Gang Way

"Gangster Squad" (2013) dramatizes (as opposed to historically depicts) the efforts of an elite, real-life unit of the Los Angeles Police Department to squelch Brooklyn-born gangster Mickey Cohen’s plans to establish a mob stronghold in post-World War II Southern California. Certainly not a movie genre exclusive to the U.S., the gangster film holds a timeless appeal unique to American audiences. Every generation gets its serving of gangland flicks.

"The Black Hand," an 11-minute silent picture from 1906, is considered the earliest gangster movie, depicting the Mob’s demand for protection money from a New York City butcher, based on an actual Mafia kidnapping case.

Authentic wintry New York City locations enhanced "The Black Hand."

The Mafia (an epithet rarely, if ever, used by its members, who preferred instead "Cosa Nostra," meaning "our thing") started making its presence known in New York City’s Lower East Side, as well as other areas along the East Coast, during the late 19th century in the wake of waves of immigrants from Italy, particularly from Sicily.

The Irish Mob is, in fact, one of the oldest organized crime syndicates in the U.S., originating in the early 1800s in Irish-American street gangs, as recorded in Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book The Gangs of New York, which inspired director Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film "Gangs of New York."

John C. Reilly, Liam Neeson, and Brendan Gleeson represent the Dead  Rabbits
gang of Irish immigrants in "Gangs of New York." 

The Jewish Mob (nicknamed, perhaps derisively, "Kosher Nostra"), with origins rooted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was fancifully dramatized in filmmaker Sergio Leone’s final epic, "Once Upon a Time in America" (1984).

Larry Rapp ("Fat" Moe), the late James Hayden ("Patsy"), James Woods (Max),
Robert DeNiro ("Noodles"), and William Forsythe ("Cockeye") toast the end
of Prohibition in "Once Upon a Time in America."

Regardless of ethnic origins, organized crime groups cashed in on a major boon as a result of Prohibition. Prior to the passage of the Volstead Act, or the National Prohibition Act, in 1919, gangsters concentrated their business activities on gambling, prostitution, bribery, kidnapping. Prohibition led the way to bootlegging, and a profitable black market for booze flourished. At the same time, Prohibition transformed major metropolises into bloody battlegrounds for rival bootleggers.

A decade into Prohibition, the Hollywood gangster movie emerged as a formidable genre, ostensibly inspired by the economical and social frustrations initiated by the Great Depression of 1929, when the apparent depravation of honest work and the instability of financial security resulted in a society disenchanted with the American way of life.

In just one year, from 1931 to 1932, Hollywood cranked out three landmark gangster films, namely "Little Caesar," "The Public Enemy," and "Scarface," each individually regarded as an enduring classic and each responsible for launching the respective leading actors into superstardom.

Darryl F. Zanuck was a 28-year-old production head at Warner Bros. when an old friend and mentor was killed in a bootlegging dispute, prompting Zanuck’s desire to make a crime motion picture. In 1929, Chicago newspaper reporter W. R. Burnett witnessed the gruesome site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, when seven members of George "Bugs" Moran’s North Side Irish gang were executed in a garage by operatives of the South Side Italian gang, inspiring the newsman to write the novel Little Caesar, the screen rights for which Zanuck paid $15,000.

Certainly not the first gangster movie, 1931’s "Little Caesar" definitely ushered in the phenomenally successful gangster movie cycle of the 1930s and made Edward G. Robinson, one of the unlikeliest of movie stars in appearance, an inimitable icon of the genre with his portrait of ill-fated mobster Rico Bandello, obviously based on Al Capone (the acknowledged architect of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre). At the age of 37, Robinson was not new to cinema, having been in films since 1923, although he was relatively unnoticed. The sensitive actor, who, as a youth, entertained the notion of becoming a rabbi and, in his later years, became renowned for his passion for collecting fine art, found it difficult to assume the role of an amoral killer. For example, he blinked wildly whenever he was required to fire a gun. The director, Mervyn LeRoy, solved the problem by taping Robinson’s upper eyelids open, which only emphasized Rico’s inhuman demeanor.

Rico (Edward G. Robinson) survives an attempt on his life.
(Note the pinky ring, which would be popularized nearly 60 years later
in Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas.")

A small-time Chicago producer named Rufus LeMaire sought out Darryl Zanuck with an unpublished novel, supposedly written by two former druggists, titled Beer and Blood. The manuscript was adapted into a screenplay for "The Public Enemy." According to one of the scriptwriters, John Bright, "Our character was a swashbuckling, hard-fisted guy, a hoodlum who had come up from the Irish ghetto to the top." (John Bright had previously met Al Capone and later found himself present at a banquet in Chicago’s Commonwealth Hotel where he witnessed Capone ordering two of his former cronies to have their skulls crushed by a baseball bat - an unsettling spectacle dramatized in director Roger Corman’s "The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre," featuring Jason Robards as Al Capone, and Brian DePalma’s "The Untouchables," with Robert DeNiro as Capone.)

