufficiency and sexual infantilism seems to presage her own taming and saddling by a man. In Under Capricorn, the shooting of the horse may symbolise the end of the dream of rescue. It is a wounded prince who comes to rescue the sleeping beauty in this strange tale. There is no doubt that the early elopement of her Ladyship with a groom is a horseback flight that embodies young lust. The rescuer is painted from the start as a foppish type who does not ride. It is his inexpert horsemanship which brings about the horse's injury and the shooting of the animal leads to his own symbolic castration.
In Monte Hellman's existential cult Western The Shooting, a mysterious woman shoots her own horse for no very obvious reason.
In America, the British film was retitled Young Scarface, reminding us that for the latter half of the film, Pinky wears a large facial scar. The film therefore scorns the fantasy violence world where people get hurt and immediately bouce back. The scar of Brighton Rock is still potentially a badge of courage. It would take another quarter of a century before Polanski would have Jack Nicholson so badly damaged in the nose department that he is compelled to play most of the picture with an unsightly gauze pad over it. Unmistakably laying claim to be the author of this classic blot, he cast himself as the dwarfish mobster who inflicts the wound.
The racetrack setting of Public Enemy is recapped in the gang-fight sequence in Brighton Rock. No horses are injured here.
It is notable that Greene plays up and exaggerates the gentleman-dandy aspects of the new wave of corporate criminal in the Italian figure of Coleone? Ensconced at the poshest hotel, he enjoys a sybaritic life, remote from the dirty work of his minions. He is amused by the unwashed Pinky and there are strong hints that the perfumed and powdered Italian is queer.
The Italian criminal mastermind is another import clearly. He represents a refinement of the American models. His holding court behind the tea-dances at the Grand Hotel seems a more extreme class distance than we find in those movies where Bogart is running his operations from a posh nightclub or financial front. Nails Nathan is shown as a narcissist but we also see him in street-fighter mode, directing his men and sharply cutting through the polite circumlocutions of the genteel crook Leehman.
Angels with Dirty Faces dates from the same year as Brighton Rock and there are remarkable similarities. The Catholic religion is strongly and explicitly profiled in both. In both a girl is courted and rejected. In both, a young criminal finds his own operations curbed by rising more organized forces than by the Law. Both films treat the police as having at best a marginal effect on the gangs. A crooked lawyer is at the centre of both pictures. The difference in portrayal is striking - the English solicitor is seen as tippling, old, cunning yet feeble and cowardly. The American lawyer is a much younger man on the way up. The press is seen as essentially an amoral entertainment in the English picture. The enjoyment of a good murder or the game of hunting down Colley Cibber is all the same to the readers, though the one might lead to the other for the unfortunate Fred.
Yet Greene does largely succeed in making these transplanted features grow and blossom in the alien climes of his imagined Brighton. The unusual intensity of Attenborough's performance is largely responsible for that success: his pale and sinister stillness could not be further removed from Cagney's balletic intensity.
Greene introduces a figure new to the genre and not much emulated since. The boozy sentimental concert-party singer is the incarnation of everything Pinky despises - and Greene does too. Her obsessive persuit of the mystery of Fred's death represents a desire to reassert a normality which Pinky rejects. For the figure of the gangster has taken on a Dostoyevskian weight in his translation from America. It is a very literary construct, far removed from the chaotic unreasoning world of the real criminal.
Brighton Rock is a diabolical work. The parody of family, of marriage, of the law, of the persuit of crime is complete. In the softened ending, if it is Divine Grace which prevents the revelation of Pinky's poisonous message, it represents a triumph of ignorance over knowledge and suggests that life may continue its ordinary course best if things are not too closely looked into. The sticking groove on the record-player prevents the playing-out of the detective formula, the finding-out. It was a finding-out which the Powers family were about to face at the end of Public Enemy, where the bullet-riddled mummy falls to the floor as the needle reaches the eccentric run-out groove on the disc. "I'm forever blowing bubbles" may have been an appropriate epitaph for the drowned Pinky.
The actual business of the gangsters plays a much smaller part in the British picture than in the American cycle. It is the rivalries within the underworld which drive the picture. The violence of Brighton Rock has a compact inevitability not unlike Macbeth. Yet Pinky is fighting for survival rather than mastery. His gang are shaken and weakened. The murder of Fred leads by slightly strained reasoning to the need to marry Rose.
