Public Enemies, Local Heroes: the Irish-American Gangster Film in Classic Hollywood Cinema

Public Enemies, Local Heroes: The Irish-American Gangster Film in Classic Hollywood Cinema Christopher Shannon New Hibernia Review, Volume 9, Number 4, Geimhreadh/Winter 2005, pp. 48-64 (Article) Published by Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas DOI: 10.1353/nhr.2006.0014 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nhr/summary/v009/9.4shannon.html Access provided by Baruch College (10 Jan 2014 17:27 GMT) 04-shannon-pp48-64 1/29/06 8:59 PM Page 48 Christopher Shannon Public Enemies, Local Heroes: The Irish-American Gangster Film in Classic Hollywood Cinema In 1928, the Irish-American politician Al Smith went down to defeat in a pres- idential election that one historian has described as “the first truly great hate campaign in modern American history.”1 Smith’s nomination suggested that urban Irish Catholic America had finally come of age, but his campaign against Herbert Hoover gave new life to an ethno-religious bigotry the likes of which had not been seen since the heyday of the Know-Nothings in the 1850s. Yet Americans who rejected the Irish in politics nonetheless embraced them in culture. The twenty years following Smith’s electoral defeat saw Irish Americans achieve a privileged place in the most dominant medium of modern American popular culture, Hollywood cinema. In 1945, Going My Way,a film about an Irish-Catholic priest’s efforts to save a poor urban parish from insolvency, swept nearly every major award at the year’s Academy Awards ceremony. The broad appeal of Irish-American stories in the Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s lay primarily in their ability to present the Irish as representative of a broader ethnic vision of the city as an urban village, fully ethnic yet fully American. The cultural rehabilitation of Irish America began in the most unlikely of all film genres: the gangster film. For many Americans in 1928,there was little difference between Al Smith and Al Capone. One was an Irish politician, the other an Italian gangster; but as urban, ethnic “wets,” both appeared equally criminal in their threat to the religious and cultural preeminence of rural and small town Protestant America. Despite the ascent of Capone as king of the real-world gangsters, the Irish- American actor James Cagney established the Irish-American gangster as the most heroic urban criminal of Hollywood’s golden age. Little Caesar (1930) and Scarface (1932), the gangster films most directly inspired by Capone’s life, present the gangster as a tragic hero driven to destruction by his desire for greatness; The Public Enemy (1931) and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Cagney’s greatest Irish- 1.Robert Slayton,Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (New York: The Free Press, 2001), p. xiv. new hibernia review / iris éireannach nua, 9:4 (winter / geimhreadh, 2005), 48–64 04-shannon-pp48-64 1/29/06 8:59 PM Page 49 The Irish-American Gangster Film in Classic Hollywood Cinema American gangster films, present the gangster as a local hero who dies a sacrifi- cial death brought on by a primal loyalty to the ties of neighborhood. Cagney’s films show how—even at their most criminal—Irish Catholics came to represent certain communal values that resonated deeply with Americans searching for signs of life in local ties threatened by the social dislocation of the Depression and the increasing nationalization of life under the New Deal. Capone’s celebrity in the 1920s, and the great cinematic achievements of such Italian-American directors as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese in the 1970s, have all but erased the image of the Irish-American gangster from the history of American popular culture. The emergence of an Irish film culture in the 1980s and 1990s has, in turn, often served to reinforce an enduring sense of Irish-American cultural inferiority bequeathed by the debates on lit- erary modernism in the early twentieth century: critics who once asked “Where is our James Joyce?” now ask “Where is our Neil Jordan?” In Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen,Joseph M. Curran acknowledges that Irish-American films “blazed the trail for other minorities” in Hollywood; however, the seemingly inexorable march toward assimilation that frames his study overshadows his account of those early achievements. Curran credits Cagney’s gangster films with securing for the Irish “unchal- lenged ascendancy as the movies’ favorite ethnic minority,”yet Joseph Breen— head of the Production Code Administration, the studios’ chosen organ of self- censorship—emerges as the representative Hollywood Irish American. Such Irish Catholics as Breen, Martin