"The Public Enemy" (1931) made a star out of its leading man, James Cagney, who had previously appeared in a handful of films but was regarded, more or less, as nothing more than an engaging supporting player. With his cocky, pugnacious performance as the sociopathic, seemingly invincible Tommy Powers, a character purportedly based on colorful Chicago gangster Charles Dion "Deanie" O’Banion, an arch rival of Capone’s, Cagney, small in stature (as most of the great screen gangsters were in the 1930s), proved that you didn’t have to be big to be tough.

Ultimately released in 1932, after a year-long delay, "Scarface," like "Little Caesar," was based on the notorious career of Al Capone. Mark A. Vieira, author of the 1999 book Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood, noted that maverick producer Howard Hughes "hired director Howard Hawks, who with Ben Hecht, wrote a script that turned the Capone family into the Borgias of Hollywood, incest and all." A remarkably nihilistic and violent depiction, in its time, of the American dream turned nightmare, "Scarface" reached out to an audience disillusioned with an economy at its nadir and Prohibition regarded as a failed social experiment.

The  Tommy gun makes its motion picture debut in the hands of "Scarface" star Paul Muni.

After repeated demands for moralistic script rewrites (among the contributors to the screenplay was W. R. Burnett, author of Little Caesar), Hughes ordered Hawks to shoot the movie as scripted: "Make it as realistic and grisly as possible." (The film depicted 28 deaths and featured the first onscreen use of a machine gun by a gangster.) Star Paul Muni became, according to The Great Movie Stars author David Shipman, "the ‘30s idea of a Great Actor; he never looked the same twice." Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney were undoubtedly more popular on the screen, but the prestigious Muni had "Class," later manifested in such roles as the famed French chemist in "The Story of Louis Pasteur," Mexican president Benito Juarez in "Juarez," and a Chinese peasant in "The Good Earth." Muni, nominated six times for an Academy Award (winning once, for "The Story of Louis Pasteur"), appeared in only 25 films during his career.

George Raft (right) pals around with Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel.

Boris Karloff played a role based on "Bugs" Moran in a cast that included George Raft (who was a friend of a number of crime figures, including Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel and Meyer Lansky) in his breakthrough role as a nickel-flipping mobster. Al Capone enjoyed repeated viewings of "Scarface," eventually possessing his own print. According to director Hawks, Capone even hosted a party for the filmmaker in Chicago. As for the popularity of the genre as a whole, Capone commented, "Well, these gang pictures are making a lot of kids want to be tough guys, and they don’t serve any useful purpose."

"Scarface" fan Al Capone

"The Public Enemy" was introduced with an onscreen message denying any wish "to glorify the hoodlum or criminal," although it goes on to do precisely that, and posters for "Scarface" were slapped with the subtitle, "The Shame of a Nation." Although the violent criminals in "Little Caesar," "The Public Enemy," and "Scarface" each came to a bullet-riddled end, audiences nevertheless identified with the charismatic antiheroes.

"For all the lip-service paid to ‘social conscience’ and pious talk about…informing the public," author George MacDonald Fraser wrote in 1988’s The Hollywood History of the World, "the plain truth is that the gangster movie pandered shamelessly to the worst side of human nature…There is no need to…theorize that the audiences of the Depression took to it all the more readily because it expressed their subconscious desire to be revenged on society; brute force fascinates." Fraser also noted, "Whether gangster pictures encouraged crime or not is a fruitless debate; there is no doubt that they glamorized it ."

Two things happened in the early 1930s which forever altered the gangster picture. Prohibition was repealed in 1933, essentially robbing organized crime’s livelihood from bootlegging. Secondly, and more importantly, in 1934, Hollywood studios started enforcing the Motion Picture Production Code, a set of moral censorship guidelines that governed the making of most U.S. movies released by the major studios.

Suddenly, yesterday’s bootleggers and gangsters, including James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, became police officers and G-men, compensating for the insignificance given law enforcement in earlier films. It was also during this period of moral reformation that Humphrey Bogart - after playing second banana to Cagney and Robinson in several films - came into his own as the screen’s iconic gangster, in such tough guy roles as Duke Mantee (billed as "The Most Terrifying Character Since the Cagney of ‘Public Enemy’") in "The Petrified Forest" (1937), Baby Face Martin in "Dead End" (1937), and Roy Earle in "High Sierra" (1941).

Humphrey Bogart, as a fugitive gangster, terrorizes a roadside diner in "The Petrified Forest"

The Production Code would hobble filmmakers for 35 years, until it was abandoned in 1968 and replaced by the Motion Picture Association of America’s movie-rating system (G, R, etc.). Actually, by 1966, MPAA president Jack Valenti had already deemed the Code outmoded, and films with adult content were rated "Recommended for Mature Audiences," as was the case with 1967’s "The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre," directed by Roger Corman.