If Pinky is disgusted by women, Dallow, played by William Hartnell is not. If the leader of this round table is neglectful of his marital duties, then a shabby Lancelot may arise to fulfil his duties. In the end it is his affection for Rose which prompts Hartnell's uncharacteristic betrayal of his criminal code.
Cagney was a small guy. The films don't ridicule his height but they don't go out of their way to disguise it. True he was not as dwarfish as Mickey Rooney or Alan Ladd but there was an air of arrested physical development in the size of the head relative to the shoulders and indeed in the snub-nosed features themselves. As he aged, the round-face wizened on the branch, as it were without falling. There was a kinship with midgets. His watchful and explosive energy made him something to be reckoned with but the otherness remains. When cornered, betrayed or thwarted his retribution will be grandiose and florid. Those who enter into his world are not signing a Faustian pact. His bargains are those of the handshake not of the contract and the terms will be entirely his own. In the disregard for his own safety, Cagney multiplied his danger to others. There was something supernatural in his retributions. Even the ending of Angels with Dirty Faces is curiously double-edged. By granting one last wish before his execution, Cagney ironically demonstrates his power over his own myth. He makes sure he disintegrates before they can execute him. Yet it is something he cannot agree to do in the cell when the request is made. He sets off to his death, composed and ready. When it comes, the collapse has to be his own gratuitous gift.
The narcissist gangster in The Public Enemy gives way to the corporate corrupt business mob in Angels. In the latter film, material success is something Cagney has learned not to flaunt. He does not make it out of his sordid bedsit. In this film, the exhibitionist temptations are represented by the Kids, who splurge their profits on flashy clothes. These disappear with bewildering speed, for they are back in their previous rags for the finale. This was clearly fairy-gold!
The narcissist gangster returns to haunt the English scene. A luxurious Italian import, the mobster Coleone resides in the sybaritic luxury of the Grand Hotel. Still, he cuts a somewhat remote figure there. It takes Billy Wilder to imagine the convention of old-world gangsters at a Florida hotel, under the guise of a mutual-aid outfit. Fleeing from these prohibition nightmares will land our heroes in deeper sexual confusions.
Growing up in the nineteen sixties, my introduction to the delights of prohibition dramas was the Untouchables, starring Robert Stack as Elliot Ness. By the standards of the time, the shows were ultra-violent, though every episode was introduced by a portentously moral voice-over, which almost seemed to suggest that prohibition was a good thing, if it gave rise to such incorruptible specimens of American law-enforcement as Ness. These were not shown after the watershed - there wasn't one. It was also possible to catch older gangster pictures as matinees. I know for a fact that I saw Angels with Dirty Faces and White Heat. There must have been many more. White Heat still carries a 15 certificate, though I remember finding the electric-chair finale of Angels more psychologically disturbing. I would have been around ten years old, maybe less and the films were admired by my father, who had seen them first in the cinema.
The Third Man is also about organized crime and features a narcissictic racketeer. Pure Buggery, was Selznick's take on the plot. There are blasphemous Christian echoes in Lime's resurrection and it is Holly who plays Judas. Greene's take on this white-collar syndicate of criminals is the time-honoured one of casting aspersions on their sexuality. The epicene figures who gather in the Café Mozart have a weary sense of fatalism, their capacity for violence is sheathed in feline mode. In place of the rising trajectory of the American gangster we have a scenario which is concerned with descent and fall. If Harry rises from the grave, it is only to be returned to the sewer. Deaths and threats of death are conceived as falls, whether of a nosy caretaker or the inquisitive pulp novelist. The setting of the old city seems to keep its criminals underground. The foreign occupation established from the start, restricts the Viennese' own movements. The foreign cuckoos are in charge of this old Viennese clock and the old Viennese movement is restricted. These racketeers must express disgust for the work of playing violin - a nostalgia for some ancient rank.
