Borsalino (1970)

Borsalino is a 1970 French gangster movie which was a major box-office hit. Which is hardly surprising, given that it stars Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo who were at that time the two most popular, most charismatic and sexiest male movie stars in France. When you add to this the fact that the period setting looks completely fabulous and there are lots of fistfights and gunfights this was about as close as you could ever get to a surefire commercial success.

The idea originated with Alain Delon (who produced the movie). He’d just had a hit with La piscine (The Swimming Pool) directed by Jacques Deray and he was keen to do another movie with Deray. Delon’s star power attracted international financing and Borsalino looks expensive because it was.

It’s the story of two small-time crooks in Marseille, Roch Siffredi (Delon) and François Capella (Belmondo). They meet when they beat the living daylights out of each other over a girl, Lola (Catherine Rouvel). Having beaten each other to a pulp they become firm friends, and criminal associates.

Roch and François are ambitious but at first they don’t really have a master plan. They just don’t like being pushed around by the crime lords of Marseille. They eliminate one of these crime lords and take over his operations, and they just keep eliminating rivals until they reach the top.

Roch and François are very different but both are charming and magnetic in their own ways. This is a gangster buddy movie and the differences between the two are (as always) a major factor in making it work as a buddy movie. Both Delon and Belmondo deploy their unquestioned star power and their established screen personas. Roch is super-cool and self-contained and rather moody and brooding, things Delon did extremely well. François is hyper-active and cheerful with a playful approach to life, things that Belmondo did extremely well.

There’s crime and corruption here but this movie takes no interest in the moral implications. Roch and François are bad guys but they’re super-cool and they’re very much the heroes of the story. They’re not rebels. They’re unabashed gangsters and they’re violent and ruthless. Nonetheless the movie is very much on their side, not for political reasons but because they’re super-cool.

The movie-going public loved this movie. Critics were less happy with it, seeing it as a case of style over substance. You can always rely on critics to miss the point. In Borsalino the style IS the substance. This is an exercise in cinematic style. This is pure cinema. Critics, being critics, love looking for political meanings and subtexts. There aren’t any here. This movie ostentatiously avoids such things.

The costumes are superb. The costumes for the two male leads reflect not just the differences between the two characters but the differences between the screen images of the two stars. Delon’s clothes are cool and ultra-sharp. That was Delon’s image. Roch wants to look like a gentleman. François wants to look like a big-shot gangster, which reflects Belmondo’s more flamboyant slightly neurotic image.

The production design is terrific and reflects these differences as well. Roch wants his living quarters to look like a gentleman’s apartment. François’ idea of interior decoration is to have paintings of naked women on the walls.

There’s a lot of fairly graphic violence but it’s done in a very operatic way, in fact in an almost Italian way. The murders (and there are lots of them) are reminiscent of the emerging Italian poliziotteschi genre. This was a Franco-Italian co-production. I have no idea how well it did in Italy but I imagine it did well. It manages to be in tune with the visually extravagant approach of Italian film-making of this era while still feeling very very French.

American gangster movies probably had some influence on this movie but the French had their own gangster movie tradition which this movie draws on heavily.

The two stars are absolutely at the top of their game and they play off each other superbly.

Borsalino looks gorgeous, has a reasonable story, it offers plenty of action and it has style to burn. Don’t overthink this movie. Just wallow in the style. Borsalino is highly recommended.

The Arrow Blu-Ray offers a very nice transfer. Extras include a worthless audio commentary that tries to impose 2020s ideologies onto the movie. In general audio commentaries are best avoided these days.

The Secret 6 (1931)

When we think of Hollywood gangster movies of the early 1930s we don’t really think of MGM, but in fact MGM made several gangster pictures. The most notable was The Beast of the City (1932) which in my view is the greatest gangster picture of them all. A more unusual MGM gangster movie is The Secret 6, released in 1931. It was directed by George W. Hill.

Louis Scorpio (Wallace Beery) works in the stockyards and is affectionately known as Slaughterhouse. He gets involved in bootlegging in a small way in the town of Centro but when his boss and former pal Johnny Franks (Ralph Bellamy) double-crosses him he decides he’d like to be the boss. He guns down Johnny.

The real boss of this crime organisation is crooked lawyer Richard Newton (Lewis Stone). Being a lawyer as well as a gang boss makes Newton a formidable figure.

Slaughterhouse’s first move after taking over from Johnny Franks is to establish complete political control of the town. He engineers the election of bootlegger and gunman Nick “the Gouger” Mizoski (Paul Hurst) as mayor.

It seems like nothing can stop the rise of Newton and Slaughterhouse and soon they’re in control of crime in the city as well. They rely not just on gunplay but on large-scale bribery. They pay off city officials and also newspapermen, including Hank Rogers (Johnny Mack Brown) and Carl Luckner (Clark Gable).

Anne (Jean Harlow) is one of the gang’s women but she falls for Hank in a big way, which will have consequences.

The authorities may be powerless to stop these gangster but there are those who are determined to put an end to organised crime in the city. These men are the Secret 6, a group of important men who have formed a vigilante organisation. It’s a rather disturbing idea. This has to be one of the earliest Hollywood movies to deal with vigilante justice, but it would not be the last. The Secret 6 all wear masks which gives this movie a bit of a pulp fiction flavour, and also perhaps a slight Edgar Wallace flavour.

