The Golden Age: the ' 'Classic" Gangster Film
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One The Golden Age: The ' 'Classic" Gangster Film The gangster/crime film took root as long ago as Griffith 's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and then struggled in unfertilized soil through to the end of the twenties. It took a combination of the sound film , Capone's Chicago , Prohibition , and the mood of the depression to inaugurate the first distinct phase of the genre. It begins with Little Caesar (1930) and ends with Scarface (1932), and it is the source and example of all the phases that follow . In general , the dynamics of gangster films of the thirties are simplistic , relying on the public 's fascination with actual criminals and their exciting , if alarming , exploits , and in tune with the rhythms of an industry approaching high gear. The gangster 's fizzy spirits , classy life-style, and amoral daring were something like an Alka-Seltzer for the headaches of the depression . In the ruined hopes of that period , the gangster 's grand designs were part of a dialectic of the audience 's fantasies and dreams and a rote Christian morality. Characters like Edward G. Robinson's Rico, James Cagney's Tom Powers, and Paul Muni's Tony Camonte succumb to a combination of hubris, social fate, and moral reckoning in plots resembling those of classical tragedy . The films they appear in establish a tradition of popular tragedy in film . Strong figures cursed by their nature, their environment, their heritage find their desires and goals overwhelmed by an immutable and often unpredictable concatenation of forces. The power they held over audiences is directly related to their show of strength within the disintegration of the depression . The depression created some desperate fanta- sles- a film like Gregory La Cava's Gabriel Over the White House (1933), with its protofascist abandonment of democratic procedures , suggests just how desperate some of them were- and the gangster , as the self-made man who has, like us, no fear of pain and death, who behaves amorally and as though oblivious of his mortality until the world 's weight crushes down on him, is one of them. If the films insist that one can't win, under that given it's how you lose that counts. In a maze of dead ends, the immensity of the gangster 's will and the size of his passions give him heroic status. (This view of the gangster persists as late as Bonnie and Clyde [ 1967], with the important difference that he is placed in a dead , empty past, not a densely actualized near-present.) As the genre evolves, and refines itself through time, it becomes increasingly self-conscious and sophisticated . Its beginnings , as we might expect , are innocent of later complexities . Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface present their material with classic straightforwardness . Their wish is to record the real ity of the gang- ster's world and his character , to convey, with nonmetaphoric immediacy , the particulars of his behavior. The interest is in what he might really be like, the ways in which he is an actual menace. He is a character who exists as the film reports him to exist. These are essentially traditional , mimetic works- imitative , illusionistic , persuasively real. Conflict is used literally and transparently . The cam- era's presence is hidden , its process es concealed . The "reality " of any shot dominates our awareness of the camera 's movement or position . Even very noticeable rhetorical conceits I ike the machine- gunning away of calendar pages in Scarface are in the service of either supplying essential information or become part of the movement of a straight-ahead narrative. They are incorporated into an illusionistic mode. Ambivalence is well -defined , explicit . On the one hand there is society and its system of laws, on the other the tragic , often appealing , hero who breaks its laws, and by his actions activates both our need to hang onto moral and social laws and our wish to get outside them. What is seen is understood as real, permit ting undeflected involvement and suspension of disbelief . We believe what we see and, for the moment, care. The issues are defined and definite . We feel the clash of two opposing 16 The Golden Age and distinctly delineated forces . We watch and listen to a story that contains the possibility of tragedy . The films occupy time present ; there are no flashbacks . The narrative sequence is undistorted . The story takes place over a period of time and unfolds sequentially . It is implicit that a straightforward unraveling is adequate , that the gangster 's story is appropriately told that way - a tale that has a beginning , middle , and end , rising and fall ing action , denouement , resolution . The gangster 's aggression and vitality are honored ; the films imply that there is a purpose in his acting out his will . He is simple , innocent , and vital ; the expression of these qualities is engaging . In combination and in excess , however , these qualities are dangerous to the status quo . They cause upheaval and must be quelled . It is the aim of the early gangster films to show the hero act and be stopped without attaching corresponding values to his actions or their violent termination , other than the applying of utterly conventional moral homilies . Grounded in literalness , physicality , and emotion , these films are not enlightened or enlightening . They are not interested in the implications of the world they so vividly create . If the world is a real world , it is nonetheless not our world but the gangster 's. On those occasions , relatively few , when the gang - ster steps into a world more recognizably ours , he stamps it as his . Icons that represent us seem somewhat out of place and extraneous or blank and characterless . In one sense , the films are travelogues and documentaries . The people we see - tough guys and their women , tough cops - are stylized by speech , behavior , gesture , and expression to a point that sharply distinguish es them from us. Our identification is an external one . The gangster remains outside us. We can never be , or completely want to be , him . He is placed above us or below us. We are awed onlookers of the atypical intensity of both his life and death . He is a version of a human being , sufficiently deviant from the norm for us to observe him as separate and apart . His role is fixed . The gangster 's character and identity are not only well defined , they are also magnified . The early films are primarily actors ' vehicles . Robinson , Cagney , Muni project a quality of being that dominates meaning . Their respective contexts serve as platforms they The "Classic " Gangster Film 17 use to assert their personalities . Their characters are larger than I ife, and their environments - typically fashioned for verisimilitude - heighten , amplify , and extend their presence . The films are con - trolled by the power of the actor 's performance . He determines our degree of involvement and detachment . What we feel toward the character is cued by the character 's candid revelations of his feelings , which the actor 's talent establ ishes between the I ines of an often perfunctory script . Our attention is not directed to abstract , thematic levels but to the character 's experience . If, for example , there is a question about loyalty , it does not take thematic definition , as it usually does in later films of the genre . Our interest remains exclusively on the level of the character 's response to the situation . We are interested , in Little Caesar , in what Joe 's disloyalty means to Rico , how it affects his feel ings . Its importance is grounded in the character ; it is not an intellectual concern of the film . The early gangster films remain fresh and vivid because we feel them not as pale and awkward instances of what the genre keeps on doing better and better but as a genuine achievement , something unique that the genre did not attempt again . They are direct , unreflective , naively representational - and as such , their excellence has not been surpassed . Scarface was the ultimate expression of the genre 's early phase . The gangster film , left with only the potential of its structure , one possibility of which had been exhausted , had to seek a new direction . Throughout the thirties it led a somewhat dormant and desultory life . The gangster became a domesticated creature , an industry pet . an anachronism (Little Giant [ 1933 ]); the films he appeared in lacked narrative bite , social thrust , and intensity of characterization . Major productions were few and far between , and they grew lyrical and romantic or portrayed the gangster as a victim of social conditions (Dead End [ 1937 ], Angels with Dirty Faces [ 1938 ], The Roaring Twenties [ 1939 ]). The gangster had become the stuff of legend more than fact . His qualities , partially mourned , were emblematic of a period put behind . Or he became an object of parody , humor . and sentimentality . Lloyd Bacon 's Brother Orchid (1940 ) is representative . All the genre 's serious matter is turned into a joke . Notwithstanding the vivacity 18 The Golden Age of the performances - the direction is anonymous - the film is just a time waster , something concocted for momentary pleasure and diversion . A spirit of affectionate ridicule prevails , a far cry from the gloom and viciousness of the early sound period . The flurry of early thirties gangster films laid down the bases for future developments . They established a milieu and an iconog - raphy. They posed an opposition between insider and outsider , society and its outcasts, and conventionalized that opposition . They dealt with crime as a social issue. They implied that in American society, intense life is only possible in the underworld and created characters whose function was to resonate that implication .