If the American wave of gangster pictures came in soon after sound, it had been preceded by some elaborate silent predecessors in Europe. If the gangsters rose on prohibition in the States, it was the economic crisis of the Weimar Republic which gave birth to Doctor Mabuse. Mesmerist and Demon as much as Criminal, Mabuse sits at the centre of a vast corrupt web, yet his ability to blackmail the world depends on a world already mired and tired. He is the nightmare of every conspiracy theory and suggestively close to being the Universal Jew. Fritz Lang's massive Dr. Mabuse the Gambler is a two part film which plays for some four and a half hours. Thanks to the Murnau Institute, we can see it in a fully restored version made from the camera negatives so it is in far better shape than the later Metropolis. This figure of evil will be brought back in later pictures, such as The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, like a horror which cannot be destroyed. There is something of the supernatural about him - he has come up from Hell, not Hell's Kitchen and his infernal rule is that of a Prince. His court is riddled with corruption in the shape of cocaine addicts and perverts but his own delight is in the control of men.
By revealing the hidden order behind the world's ills, Lang's films limit their own capacity for shock. If Mabuse is mad from the start, we cannot enjoy the growing escalation of derangement shown by Cagney within films and across them. Nor was there any chink of light in the character of Mabuse, suggesting that he could have been different and allowing for the kind of shocking identification with evil which Cagney oddly permitted his audience to feel. Nobody wants to be the mad professor in the movies.
Monday, 17th April, 2006: The Racketeer, 1929 & Hell's House, 1932
Two minor entries in the gangster genre. The Racketeer is a very curious film for two main reasons. Firstly, it has only one or two action scenes and those are staged in a slow and stately way. The way a rival gangster is executed by a gun concealed inside a box of wedding orchids suggests an imagination more poetic than visual. The damaged flowers are presented to the bride, who rescues what she can of them in a surreal moment. If the film defies our expectations of the gangster genre that may be because they had not yet been fully formulated. Even the standard rules of realism were being wrestled with. The film is not adventurous technically. The camera is allowed to move a little but in general these are static talkie scenes. Yet we must assume that even pre-code there was some understanding of basic morality. The Racketeer does not appear to set out to outrage sensibilities but it sleepwalks in an amoral haze. Both the Law, in the shape of bent copper and High Society, in the shape of a charity gambling hell are seen to be corrupted by the successful criminal Wayland Keane.
Rhoda is welcomed back into high society, though her adventurous past is referred to. Her cheating at cards is detected by the hostess but Keane covers up for her and enters her life. He recognizes the fifty dollar bill he gave to a drunken street violinist. This turns out to be her boyfriend, a hopeless depressive and alcoholic. Keane uses his Long Island mansion to woo Rhoda and rehabilitate Tony. Though there are signs that his criminal empire is disintegrating, he organizes a concert for the violinist. Now he is no longer dependent on Rhoda, Tony terminates their relationship. On the rebound, she agrees to marry the patient Keane. The night of the concert is to be the night of the wedding and their escape to a new life on Keane's boat. In an abrupt change of heart, Tony now passionately declares his love for Rhoda and the Law descends on Keane, who is killed as they try to arrest him.
There are hints of perversity in the scenario. The gambling hell seems to have been imported from the films of Pabst or indeed Lang. The women seem to be in charge in this world and there are hints of sapphism in their relations. At the start of the film, Keane himself appears to enjoy a very close intimacy with his assistant Gus, who is instructed to follow him upstairs for a rub-down. Later, Gus appears to be watching the developing relationship of Keane and Rhoda with some anxiety.
Throughout the film, in his relationship with Rhoda, Keane is the perfect gent, never pressing his case until she indicates she can accept his proposal of marriage. Tony, withdrawn and selfish, acts as the temperamental narcissitic-artist throughout. Yet there no suggestion that in becoming the dependents of this criminal, the pair are living off immoral earnings. There is a disconcerting lack of any moral compass in the film. Events in Keane's criminal career and the emotional life of Rhoda seem to have no connection but merely to coincide.
There is a strong feeling that this film has been drawing on the continental crime dramas of Pabst and Lang. The criminal whose web entraps high and low alike may be derived from Lang's Mabuse, though Keane is less obviously wicked. We see that he will have rivals executed and he clearly enjoys the psychological games-playing with his operatives. His narcissism is demonstrated by the care with which he selects a buttonhole from a floral display and by his cool appraisal of a rival's dress sense, accusing him of imitating his own taste.