It’s interesting that both the notable MGM gangster movies, this one and The Beast of the City, are slightly unusual (although in different ways) with a flavour that differentiates them from Warner Brothers gangster films of the same era.

Slaughterhouse never manages to acquire even a veneer of sophistication. He’s uncouth and maybe not overly bright but he is ruthless and he has Newton’s brains to rely on. You do have to wonder if Slaughterhouse is really smart enough to be a gang boss. Wallace Beery is good as Slaughterhouse but maybe a bit too much of a cheery likeable working-class rough diamond to be really menacing.

Lewis Stone is smooth and sinister as Newton. Ralph Bellamy is excellent.

This was a very early rôle for Jean Harlow (she was nineteen at the time) but she shows definite flashes of the Harlow magic.

It’s also an early rôle for Clark Gable. He was not yet a star but he soon would be. Watching his performance in this movie his star quality is already evident.

This was the movie that convinced MGM that Harlow and Gable were star material and the rest is history.

There’s plenty of violence but it’s nowhere near as graphic as the blood-drenched The Beast of the City.

The ending is a bit contrived and a bit rushed. Frances Marion had a distinguished career as a screenwriter but gangster movies were not her forte and the script doesn’t quite hold together as well as one would like.

Director George W. Hill keeps things moving at a breakneck pace which helps to disguise the weaknesses of the script.

The Secret 6 is an intriguing and entertaining gangland saga and the presence of Harlow and Gable helps enormously. Recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD is of course barebones but provides a very good transfer.

The Damned Don’t Cry (1950)

The Damned Don’t Cry is a 1950 Joan Crawford melodrama with a definite film noir tinge.

In classic noir style the story is told in flashback. The movie opens with the discovery of the body of a mobster found in the desert. A home movie is discovered that shows the mobster with glamorous socialite Lorna Hansen Forbes (Joan Crawford). Lorna is nowhere to be found which leads the police to speculate that it might be worth questioning her about the murder.

We then get the flashback that fills us in on Lorna’s life. She was once Ethel Whitehead, married to an ordinary working guy, and with a six-year-old son. Life is a constant round of struggle and poverty. When the boy is killed in an accident Ethel has had enough. She leaves. She wants more out of life and she wants to get it before it’s too late.

She gets a job as a fashion model. The models get kickbacks for introducing suckers to a gambling joint. Ethel is starting to make some money and she likes it.

She meets a rather nice man. Martin Blackford (Kent Smith) is an accountant. Through Ethel he meets Grady and Grady has a small accounting problem which Martin clears up. Grady is impressed. Grady is a businessman whose business activities are not what you might call strictly legal. In fact he’s a gangster. Grady is impressed by the idea that a guy like Martin could put his operation on a more sound and profitable footing.

Grady sings Martin’s praises to his boss, big-time mobster George Castleman (David Brian). Castleman sees the possibilities. Castleman represents a new type of gangster. He sees the future in terms of operating a crime organisation like a legitimate business. Much more efficient and much more profitable. In Castleman’s view the days of gang wars and thuggery and having guys rubbed out are over. He offers Martin the job of running the whole financial side of his criminal empire. Martin doesn’t want to be involved in crime but he figures that the only way to keep Ethel is by having lots of money so he takes the job.

Soon Martin is a rich man but he did it all for Ethel but Ethel has set her sights on George Castleman. He can give her what she wants. He can give her more than Martin could ever hope to give her.

Ethel is soon installed as Castleman’s mistress. And with the help of socialite Patricia Longworth (Selena Royle) she reinvents herself as Lorna Hansen Forbes. She has acquired enough class to pass as a high society dame. She has everything she wanted.

For the sake of convenience and simplicity I’m going to continue to refer to her as Ethel.

There’s one fly in the ointment - Nick Prenta (Steve Cochran). Nick runs the west coast territory for Castleman but Nick is old school. He does things the old way. If someone causes a problem Nick gets the boys to take the guy for a ride. Nick’s habit of having guys killed puts him out of synch with Castleman’s approach and there’s eventually going to be a showdown. And Ethel, much against her will, is going to be right in the middle. Ethel doesn’t like being confronted by unpleasant realities like gangsters planning to have each other rubbed out.

It’s a good script with more than enough noirishness to justify the film noir label. Both Ethel and Martin are nice ordinary people but they get sucked in by the lure of easy money and they slowly become corrupted. They make more and more compromises and as they get in deeper it becomes more and more impossible to get out.

Ethel is ambitious and ruthless but she’s not as tough and ruthless as she thinks she is, and while we’re appalled by her climb to the top we can understand her motivation. We can understand why she thinks it’s worth paying any price to escape the life of poverty and despair she once knew. She might be a bad girl but there are lines she will not cross. One of those lines is murder. She will happily live off the proceeds of crime but she wants no part in violence of any kind. She is attracted to George Castleman because he’s a gangster who has renounced violence. It never occurs to Ethel that a situation might arise in which George would be tempted to revert to violence. Ethel thinks she can remain in control of her situation but she’s wrong.