Quigley, and Daniel Lord, S.J., as well as the heavily Irish Catholic Legion of Decency, undeniably played a major role in film censorship. Still, to equate Catholic support for Victorian sexual norms with “a ringing endorsement of the status quo” obscures a whole range of cultural issues—not the least of which was Prohibition—on which Irish Catholics refused to submit to WASP norms.2 The last two decades have seen an explo- sion of books on film censorship, and comparatively little scholarly treatment of figures like Cagney. This scholarly trend, in turn, reflects an enduring intel- lectual bias in which Irish Americans are often characterized as cultural thugs—a tendency that, to be fair, Curran himself criticizes.3 2.Joseph M. Curran, Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen: The Irish and American Movies (West- port: Greenwood Press, 1989), pp. xvi, 39, 51. 3.Curran, p. 120.For representative works on film censorship, see: Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood Censorship and the Pro- duction Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990); and Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 04-shannon-pp48-64 1/29/06 8:59 PM Page 50 The Irish-American Gangster Film in Classic Hollywood Cinema Even those willing to acknowledge the significance of Cagney’s work often have trouble discerning anything particularly Irish or ethnic about his films. Recent film and cultural studies tend to view ethnicity in terms established most clearly in the work of Werner Sollars. For Sollars, the representative ethnic scenario consists of an individual caught between two worlds—ethnic and American—struggling to forge some unique identity that could either reconcile or transcend the two cultures.4 Such a tale of ethnicity was, in fact, present at the creation of the sound era: Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927)tells the story of Jakie Rabinowitz/Jack Robin, the son of a Jewish cantor torn between his duty to follow in his father’s footsteps and his desire to pursue his own dreams of suc- cess as a popular entertainer. Scholars looking for an angst-ridden identity cri- sis of the kind featured in The Jazz Singer will be disappointed, and more than a little baffled, by Irish-American films of the 1930s and 1940s. The characters in these films certainly have problems, but identity is not one of them: Irish- American characters may not always know what to do, but they always know who they are. Troubled by conflicting loyalties and obligations within their urban ethnic community, they nevertheless know that their destiny, whatever it may be, must be worked out in terms set by the local community. In these films, ethnicity is not who you are, but where you are. Place or locality constitutes a major speed bump on the assimilation super- highway that usually frames accounts of Irish-American culture in the twentieth century. Irish America’s two greatest achievements—the Catholic church, organized by geographic parishes, and the urban wing of the Democratic Party, organized by neighborhood ward—tie its identity to place in a way deeper than that of any other ethnic group in America. Charles Morris and other scholars have pointed out that even as Irish-American bishops fought against particular ethnic identities in their effort to create a unified “American” church, they cre- ated a separate universe of social institutions rooted in local parishes to serve as a firewall against assimilation into mainstream American Protestant culture.5 In retrospect, the New Deal marked a decisive turning point in that nationalization of American life initiated by the rise of corporate capitalism in the late nine- teenth century; still, this separate Irish Catholic universe was thriving well into the 1930s. By filtering money through local Democratic political machines and Catholic charities, the New Deal seemed to reinforce, rather than to undermine, 4.See Werner Sollars, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 5. On the Catholic church and the Democratic Party as the two greatest achievements of the Irish, see “The Irish” in Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963), pp. 217–87.On the separate universe of American Catholicism, see Charles Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church (New York: Vintage Books, 1998). 04-shannon-pp48-64 1/29/06 8:59 PM Page 51 The Irish-American Gangster Film in Classic Hollywood Cinema local structures.6 In a similar manner, Hollywood—certainly the mass cultural equivalent of New Deal nationalization—appeared less foreign and threatening through its ability to tell local stories. Tales of Irish America quickly emerged as the most local of all stories.

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