Yet we are, I think, to see Keane's love for Rhoda as genuine and maybe redemptive. He is not allowed to escape, however. Yet his botched arrest and shooting seem to be arranged at the concert for aesthetic rather than genuinely dramatic reasons. This is a slow and dream-like drama that cannot help but seem quaint today. A youthful Carole Lombard cuts a striking and bold figure as Rhoda while XXX as Tony cannot do anything with such an unsympathetic part.
The sound-track is as rough as one might expect from this period. There is little music and the actors are encouraged to speak the script slowly and clearly, adding to the sense of dislocation from any recognizable world. The courtyard with its fountain may bring memories of the pleasure-garden from Metropolis.
Hell's House is remarkable for two scenes, one of them a frankly homo-emotional scene between two borstal boys, the other a scene near the end in which career criminal Pat O'Brien is persuaded to confess and rescue the naïve youth who has served time by refusing to divulge O'Brien's identity. There are three elements here which accidentally or not will come to a later fruition in Angels with Dirty Faces. First, Pat O'Brien will metamorphose into the spud-faced priest begging Cagney for a final favour. Secondly the vulnerable pathos of Junior Durkin will be completely overwritten by Cagney's more nervous, energetic and threatening take on street-urchinhood. The critique of the delinquent home as an institution will continue into the later film and some of the suggestions of sexual inversion.
This independently-produced social concern picture came after The Public Enemy, though it seems to belong to a more innocent age. The opening scene with its playful spanking and joyful interaction of mother and simple son offers a brief pastoral idyll with suggestions that the countryside may have let the boy develop at his own pace. The hit and run accident is shocking and strangely precient: Durkin himself was doomed: he died in an automobile accident at the age of twenty, when there were moves afoot to feature him in adult rôles.
His playing in Hell's House as a vulnerable innocent, fresh from the farm, may seem over mawkish. This gangling youth seems trusting and stupid to a degree which strains the patience of the camera. However, this naturalism seems quite fresh put alongside the hard-bitten kid who expresses his toughness by a permanent artificial scowl. The romance of Juniors Durkin and Coughlan is conveyed with unique simplicity and surprising frankness and a complete absence of apology. Coughlin is not allowed to survive but the way his death is reported over the telephone carries a dramatic punch as the audience is more fully aware of their relationship than anyone else in the picture.
There is one immensely impressive shot in the movie and it is entirely silent as the camera moves along the rows of boys literally toeing the line as a punishment, their eyes are fixed, as instructed on a line drawn on the wall for hours on end.
20th April 2006, 3:52 am
"What's wrong with you? You playing for the other team or something?"
"We can straighten him out."
"I don't know."
There are texts from this period - notably Steinbeck's Of Mice & Men - which cause young readers to ask are those guys gay? My standard answer is to wonder how it might affect the meaning of the book if they were. Probably it doesn't. I doubt very much if Steinbeck intended his characters to be sexually involved with each other. The whole book seems to preclude anything so banal. Such sex as there is seems fuzzy and uncertain, as it might seem from a child's perspective. Sometimes we think there might be a symbolism in the behaviour of the characters but we are allowed to think it might be innocent.
With the 1938 picture Angels with Dirty Faces, we might feel guilty about being viewers with dirty minds, but repeated viewing suggests that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the sexuality of the characters is central to the piece. Are we to see them as indulging in sexual acts? Probably not but there is an awareness of that potential throughout the film.
Made at the height of the infuence of the Hays Code and the Legion of Decency, the script was subject to much horse-trading. By emphasising the religious dimension many of the earthly implications of the script seem to have been missed. The heavenly choir, lighting and upward movement of the characters at the conclusion all serve to cloak the lie of the priest. He feels that the greater good is served by pretending that Rocky died a coward. This is notably an about-face from his earlier rejection of ill-gotten gains to materially affect the lives of those same kids.
cf the lie at the end of Under Capricorn.
An event on the top deck of a bus seemingly gave one boy his vocation.
Milk note: the iconic use of a glass of milk in the posters of A Clockwork Orange. With the white boiler-suits of the thugs it serves the notion of their violence as something undertaken in a sober and planned manner.
©James Beswick Whitehead, 2006