Gangsters galore

I liked the just-completed first season of Boardwalk Empire (MC-88) well enough, but I was not gangbusters over it.  It does not muscle into that handful of ongoing series that have truly engaged me (e.g. current and final season of Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Treme), but I will keep watching.   Steve Buscemi and Kelly MacDonald are always enough to keep me interested, even when other characters and storylines strain credulity.  After a bit of fact-checking, I was surprised to see how the mobs in Atlantic City, New York City, and Chicago were interlocked, and how the interweaving of all the big names – Rothstein, Torrio, Capone, Luciano, Lansky – is plausibly true to life.  The whole series reopens the mythology of Prohibition-era gangsters enough to make one revisit some of the classic texts of the genre. 

I happened to notice The Roaring Twenties (1939) appearing on demand, and once I checked it out, I couldn’t stop watching.  Raoul Walsh’s hurtling direction mixes documentary-like footage with characters who age from WWI doughboys through Prohibition kingpins to gang-war casualties.  The impeccable cast includes James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, with Priscilla Lane as the canary for whom Cagney pines and Gladys George as the saloonkeeper who really understands him.  This came at the end of the initial cycle of great gangster movies, but is a fluent and masterful summation

Cagney had begun etching his gangster persona on the consciousness of audiences with The Public Enemy (1931), in a performance of startling intensity.  William Wellman was one of the most competent directors of the early talkies, but this film suffers from period liabilities of pacing and performance, so once you get past Cagney’s electricity and the famous grapefruit in his moll’s face, there’s not a lot here.

Another iconic, career-making performance in the genre had been offered by Edward G. Robinson as the Capone-like title character in Little Caesar (1930).  This role involves yet more scenery chewing, but is effectively expressive in its snarls and spit-out lines.  Mervyn LeRoy directs smoothly and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is unusually good in the sidekick-who-tries-to-go-straight role.

Howard Hawks shows why he was the master of all genres with the swift, sure storytelling of Scarface (1932).  Paul Muni is excellent in a balls-out, ape-like interpretation of Al Capone, as the punk with big ideas, a Borgia with a machine gun.  The almost amusingly overt incest theme of this film is matched by the startling implicit homoeroticism of the other two early gangster classics as ways of creating operatically bad characters.

Along with these old films, I revisited Robert Warshow’s classic essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (1948), and while it certainly overreaches, it does so in exciting and provocative ways, with that classic mid-century blend of Marxism and Freudianism.  He demonstrates how the gangster represents the dark side of the pursuit of happiness, the anarchic id run wild, an epitome of the modern city:  “And the gangster – though there are real gangsters – is also, and primarily, a creature of the imagination.  The real city, one might say, produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster: he is what we want to be and what we are afraid we might become.”