Martin is in the same boat. He thought that being an accountant for the Mob wasn’t the same as being an actual gangster but he learns that once you work for the Mob you’re a gangster whether you like it or not.

Kent Smith is excellent as the hapless Martin. David Brian effortlessly combines smoothness and menace. Steve Cochran is always a joy to watch.

There’s so much to like about this movie but there is one major problem that can’t be evaded. Joan Crawford is right for the part and her performance is excellent but she was simply too old to play this role. At least fifteen years too old. This was true of several of her 1940s movies. Crawford was never one to let that bother her. She always relied on sheer bravado to carry it off and in most cases it worked. It doesn’t work this time.

I can buy the idea that George Castleman falls for her. He’s attracted by her intelligence, her ambition and her ruthlessness. He sees her as a female version of himself. I can just about buy the idea that Martin falls for her. For years he’d worked long hours for very little money. He had neither the time nor the money for a social life and he’s naïve about women.

What I can’t buy is that Nick Prenta would fall for her. He’s not the kind of guy who’s going to fall for a woman almost old enough to be his mother. The whole romance between these two is wildly incongruous and totally unconvincing and unfortunately it’s absolutely critical to the plot that the viewer does buy it.

Apart from that problem this is a fine noir melodrama. If you can ignore the problem of Crawford’s age then it’s highly recommended.

The Beast of the City (1932)

The Beast of the City, released in 1932, was MGM’s attempt at the gangster movie genre. It’s based on a story by W. R. Burnett and was directed by Charles Brabin.

To say that Captain Jim Fitzpatrick (Walter Huston) is a hardboiled cop would be putting it mildly. He’s not just hardboiled, he’s impetuous and obsessive. And he’s obsessed with putting big-time mobster Sam Belmonte (Jean Hersholt) behind bars. Fitzpatrick is honest but he’s prepared to stretch the rules a little to get results.

His attempts to nail Belmonte for the murder of four bootleggers backfire, and Fitzpatrick finds himself transferred to the quietest precinct the Chief of Police can find, where he can’t get himself into hot water.

His brother Ed Fitzpatrick (Wallace Ford) is a cop as well.

Hoping to find even a shred of evidence to use against Belmonte Jim Fitzpatrick has a bunch of blondes brought in for questioning. He hopes that a witness can ID Daisy Stevens (Jean Harlow) for her part in a robbery. Daisy is pretty hardboiled as well and she knows how to handle cops.

Perhaps not altogether wisely Ed Fitzpatrick pays a visit to Daisy’s home. He falls for her considerable and very obvious charms. Given that this is Jean Harlow it would be difficult for any man to resist those charms. Seducing Ed is child’s play.

Jim Fitzpatrick hits the headlines after foiling a bank robbery and the moral reformers push for him to be made Chief of Police. His job is to clean up the town. People are having fun and someone has to put a stop to that.

Ed had hoped that with his brother now Chief of Police he’d get an immediate promotion. It doesn’t happen. Ed is bitter about this and he finds that maintaining a mistress like Daisy is an expensive proposition. He gets drawn into the rackets. In a small way at first, and then in a big way. He tips off Belmonte’s chief henchman about a shipment of bank money. The heist goes badly wrong. Ed ends up facing a murder charge. Jim Fitzpatrick is keen to see his brother go to the electric chair. Jim is not a forgiving kind of guy.

It all leads up to a finale that is one of the most extraordinary you’ll see in any gangster movie. Jim has a plan to nail Belmonte. It’s breathtakingly ruthless. Jim will use any methods, any methods at all, to get the result he wants.

Wallace Ford is very good as Ed Fitzpatrick but it’s Walter Huston and Jean Harlow who take centre stage. Huston manages to be incredibly intense without resorting to any histrionics. In the same year he played a very similar role as an obsessed lawman in the superb western Law and Order, a movie which has strong thematic affinities with this one.

Harlow is delightful. She does the full-blown sexy bad girl thing and, unconstrained by the Production Code, she sizzles.

There’s some classic pre-code dialogue. Ed grabs Daisy’s arms. She tells him he’s hurting her. He says she doesn’t like being hurt. She replies that sometimes it’s kinda fun, if it’s done in the right spirit.

This is an extremely violent brutal movie but it’s intelligent and provocative as well. Is Sam Belmonte the beast of the city, or is it Jim Fitzpatrick? Jim is entirely humourless and he’s utterly convinced that he is right. He has convinced himself that any methods can be justified, no matter how brutal. It never occurs to him that he may have become an inhuman monster.

Not surprisingly MGM were horrified by this movie when they saw it and made sure it disappeared into obscurity. One of the many things that frightened MGM was the implication that mobsters and the police can end up being almost indistinguishable, and that good men who believe themselves to be right can be horribly dangerous.

This movie is available on DVD in the Warner Archive series, with a very good transfer.

The Beast of the City is one of the most interesting of pre-code gangster films. Had it been made by Warner Brothers it might have been a major hit but MGM was the wrong studio for it. Very highly recommended.

Tokyo Drifter (1966)

Seijun Suzuki had a lucrative career going making inexpensive crime thrillers for Nikkatsu but his movies gradually became weirder and more stylistically extravagant. Things came to a head with Branded To Kill in 1967 but you can already see signs of his desire to break away from the standard crime movie formula in Tokyo Drifter in 1966.

Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari) is a heavy for a yakuza gang but when his boss Kurata decides to go straight and disband the gang Tetsu decides to go straight as well.

It’s not going to be so easy. Otsuka, a rival yakuza from Karuta’s past, wants to take over Kurata’s legitimate businesses. If it’s going to be difficult for Kurata to go straight then it will be just as hard for Tetsu. His loyalty to Kurata is absolute.

Otsuka comes up with an elaborate plan to force Kurata’s hand. During the execution of the plan there are two murders, and either Kurata or Tetsu might be manoeuvred into taking the rap for one or both murders.

Tetsu decides it would be better for everyone if he wasn’t around any more. So he leaves and becomes a drifter. Like the Tokyo Drifter in the song that his girlfriend Chiharu (Chieko Matsubara) sings.

Of course his yakuza past keeps catching up with him, and Otsuka is still out to get him. A killer named Tatsu the Viper is stalking him.

In the course of these adventures and misadventures he encounters Kenji (Hideaki Nitani). Kenji saves Tetsu’s life. Kenji is also a drifter. A yakuza who becomes a drifter is a bit like a masterless samurai. He no longer has a sense of belonging. There is however a difference between the two men. Kenji had been Otsuka’s man but has abandoned his loyalty to his old yakuza boss. This deeply upsets Tetsu. Tetsu would never give up his loyalty to Karuta. A yakuza just doesn’t do such things. So two men who should become friends become at best uneasy allies.

Otsuka goes on plotting and eventually there must of course be a showdown.

We have to confront the question of genre. A lot of the Japanese crime movies made from the late 40s to the mid 60s get labelled as film noir and many do indeed have strong affinities to film noir. That’s especially true of Nikkatsu’s late 50s/early 60s offerings and several of Seijun Suzuki’s movies are often described as film noir. It’s obvious that Suzuki was heavily influenced by American crime movies of the 40s. The basic plot outline of Tokyo Drifter could come from a 40s American crime thriller. It does however have quite a few distinctively Japanese features. This is very much a movie about loyalty and betrayal, but it’s loyalty in a sense that owes more to the code of the samurai than to anything that you’d find in an American gangster movie. Tetsu is not Karuta’s loyal employee. They have a kind of father-son relationship but also the kind of relationship that would have existed between a samurai and his lord.

Stylistically this is a movie with its own unique flavour. It’s shot in colour, and vibrant colour. There’s a lot of film noir atmosphere but there’s a very strong 1960s vibe. In fact there’s a blending of 40s and 60s style. The nightclub in which Chiharu sings looks very 1960s but she doesn’t sing pop songs. She sings the kinds of songs that a chanteuse in a 1940s Hollywood movie would sing.

I thought initially that Tetsuya Watari was a bit too young to play Tetsu. I’d have been inclined to go for an actor who looked a bit more world-weary. He was forced on Suzuki by the studio and was apparently quite a problem, being too nervous and inexperienced to remember his lines. In a normal movie his performance might have been a disaster but in this movie his non-acting acting works. In a Suzuki movie clothes make the man. Literally. Suzuki thought the key to characterisation was to choose the right costume for the character. If the costume was right nothing else really mattered.

There are also touches of the surrealism that was a Suzuki trademark. This is not the real world. This is not Tokyo in 1966. This is a world created by Seijun Suzuki. The rules are different. It’s a totally artificial world that doesn’t even try to resemble the real world.

There’s a wonderful scene set in a western saloon (it’s a bar in Tokyo in the style of a wild West saloon), with an all-in brawl just like in a western. It’s played for comedic effect, it’s totally crazy and it comes out of nowhere but it works.

When you watch the two interviews with the director included on the Criterion DVD you start to get a handle on what it is that makes Tokyo Drifter so appealing. Suzuki wasn’t trying to be arty. He had no artistic pretensions at all. He was simply trying to be non-boring and fun. He hated the idea of shooting any scene in a conventional way. It was much more fun to do it in a totally unconventional and original idea. The movie looks like it was made as an art film, in a very Pop Art way, but this was entirely accidental. It was simply a product of Suzuki’s determination to keep trying something different. This is a kind of naïve art. Unlike too many self-consciously arty films it is never boring. You never know what Suzuki will throw at you next.

There are so many excellent visual set-pieces. The climactic shoot-out is the wildest most outrageous shoot-out you’ve ever seen.

Suzuki didn’t agonise too much over continuity. The important thing was to avoid being boring. He was much more interested in the production design than in the plot. And the production design in this case is stunning and outlandish.

Predictably Nikkatsu hated the movie. After two more films they fired him. Branded To Kill, usually regarded as his masterpiece, was the last straw for Nikkatsu.

Tokyo Drifter is a wild ride but I can promise you that while you might be mystified you will not be bored. Very highly recommended.

Johnny Eager (1941)

Johnny Eager is a 1941 MGM gangster movie that can, at a stretch, be seen as a proto-noir.

