Living In Gangster Time...

After its early wave, between the years of 1930 and 1932, the gangster film fell victim to becoming a perfunctory repetition, or in some cases, self parody, as can be seen in 1933's Lady Killers. Here James Cagney portrays a neophyte criminal, who trades in his felonious lifestyle, capitalizes on his charisma, and embarks on a career of playing toughies in the movies. The theme recurrent, for in The Little Giant (1933) history repeats, when Edward G. Robinson retires from the bootlegging business and inveigles his way into the smart set, but is soon swindled as a result of some dodgy bonds from 'respectable' people. Robinson saw this type-cast, as anathema, he honestly balked at the concept of being identified with any such gangster role, for in actuality, Robinson was a highly cultured being, with a penchant for fine art - and a collector of impressionistic paintings - this was dramatized with near schizophrenic vividness in The Whole Town's Talking, where Robinson played the innocuous double of a gangster, in coalition with being the bad, nefarious guy himself, who manages to assuage his alter ego by briefly assuming his identity.

And both Robinson and Cagney figured prominently, in the next wave of the gangster film, from 1935 and beyond, in which the hero, in lieu of being the archetypal gangster, was now himself a law
enforcer - albeit, almost always an undercover one, who essentially did come with all the trimmings of a stereotypical hoodlum, for the majority of the film. Many factors contributed to this development however. Gradually, censorship would be an imposing force, as the Hays code, which formulated in 1930 for the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA, later MPAA) began their regime of puritanically enforcing provisions under Joseph E. Breen's administration.

                    A little Catholic guilt and a whole lot of Production Code










Simultaneously, the Catholic pressure would spur the formation of the Legion of Deceny, which initiated and would impact sanctions on an influential ratings system. At this same juncture, the FBI which initially failed to make much impression on organized crime under Prohibition, or following it, was now galvanized into brand new initiates, as it was being helmed by a publicity-conscious director - J. Edgar Hoover. When Congress lengthened its mandate to a whole new list of federal crimes, in the light of the Lindbergh kidnapping, Hoover's own agents would gun down a clutch of provincial bank robbers in 1934-5, most notably John Dillinger (though in Mr Dillinger's case, the now famed shooting outside the Biograph cinema in Chicago, quite possibly nailed the wrong man). Appropriately, then William Keighley's 1935 effort G-Men, inaugurated Warner Brothers new policy -here we find Cagney the ambiguous undercover agent or G-Man (this nickname attributed to George 'Machine Gun' Kelly, later immortalized in Roger Corman's 1958 biopic). Robinson subsequently starred as an undercover (though not specifically FBI) role in Keighley's 1936 entry, Bullets or Ballots. Here he was pitted against enfant terrible gangster boss Humphrey Bogart.

                    It's no wonder they were so petrified in the forest






Bogart also figured prominently in yet another thread of mid-1930s gangster vehicles, a somewhat clinical one - adapted Broadway plays. He would star in the film interpretation of Robert E. Sherwood's The Petrified Forest (1936) as Duke Mantee, gangster on-the-lam, who inevitably cannot resist the urge to shoot again - this time, killing a loquacious writer (Leslie Howard). Bogart left Maxwell Anderson's verse play Winterset (1935) in the capable mitts of Burgess Meredith but returned to the ol' drawing set for a seemingly studio-bound version of Sidney Kingsley 's Dead End (1937) now chiefly recounted for catapulting the careers of the Dead End Kids (Leo Gorcey and company) who would go through several incarnations before deciding on being coined The Bowery Boys.

                         Angels dirty faces went well with their red shoes.






Their finest hour would be in Michael Curtiz's Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) which also revisited the thematic of social origins in crime film. In Dead End, Bogart's shyster attorney is once again irredeemably evil, but toughie chap Rocky (Cagney) has a little more self-awareness and an honestly good remit for killing off two treacherous associates, in order to save his childhood chum, who is now the parish priest (Pat O'Brien).Of more significance, he is persuaded to pretend to be nervous when facing the electric chair, proving to the hero-worshipping local lads that crime simply does not pay. However, the theory that poverty is synonymous with crime, was somewhat undercut by having both the good guy and the bad guy come from parallel backgrounds. When this patter re-surfaced in post -war films (such as Cry of the City, 1948), the socialogical element waned altogether, becoming a device of psychology, nearly metaphysically doubling and contrasting.

                Cagney and Raft just wanted to wake up without dying one morning




Inevitably, social themes would influence the perennially popular prison films, if slums were the high schools of crime, prisons one could say, were it's universities. Yet reform was not out of the queston, even if instigated from within, as Keighley's Each Dawn I Die (1939) by a crusading journo (Cagney), framed for a felony he did not commit, by a meglomaniacal DA, and a good gangster (George Raft, allegedly a gangster in the real world) Even the Dead End Kids, did a spell in the reformatory in Crime School (1938) under the benevolent supervising of a liberal Commissioner of Correction (Bogart)

Bogart reverted to type in Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939) which not only summed up much of what the gangster movie had become during the decade, but also helped to popularize the retrospective even nostalgic mode that has since so largely characterized the sum of the genre. If Bogart's bootlegger, George is again both psychopathic and evil, Cagney's cabdriver Eddie, is now a big time hood almost by accident rises with the boom and declines in the Depression, is driven by unrequited love for a singer (Priscilla Lane) to sample the booze he had previously shunned, and finally redeems himself by sacrificing his life to save an old friend, now married to the gal. We find a fairy-tale Manhattan as its setting, given it was originally written by New York crime reporter cum producer Mark Hellinger. This is interspersed with elaborately symbolic, faux-documentary montages, most likely directed by the young director Don Siegel, that established each section of scenes economic and political context.

                   You could take the gangster out of the Bogey, but you can't...




This was Cagney's wave goodbye to the gangster role for a full decade, but Bogart soldiered on with Brother Orchid (1940, opposite Robinson) and The Big Shot (1942). The turning point of Bogart's career came with High Sierra in 1941, produced by Hellinger and directed by Raoul Walsh. This time Bogart's Roy 'Mad Dog' Earle (loosely based on Dillinger) is posed between a love unrequited and a sympathetic moll (Ida Lupino). But he is an aging loner rather than a ex-big-shot, and his inevitable death takes place in the rural isolation of the mountains, far away from the big city. The film was tinged throughout with nostalgia.






The gangster movie was soon to give way to the private-eye genre, and the dark perversity of film noir . The next brief influx of activity involved using the names, if not the true accounts, of real gangsters, as in Roger Touhy, Gangster (1944), followed the next year with Dillinger, a practice previously verboten, by the standards of the Production Code, but the fashion for biopics did not come to its fruition until the late Fifties.