Introduction
to the Gangster Films of the 1930s
The Gangster
and American Capitalism
The
mythologised gangster can only be understood in relation to the wider
society, whether he is cast as a villain whose actions confirm the need
for law and order or as an outlaw hero admired for the toughness and
energy with which he defies the system. The gangster films of the early
1930s use the rebellious figure of the criminal and the hierarchical
structure of the criminal organisation both to challenge and to ironise
capitalism and the business ethic. Having made a career of illegality,
the gangster functions as the dark double of 'respectable' society,
undermining its claims to legitimacy and parodying the American drive
to succeed; underworld activities image the injustices and vicissitudes
of American economic life, with its illusions of upward mobility, its
preoccupation with image-building and its hierarchy of exploiters and
exploited.
The
popular appeal of the American gangster figure during the thirties was
divided. Cinema audiences experienced the double satisfaction of vicarious
participation in gangster violence and of seeing violence turned against
the gangster himself. This enabled them, on the one hand, to identify
with criminal rebellion against a corrupt, hypocritical society, and,
on the other, to enjoy fantasies of revenge against criminals who could
be cast as 'the root of evil'. The Hollywood gangster story was conventionally
placed in a retributive frame, and the negative side of the gangster
myth could be seen as the reinforcement of a belief in the 'public enemy'
as an explanation of the collapse of morality, discipline and order
in American society.
This
villainising of the gangster is most apparent post-1935, when a 'war
against crime' was waged in vigilante and G-Men movies exempt (because
of their law-and-order bias) from the anti-violence provisions of the
Hays Office production code that had, by 1934, virtually outlawed the
gangster movie. In the 1935 film G-Men, for example, James
Cagney has changed sides: ‘Hollywood's Most Famous Bad Man Joins
the ‘G-MEN’ and Halts the March of Crime!’
The Mythologizing of the Gangster
From the late twenties on, fictional
American gangsters are no longer the crudely vilified 'defectives' and
physical monsters to be found in earlier representations (for example,
in the films of Lon Chaney or in early 1920s cartoons of grotesque,
diminutive criminals skulking like creatures apart). Nor are they drawn
as the kind of psychopathic gangster later epitomised by Ralph Cotter
in Horace McCoy's Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948), played by James
Cagney as an unbalanced sadist in the 1950 film adaptation.
Gangsters
of the early 30s are instead characterised by their normality, and this
essential normality is closely related to the ways in which fictionalisations
of the gangster’s career can act as wide-ranging critiques of
American society and economic structures. A high-profile gangster, like
any man trying to live out a public identity, poses the question of
what drives such a man to succeed and what qualities ultimately undermine
his power. Sharing so much common ground with respectable, law-abiding
citizens but at the same time functioning outside the law, the gangster
serves both as a figure admirable for his toughness and energy, defying
an unjust system, and, looked at from another angle, as a parallel in
his activities to the criminality of supposedly honest society. He both
collides with and replicates this society's legitimate structures.
Many types of criminal, from the urban
ethnic gangster to the poor farm boy who has drifted into crime, acquire,
in the Depression, cross-class and cross ethnic appeal (the best discussion
of which is in Jonathan Munby’s Public Enemies, Public Heroes).
Both types become symbols of a rebellion impossible for ordinary law-abiding
citizens to enact. The heroic rebel image was reinforced by the Hollywood
versions of the myth, featuring performances of great verve and energy.
Movie
gangsters such as Cagney and Edward G. Robinson were heroes of dynamic
gesture, strutting, snarling and posturing, possessing a blatant, anarchic
appeal. Standing outside the law in a period when Depression America
was cynical about all sources of moral authority, they possessed an
awe-inspiring grandeur, even in death. At the same time, however, they
were a reflection of legitimate society. The criminal big-shot, viewed
in the distorting mirror of the satirist, is a parody of the American
dream of success, ironising the business ethic by the illegality of
his methods as well as by his ultimate defeat; the inevitable fall of
the big-time gangster creates a sense of entrapment in an economically
determined reality. He is the victim of a society in which everyone
is corrupt.
Gangster Sagas and Film
Noir
It
is usual for film criticism to distinguish the classic gangster film
cycle of the 1930s from the films noirs of the 1940s and 50s. Silver
and Ward, for example, in their ‘encyclopedic reference’
book, Film Noir, argue that there are fundamental differences
in narrative attitude. They see the glorification of the gangster in
early, Prohibition-era films such as The Underworld (von Sternberg,
1927) and The Racket (Lewis Milestone, 1928) as still present
in the 'demented idealism' and ego-mania of Rico in Little Caesar
(Mervyn LeRoy, 1930) and Tommy Powers in Public Enemy (1931).
This
romanticising is evident as well in the emphasis on action and the flamboyant
nature of the violence, with its staccato rhythms and blazing machine-guns.