Robert Taylor was a major star at the time but he was thought of as being something of a lightweight, a pretty boy who was fine as a romantic lead but without much substance. Taylor would later develop into a very fine actor in rather dark roles in film noirs such as Rogue Cop and The Bribe. Johnny Eager can be seen as one of his first attempts to demonstrate that his acting really did have some depth.

Johnny Eager had been a notorious gangster before he was sent to prison. Now he’s out on parole and doing his best to go straight. He has a job as a cab driver and he is now a model citizen. His parole officer Mr Verne (Henry O’Neill) considers Johnny to be one of his greatest successes, a living proof that even hardened criminals can be successfully rehabilitated.

Unfortunately for the well-meaning Mr Verne, it’s all a lie. Johnny Eager is still running his criminal empire while putting on a remarkably convincing act. He maintains a cheap apartment in a poor neighbourhood as a front, but he only inhabits it when he gets a tip-off that his parole officer will be paying him a visit.

Johnny is the big boss of the city’s gambling rackets. His current project is to open up a dog-racing track. Apart from being a big money-spinner this will also be a convenient front and a useful place for laundering money. He has the politicians paid off but there is one major obstacle in his way, John Benson Farrell (Edward Arnold), the city’s incorruptible DA, and incidentally the man who sent Johnny to prison.

Everything is running fairly smoothly for Johnny until his parole officer arrives with two young female sociology students in tow. Lisbeth Bard (Lana Turner) is immediately attracted to Johnny and their paths are destined to cross again. Johnny is tiring of his current excessively needy girlfriend and Lisbeth soon takes her place. There are two problems associated with this romance. The first is that Lisbeth is the daughter of John Benson Farrell. The second is that Lisbeth falls in love with Johnny.

Johnny thinks the first problem can be easily dealt with. He sets Lisbeth up in such a way as to give him something big to hold over Farrell’s head, something that he can use to remove Farrell as an obstacle to his criminal activities. The second problem is more difficult. Johnny doesn’t take his relationships with women very seriously. His girlfriends come and go and he assumes that they understand that, and that they won’t become clingy. Unfortunately Lisbeth doesn’t work that way. Lisbeth doesn’t care that Johnny is a gangster, but she does care when he tries to give her the brush-off. This sets events in motion that will threaten the destruction of Johnny’s criminal empire and Johnny himself.

Robert Taylor is superb, as he always was when he was given a demanding role that allowed him to explore the darker side of human nature. Johnny Eager is both charmingly naïve (his knowledge of any subjects not related to crime is almost zero) and ruthless. He really knows very little about what makes people tick and his understanding of women is non-existent. He might be an anti-hero and a gangster but he’s difficult to dislike. Johnny Eager certainly has charisma.

Van Heflin, not yet a major star, is excellent as Johnny’s perpetually drunken sidekick Jeff Hartnett. Hartnett is a writer and an intellectual and seems on the surface of it to be an unlikely person to be mixed up with gangsters (although intellectuals do tend to be fascinated by criminals). Johnny claims that he doesn’t know why he lets Hartnett stay around him, but in fact Hartnett is his only true friend, the only person who doesn’t want something from Johnny. Hartnett always tells Johnny the truth. Those with the tedious habit of looking for gay subtexts may be tempted to look for one here. I personally find it rather irritating when any friendship between men is interpreted this way. I think the friendship between Johnny and Jeff Hartnett is more interesting without the gay subtext.

Lana Turner is surprisingly just a little on the bland side as Lisbeth. Or possibly she’s simply overshadowed by the very fine performances by Taylor and Heflin.

This movie was helmed by Mervyn LeRoy, always a reliable director of this sort of material.  Harold Rosson was in charge of the cinematography. They give the movie a definite atmosphere, and the noir feel is enhanced by Robert Taylor’s interestingly complex performance.

Johnny Eager is available as a made-on-demand DVD in the Warner Archive series. It’s an excellent transfer.

Johnny Eager is either an intriguing proto-noir or perhaps just a very early example of outright film noir. Either way it’s a very good movie and is highly recommended.

The Scarface Mob (1959)

In 1959 Desilu launched its new TV series The Untouchables with a two-part episode The Scarface Mob. The two parts were later combined for a theatrical release so it’s an appropriate subject for a classic movie blog. It can in fact be judged, and judged quite favourably, as film noir. The episode was directed by Phil Karlson, a man who needs no introduction to film noir fans, being responsible for noir classics like Kansas City Confidential.

The Scarface Mob deals with Eliot Ness’s battle to destroy the criminal empire of Al Capone. It was based on the book by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley and it appears that  while Ness’s contribution was accurate enough Fraley fictionalised the final book quite a bit. Nonetheless it’s a gripping documentary-style account of crime-fighting in the days of Prohibition. Eliot Ness was a Prohibition agent who assembled a small team of honest Federal agents who could be relied upon to to be immune from bribery. The Federal government pursued a double campaign against Capone. While they collected evidence to convict the famed mobster on income tax evasion charges Ness and his men would conduct a campaign of harassment, raiding Capone’s breweries and distilleries and cutting deep into his revenues.



