http://www.slate.com/id/2151867/?GT1=8702
Concrete Badlands How the gangster film began.
By Stanley Crouch
Posted Thursday, Oct. 19, 2006, at 1:33 PM ET
"He ain't no gangster. He's a real old-time desperado. Gangsters is
foreigners; he's an American."—Gramp Maple, The Petrified Forest
Perhaps no genre captures the lower aspects of the national soul and the
darker elements of its ethos better than the gangster film. The tale is
almost always about, as the minstrel knucklehead 50 Cent would say,
"coming up," or furiously rising from the bottom. The gangster is never
less than arrogant, resentful, and possessed of an optimism so naive
that it might become ruthless. He represents a perversion of the
anti-aristocratic attitude that began in the United States after the
Revolutionary War. By the time Andrew Jackson became president, the
popular sense of American democracy was that triumph was superior to a
"noble" bloodline; that refinement was usually no more than the glaze of
pretension; and that education did not necessarily make anyone better—or
more clever!—than anyone else.
From the second half of 19th century forward, American slums became
locations for social diseases, vermin, filth, and overcrowding as
immigrants poured in from a class-bound Europe. In that context of urban
poverty, the modern criminal emerged with the 20th century. He offered
vice and defended both his territory and his corrosive wares with
violence. Bloody action could travel all the way up the thermometer of
crime until it reached murder, the most conspicuous of which was the St.
Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929. The murders were ordered by
Al Capone and executed with such contemptuous brutality that the public
howled for law and order. The mood was perfect for the emergence of the
gangster film, which arrived from Warner Bros. with the startling
realism of The Public Enemy and Little Caesar in 1931.
The studio not only made the most of the classic machine-gun operas but
provided the basic plotlines and the iconographic figures. These movies
brought a casual but attentive accuracy to a new Wild West that had been
reincarnated in the big cities of the Midwest and the Eastern Seaboard.
Warner Bros. also gave us James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey
Bogart, the three most important innovators in a style defined by the
portrayal of gangsters, outlaws, and gunmen.
In the DVD anthologies Gangsters and Tough Guys, Warner Bros. brings
together examples of its A and B lists. The former collection includes a
number of indispensable films and equally indispensable performances,
while the second includes entertaining films but furthers its quality
with extremely well-done documentary special features that put these
movies right inside the cultural pulsation that was roaring when they
were released. We also come to better understand the impact these
gangster films had on American identity and on the imitations of
American films that circled the globe.
Warner Bros. discovered that hard-boiled guys were more attractive to
men—and to women—than any kind of good-mannered cotton-candy figures in
tuxedos and expensive surroundings. In this spirit, James Cagney and
Edward G. Robinson maintained their tough style of talk and the cocky
ways that they brought to early gangster movies. But things changed for
the actors very quickly. By the middle '30s, they were recast as cops
and government men so that the audience could still experience the fresh
moxie of the actors but could also side with the law. More important,
these characters strongly recalled the popular 19th-century American
theater figure of Mose the Fireman, who had the basic sensibility of
sandpaper but would lay down his life for a lady in distress or could be
brought to tears by the plight of an endangered child.
With some variations, Mose reappears in "G" Men (1935) as James Cagney's
federal agent. This was a character who came up hard and has the rhythm
of the streets in every aspect of his personal style: his talk, his
dancing gait, and his readiness to war with his fists or a firearm. He
comes to us another way through Edward G. Robinson's undercover cop in
Bullets or Ballots (1936) and still differently as the prison warden
played by Pat O'Brien in San Quentin (1937). O'Brien was another of the
confident Irishmen who achieved originality in the 1930s and was
especially good in roles where he had to uphold the law or play a priest
who hadn't forgotten how to settle things with his fists. This is
particularly true in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), where O'Brien plays
the moral counterbalance to Cagney's charming thug, who is a less
circumscribed variation on his Tom Powers in The Public Enemy, whereas
Cagney's Powers has no morality whatsoever and has replaced a soul with
brute appetites. By White Heat (1949), Cagney has evolved into Cody
Jarrett, an ominously violent psychopath with a remarkably believable
feeling of tenderness toward his mother. The great beauty of the
performance is that, however much we might empathize with the humanity
of the character, Cagney never allows us to forget that Jarrett is,
finally, monstrous: a flippant murderer and a sadist.
Humphrey Bogart emerges as the outlaw, not the gangster. As Duke Mantee
in The Petrified Forest (1936), Bogart is a character of menace,
desperation, and tragedy. He is, like Dillinger, a leftover from the
19th century of Jesse James; unlike the characters of Cagney and
Robinson, he has no connections to powerful men in high, starched
collars, the ultimate symbols of urban corruption. Mantee has made his
way with a small gang that shares his doomed future. In both
collections, Bogart's signature menace comes through whenever it is
needed, and one can see the degree of concentration he brought to his
roles as either embittered men or hardened criminals who found joy in
cruelty, murder, and torture. In A Slight Case of Murder (1938),
Robinson proves himself capable of what is almost impossible today: He
could be just as effective in comedy as he was in drama or melodrama.
In our time, graphic violence so often solves the problem of skillfully
developing dramatic intensity that these earlier films seem tame in one
way and ridiculous in another. They seem tame because of the absurd ways
in which the actors pretend to have been shot, and they seem ridiculous
because now everyone knows that a person shot at close range in his
overcoat could not conceal his wounds in the way actors did in those
days when no one who was shot on the screen ever gushed blood. In a
one-two punch, Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather did away with those
conventions universally.
But to see the evolution of these iconic representations of an era and
the gifted performers who made the gangster and the urban outlaw part of
our cultural pantheon is to feel present at the emergence of a new way
to express the dark side of human complexity within the context of our
roller coaster of a democracy, which never fails to descend, no matter
how high it rises.
/end
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
.
|