Silver and Ward do concede, however, that gangster films and films noirs
also share iconic and narrative characteristics, and that they can both
be viewed as part of a larger, 'underworld film' phenomenon, with slightly
later gangster films like Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) closer
to the dark mood, the ironies and the sense of claustrophobic entrapment
that characterise noir. Other recent critics have argued persuasively
against seeing any sharp disjuncture. Most notably, Munby (Public
Enemies, Public Heroes) presents a strong case for viewing film
noir as a development of a 'repressed but established formula'. Noir,
in this interpretation, is an infusion of modernist stylistic attributes
which enabled the earlier, 'potentially seditious' crime cycle to negotiate
the censors.
The gangster films and novels of the
30s are in part about the self-publicising and the public interpretation
of the gangster and about the nature of the myth-making. They explore
the desire for legitimation and recognition on the part of the gangster.
Such desires make the gangster vulnerable to the destabilisation of
identity that afflicts the insecure, self-divided protagonist of canonical
film noir, with gangsters like Little Caesar and Scarface
often suffering from a splitting of identity that is evident, for example,
in their doomed efforts to acquire the trappings of social success (flash
cars, stylish suits) and to achieve upward mobility.
Little Caesar
and Scarface
W. R. Burnett saw himself as the writer most responsible for the shift
towards depicting crime from the point of view of the criminal himself.
Little Caesar was, he said, 'the world seen through the eyes
of the gangster. It's commonplace now, but it had never been done before
then...The criminal was just some son-of-a-bitch who'd killed somebody
and then you go get 'em.’ Little Caesar stands at the
start of a period of fascination with the criminal's own perspective,
both in fiction and film. Written in 1929 and filmed in 1930, it was
the most influential of the gangster sagas, imitated in dozens of early
30s films and novels.
Burnett's gangsters are driven by a
sense of social inferiority and, in the case of Little Caesar, by an
overwhelming ambition that made him, in Burnett's eyes, akin to the
heroes of tragedy, 'a gutter Macbeth'. As the novel's title suggests,
the central theme is the parallel between the gangster and the man of
power. It is an analogy that works to ironise the 'great man' in a way
which was to become, for European writers like Brecht and Greene, one
of the more potent aspects of American gangland mythology. In Burnett,
in contrast both to European version, however, there is pathos in the
conception of Rico, who always has, under the confident surface, a sense
of isolation and despair.
The
historical figure who most influenced the conception of the big-time
gangster was, of course, Al Capone, who had by the end of the 1920s
become the symbol of American gangsterism. Capone was accepted as 'a
force in American life that government was powerless to control', his
phenomenal rise to power in Chicago's underworld having made him not
only feared and hugely wealthy but a substantial political influence
and an example of how a gangster could make a business asset of his
reputation. Burnett's Little Caesar was partly modelled on
Capone, but the most famous fictionalisation of his career was undoubtedly
Armitage Trail's Scarface, in which Tony Guarino (Tony Camonte
on the film), the Capone figure, is both protagonist and scapegoat.
Trail
(the pseudonym of Maurice Coons, who had been a detective-story and
Hollywood script writer) immersed himself in Chicago's gangland while
he was writing, researching the book by getting to know Sicilian gangsters.
But he also stood back from his material, incorporating numerous passages
designed to establish a normative moral perspective and insisting that,
as an exemplary figure, the gangster supplies a cautionary tale rather
than a glamorous role model. This was in some ways an approach more
in keeping than Burnett's with the tendency of Hollywood studios of
the time (under pressure to acquiesce in censorship) to add 'crime doesn't
pay' riders to gangster films, in an effort to counter charges that
their aim was 'to glorify the gangster'.
The controversial film of Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks,
was one of the most violent of the 30s gangster films (the first in
which a gangster uses a machine gun). Although it was filmed in 1930,
its release was delayed for two years, until Scarface had been
altered to placate the censors. Whereas Trail’s novel had emphasised
the corruption of the society that created Scarface, the concern of
the Hays Office was, of course, with establishing the viciousness of
the gangster. Hawks himself refused to make the required changes, but
his co-producer Howard Hughes eventually gave way to the pressures.
The Hays Office demanded not just the cutting of a violent scene - the
St. Valentine's Day Massacre – but insisted on a change of title
that would point the moral (to 'Scarface, the Shame of a Nation'); Hughes
also agreed to add a prologue describing the film as an ‘indictment
of gang rule in America’ and to the addition of other scenes that
would incorporate into the film a moral diatribe against the of the
figure of the gangster – countering the image of the romantic
outlaw with images of the condemnation and defeat of gangland evil.
Copyright © 2002 Lee Horsley
The main images above are
from a site called Crime
and Gangster Films, which provides (see Links)
very full summaries of some of the most famous 30s gangster films. http://www.filmsite.org/crimefilms.html
Other images are from:
http://www.moderntimes.com/egr/cover.jpg
http://www.orl.arch.ethz.ch/dl/Chicago/images/
http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/advocat/gmen.jpg
http://www.gambino.com/bio/valday.jpg
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