This production has a rather dark tone with the Federal agents facing many setbacks and often paying a high price for their successes. Even the ending is slightly downbeat, emphasising that the battle against organised crime was far from won. In fact it has very much the feel of film noir, with its emphasis on corruption and with a major character (and a very likeable one) being killed off (a risk you certainly don’t expect to see taken in a 1950s American TV program). Both writer Paul Monash and director Phil Karlson approach the material in a manner that seems much closer to 1940s and 1950s crime movies than to television.

It’s also rather violent for a TV production with many shootouts filmed in a fairly brutal style. It’s interesting to compare this production with earlier gangster movies that had dealt with Capone. Capone here is a vicious thug and there’s no attempt at all to humanise him.



Eliot Ness would have been an ideal subject for a film noir. He was scrupulously honest but he managed to make a tragic mess of his life, ironically (given that he’d been a Prohibition agent) due to his fondness for the booze. That weakness is not touched on here but Ness does come across as a surprisingly vulnerable hero and he’s certainly no superman - he loses as many battles against Capone as he wins. Robert Stack’s performance became rather iconic as the series progressed and established itself as a television classic and in this opening episode he makes an effective hero with a fair degree of complexity. He’s obsessed and when he loses it hurts.

Keenan Wynn provides fine support as an ex-con turned crime-fighter who becomes Ness’s only really close friend. Barbara Nichols goes delightfully over-the-top as stripper Brandy LaFrance (and some of the scenes of her act are remarkably risque for 1959).



This is no glamourised view of the Jazz Age. This is a world of corruption and violence. It’s very much a film noir world and the style is gritty, violent and sleazy. Tragedy and death stalk this world and even Ness’s famous Untouchables can’t always protect you from this world. It’s a world in which crime often does pay handsomely and in which there is no guarantee that justice will prevail.

The sets and costumes look great and the production looks far more expensive than you’d expect from a television series. Desilu obviously had high hopes for this series and they pulled out all the stops to make it look impressive.



This opening episode is included on the first disc of the Region 4 Untouchables boxed set and includes introductions to the two parts of the episode by Walter Winchell and Desi Arnaz (head honcho of Desilu). Picture and sound quality are both very good.

Don’t expect historical accuracy but with that minor caveat this is really a must-see for film noir fans as well as fans of classic American television at its best. Highly recommended.

New York Confidential (1955)

New York Confidential is more gangster movie than film noir, but it’s a good gangster movie. It looks back to the classic gangster movies of the 30s, but it also looks forward to the gangster movies of a later era.

Made in 1955, it deals with the Mob in a period of transition. They’re still gangsters but now they’re covering it up with a veneer of respectability. They’re businessmen, but the gang violence is still there bubbling away under the surface.

Charlie Lupo (Broderick Crawford) heads the New York operations of the Syndicate. He has put the bad old days of gangland killings behind him, or at least he thinks he has. Until  Pete Androtti carries out an unauthorised hit. Androtti has broken the cardinal rule of organised crime - he has executed a hit for reasons of personal vengeance. Obviously Androtti has to be taken care of, but can this be done without setting off an old-fashioned gangland war, the very thing the modern Syndicate abhors?

The hit on Androtti has to be done cleanly and efficiently. And that’s just what Nick Magellan (Richard Conte) is good at. He does the job so well that Lupo hires him as a permanent employee. Nick is no street thug - he’s smooth, he’s polite, he’s civilised, he’s educated (although one suspects self-educated). He’s the ideal man for the new respectable gangsterism of the 50s - he can make polite conversation and he knows what fork to use at dinner, but if necessary he can kill and do so very efficiently.

Of course things get complicated. Lupo’s daughter Kathy (Anne Bancroft) desperately wants to escape the stigma of being a gangster’s daughter. There is also a definite emotional and sexual attraction between Kathy and Nick Magellan, but Kathy will have to overcome both her distaste for gangsters and Nick’s incredibly strong loyalty to her father.



All is going well for the Syndicate, and especially for Charlie Lupo, while Nick Magellan is steadily rising up the ranks of Lupo’s organisation. In fact Charlie has decided that Nick should do no more hits. Despite his skills as a hitman he is now too important to be risked in that manner. He is being groomed as a possible successor to Charlie’s number two man, and possibly even to take over the operation if Charlie decides to retire. Nick has both brains and loyalty, two qualities that Lupo values highly.

Then trouble strikes. An oil deal falls through. This is an attempt by the Syndicate to branch out into legitimate business although their methods of moving into the oil business are characteristically dishonest. They have various high-ranking government officials and congressmen in their pocket and they are convinced that one of them has betrayed the Syndicate. Charlie believes the best way to handle it is just to take it on the chin. Trying to take revenge on such a prominent man is just asking for trouble. But he is overruled - the other leaders of the Syndicate decide on a hit, and they decide Lupo’s organisation should handle it.



Lupo’s fears turn out to be well-founded, and soon his whole organisation is imperiled. Nick will also find himself drawn into the mess as events move towards their climax.