A living legend in filmdom, Corman, in his enduring career as an independent producer and director, helped launch the acting careers of Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, Dennis Hopper, and William Shatner, while nurturing and mentoring once fledgling directors Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, and, among others, John Sayles.

"The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre" was a first for the rogue moviemaker, who was handed a million dollar budget by a major studio (Corman completed the film ahead of schedule and $200,000 under budget). "The aim of this film," Corman recalled, "was to provide an extremely accurate, semi-documentary account of the Chicago gang wars leading up to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre."

Veteran character actor Dick Miller (far right) portrays one of the phony cops
in "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre."

Corman avidly wanted Orson Welles to portray Al Capone, with Jason Robards as rival "Bugs" Moran. According to Corman, the studio told him, "You’re buying trouble if you buy Orson Welles," maintaining that Welles tried to take over any picture he acted in and suggesting instead that Robards play Capone. Corman, in vain, said, "He’s not really right. Robards is thin and Irish and Moran was thin and Irish. Capone and Welles are both big guys."

Jason Robards looks for more scenery to chew up and spit out as Al Capone.

Ultimately, Corman and Robards enthusiastically embraced the casting change (which brought in Ralph Meeker, a reliably utile character actor, as "Bugs" Moran), perhaps a little too enthusiastically on the actor’s part, who made up for the obvious physical shortcomings and age dissimilarity (at the time of the events depicted, Capone was 15 years younger than Robards) with over-the-top scenery-chewing, matched onscreen only by costar George Segal’s rabid channeling of James Cagney as Peter Gusenberg (below), Moran’s chief lieutenant. (Bruce Dern appeared as a hapless garage mechanic caught in the middle of the slaughter, while Jack Nicholson collected a seven-week paycheck for two scenes in a bit part as a getaway car driver.)

With a passion to create, in his words, "the most accurate, authentic gangster movie ever," Corman hired a screenwriter whom the director claimed was "once a young Chicago police reporter in the twenties." In fact, Howard Browne was a freelance correspondent for a Chicago newspaper who later became a prolific science-fiction story editor, mystery author, and television scriptwriter. Corman insisted, "Every aspect of the film was painstakingly researched." There were, however, inevitable historical inaccuracies, but Corman did have his cast study photographs of the grisly aftermath of the massacre so that each actor’s death-fall matched the positions of the actual victims.

A newspaper photo of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre victims

Less than two months after "The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre" hit theaters in 1967, "Bonnie and Clyde," director Arthur Penn’s revisionist "rural" gangster picture, starring Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, and Gene Hackman, splattered slow-motion bloodletting across the screen. Only five years later, director Francis Ford Coppola adapted author Mario Puzo’s sprawling saga of a crime family, The Godfather, into a cinematic epic, in the wake of which, seemingly, nothing would be the same again when it comes to Mob films, culminating in the phenomenally successful HBO series "The Sopranos."

Warren Oates (John Dillinger), Harry Dean Stanton (Homer Van Meter), Geoffrey
Lewis (Harry Pierpont), and John P. Ryan (Charles Makley) pose for a publicity
photo for "Dillinger" (1973), directed by John Milius.

Despite the popularity of post-"Godfather" films that turned Family business into complex dramas worthy of Shakespearean tragedies, including "Scarface" (1983), "Once Upon a Time in America" (1984), "Goodfellas" (1990), "Bugsy" (1991), "Donnie Brasco" (1997), and "American Gangster" (2007), there still was the occasional nostalgic homage to old-timey tommy gun-blazing gangster flicks, among them "Dillinger" (1973), starring Warren Oates, with Ben Johnson as FBI agent Melvin Purvis and Richard Dreyfuss as Baby Face Nelson; "Capone" (1975), written by Howard Browne and produced by Roger Corman, starring Ben Gazzara, with a young Sylvester Stallone as Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti; "The Untouchables" (1987), starring Kevin Costner as Eliott Ness, Robert DeNiro as Al Capone, and an Oscar-winning Sean Connery; "Mobsters" (1991), featuring Christian Slater as Charlie "Lucky" Luciano, Patrick Dempsey as Meyer Lansky, and Richard Grieco as Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel; "Billy Bathgate" (1991), starring Dustin Hoffman as Dutch Schultz, with Stanley Tucci as Lucky Luciano; "Hoodlum" (1997), with Laurence Fishburne as Harlem mob boss Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson, Tim Roth as Dutch Schultz, and Andy Garcia as Lucky Luciano; and "Public Enemies" (2009), starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger (below) and Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis.

And 2013 saw the release of the machine gun bullet-riddled "Gangster Squad," starring Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Emma Stone, and Nick Nolte. (To be continued…)