Is this a film noir? That depends on how you read Nick Magellan’s character. We know from the start that he’s a cold-blooded killer, but by his own lights he’s an honourable hoodlum. He has always been loyal to his employer. He has never double-crossed anyone. And it’s a point of honour for him (and also a sign of his fastidious nature) that when he carries out a hit he does it cleanly. No innocent bystanders get killed. The sort of bungled hit that Pete Androtti carried out, one that resulted in the death of an innocent civilian, is anathema to Nick Magellan. It’s inefficient, it’s clumsy, and it’s wrong. Nick is a killer but he’s an oddly sympathetic character. He kills, but he only kills other gangsters, men who have transgressed clearly understood rules. As the situation spirals out of control he is, like a noir hero, dragged down into a nightmare world where loyalty can be a dangerous emotion and the stakes are very high, in fact the highest stake of all - life or death.



Richard Conte gives another faultless performance. He knows when to underplay but although Nick is on the surface a cold and controlled personality we are always aware that despite appearances he is not emotionless. He is in his own way a tragic figure - as he explains to Kathy, when you’re the son or daughter of a gangster your destiny is already mapped out and no matter how hard you try you’re always a gangster’s son or daughter. Nick’s solution is to accept this, not because it’s a good solution but because there is no other. Conte gives Nick Magellan real depth in his characteristic effective but unflamboyant way.

Broderick Crawford is much more showy but just as effective. Anne Bancroft in one of her often overlooked early roles plays a complex femme fatale role extremely well. A strong supporting cast adds further strength to this movie.



This is a film noir that was quite successful at the time but more or less disappeared from sight for many years until VCI’s DVD release. VCI have done a fine job with this release with an excellent transfer and an informative commentary track.

New York Confidential marked something of a departure in gangster movies, depicting the new face of organised crime. On the surface this was organised crime without the violent gangland wars of earlier decades, organised crime that seems almost respectable outwardly but beneath the veneer it is still based essentially on brutality, greed and violence. An interesting movie, and highly recommended.

Little Caesar (1931)

Little Caesar was released at the beginning of 1931 and it’s the movie that largely defined the gangster movie as a genre. It also made Edward G. Robinson a star.

The movie literally starts with a bang. In fact two bangs as two small-time hoodlums, Caesar Enrico "Rico" Bandello (Robinson) and Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), commit a gas station robbery and two shots are fired. Rico has no intention of staying small-time. He’s going to be a big shot. Joe on the other hand really has no taste for crime. He wants to be a dancer.

They make the move to the big city and Rico quickly establishes himself as the right-hand man of gangster Sam Vettori. Joe gets hired as a dancer in a night-club and falls in love with his dancing partner. Rico’s rise in the criminal underworld is swift but already early on in the movie we see that he has the fatal flaws that will bring him down. As we see in the robbery of the night-club where Joe Massara is now working as a dancer, he is decisive and ruthless, but his judgment is dubious and he is over-confident. He is too quick to use his gun, a mistake that will come back to haunt him.



Rico continues to rise. He and Joe have lost touch, until Joe overhears plans to have Rico killed and sends a warning to Rico. Rico now decides that it’s time to bring Joe back into his organisation. He needs a reliable right-hand man. Rico’s inability to understand that Joe really is determined to have done with crime is his second fateful mistake.

Joe is pushed into a corner where he has to choose between betraying Rico or spending his whole life running. Rico’s nemesis, Detective-Sergeant Flaherty, may be able to get the break he needs to destroy Rico.



Mervyn LeRoy isn’t as celebrated as Howard Hawks or William A. Wellman, who directed the other great early gangster classics Scarface and The Public Enemy but he was extremely competent. To say, as some critics have said, that the one thing that makes Little Caesar exceptional is Edward G. Robinson’s acting is a trifle unfair.

There is certainly no doubt about the greatness of Robinson’s performance however. So much has been written about it that it’s difficult to find anything to add. He’s a wound-up spring of manic energy and menace. Douglas Fairbanks Jr’s performance has been less admired. He was a fine actor but is perhaps just a little too civilised and too nice to be a convincing hoodlum, but then the key to Joe’s character is that he knows himself that he isn’t cut off for a career as a gangster. It’s also an essential plot element that Joe should be a guy who is capable of passing in both worlds, the world of the racketeer and the world of the cultured sophisticates who haunt the expensive nightclubs the gangsters use as a front.



If you’re determined to see every movie through a political prism you can try to force Little Caesar into that mould and see it as the dark flipside to the American Dream or a comment on the evils of capitalism or the despair of the Depression. In reality there’s absolutely nothing in this movie to support such an interpretation. That of course won’t stop film school types from trying.

The author of the novel on which the movie is based, W. R. Burnett, described Rico as a gutter Macbeth and that is the key to what the movie is really about. It’s a kind of ironic parody of classical tragedy. Rico’s single-minded ambition will carry him to the top but the qualities that put him there will drag him back to the gutter again and to his ultimate destruction.



The DVD includes a commentary track by Richard Jewell, a film historian at the University of Southern California. Unfortunately much of what he has to say is the sheerest nonsense. Being an academic he is determined to give the film the correct left-wing political spin. At one point he assures us that Rico could never have reached the very top of the criminal underworld because of the rigid class barriers in the US. One can only assume this guy has never heard of Al Capone. It’s particularly ironic to hear such poppycock from a film historian given that Hollywood itself was a classic example of an industry in which class barriers were non-existent. While a political interpretation might be valid in the case of some other Warner Brothers gangster films the fact is that Little Caesar is remarkably apolitical.

He does, to his credit, admit that the gay interpretation that many have tried to give the film doesn’t really hold water. The gay interpretation is based on scenes such as the one in which Rico is trying on his first dinner jacket and preening himself in front of a mirror. That scene is clearly meant to show us one of the flaws that will bring Rico undone - his overwhelming vanity. That vanity, and the fact that Rico doesn’t have the cool judgment or the intelligence to back up his incredibly high opinion of himself, is stressed again and again in the movie.



As for the relationship between Rico and Joe Massara it always amazes me that so many people today are incapable of comprehending the idea of a relationship between men that isn’t sexual. W. R. Burnett apparently felt the movie could be seen as suggesting that Rico was homosexual and was annoyed by this but I really think he was equally mistaken. The fact that Rico has no involvement with women simply stresses his isolation from his fellow creatures, an isolation that makes him vulnerable in the case of Joe Massara because Joe is the only person who truly likes Rico and shows any genuine loyalty to him.

The friendship between Rico and Joe serves to underline just how twisted Rico’s view of humanity is. While Joe understands real friendship Rico uses Joe the same way he uses everyone else. He wants Joe to be his loyal lieutenant because he needs simple he can trust not to betray him, and someone who can act as a useful front man. It doesn’t occur to Rico to consider Joe’s wishes. In the most crucial scene of the movie, when he realises he will have to kill Joe, Rico gets his first glimpse of what true friendship might mean. Even a man as evil as Rico still has some tiny shred of human decency deep within him but it is too late for Rico.



Just as significant as the absence of women in Rico’s life is the absence of family, again stressing his aloneness.

Rather than taking a political stance the film puts the focus squarely on Rico, on the strengths that allow his rapid rise (his self-confidence, his decisiveness, his ruthlessness) and the weaknesses that cause his equally rapid descent (his isolation and his vanity). There is no mention of the Depression or of Prohibition, no mention of impoverished childhoods, no social context whatsoever. This is the film’s great strength. It makes it a timeless story with universal significance rather than a topical political tract. This makes it very unusual for a 1930s Warner Brothers film.

There had been gangster movies before this film and there would be many more afterwards but Little Caesar remains the greatest of them all.

Dance, Fools, Dance (1931)

You could be forgiven for assuming that the 1931 MGM release Dance, Fools, Dance is another of Joan Crawford’s early flapper comedies, something along the lines of Our Modern Maidens (1929). In fact this is a gangster movie. She does start the movie as a flapper however.

Bonnie Jordan (Crawford) and her brother Rodney (William Bakewell) are the offspring of a fabulously wealthy industrialist. They have been indulged for the whole of their young lives, lives that have been a constant search for pleasure, revolving around yachts, parties and bootleg liquor. Then comes the Wall Street Crash. It’s such a shock that their father promptly drops dead of a heart attack. His fortune had been completely wiped out and Bonnie and Rodney are now penniless.

What are they to do now? Bonnie suggests that the best option might be to get jobs but Rodney has no intention of demeaning himself by performing useful work. Bonnie finds employment as a cub reporter on a major daily newspaper; Rodney goes to work for notorious bootlegger Jake Luva (Clark Gable). He assumes that no actual work will be required - he will simply use his society connections to find more customers for Jake’s bootleg hooch.

He soon finds out that he will be required to do rather more than this, and that working for a gangster can be rather unpleasant. Especially when he finds himself in the middle of a major gangland killing.

Bonnie finds that being a cub reporter mostly involves covering things like poultry shows. She gets her big break in tragic circumstances. The paper’s star reporter is gunned down by Jake Luva’s goons. This reporter had taken Bonnie under his wing and she takes his murder rather personally. She jumps at the chance offered to her by her editor to undertake a very dangerous assignment - to infiltrate Jake Luva’s organisation.

She gets a job as a dancer at one of Luva’s night-clubs and soon catches the eye of the mobster. The facts she uncovers will come as a devastating blow to her.

The movie can be seen as a transitional vehicle for Crawford. She plays the kind of wise-cracking hedonistic flapper that had become her specialty but Bonnie is a flapper who grows up and takes on adult responsibilities. This grown-up Bonnie is a resourceful, brave and determined woman and points the way forward to the roles she would play in her later career. We get to see her dance (and she’s a remarkably energetic and sexy dancer) and we get to see her do some serious acting. She completely dominates the movie, as she was to do time and time again in her subsequent career. It’s a fine performance.

Clark Gable was still playing stereotyped gangster roles at this stage of his career but his star quality is already evident. The supporting players are generally solid. There are a few definite pre-code moments, such as Bonnie suggesting to her boyfriend a kind of trial marriage.

MGM is not the studio that comes to mind when you think of early 30s gangster movies but they did make a few very interesting forays into the genre (Beast of the City being a particularly interesting example).

Dance, Fools, Dance is very much a melodrama but it has some very dark moments and on the whole it’s a fairly effective gangster flick with the addition of Crawford’s feisty girl reporter making it part of the newspaper movie genre as well.

This is one of the best of Crawford’s early movies. It’s been issued in the Warner Archive DVD-R series, and it’s a pretty good print. Definitely worth a purchase.