Gangsters We Love To Love

Warner Bros.’ DVD arm is releasing many of its pre-Production Code movies according to gender. Its “Forbidden Hollywood” series, which was recently expanded by an irresistible second volume, focuses on women who indulge in sexual bravado. As free souls and the equals of men, they instigate affairs, exploit male assistants, and assault the citadels of power, mounting one gatekeeper after another. These pictures ask us to identify with the women.On the men’s side, we are often asked to identify with gangsters. Four of the six films in the new “Gangsters Collection, Vol. 3” are pre-Code variations on the theme of the heavy who is more sympathetic than the forces of law and propriety. The remaining films cover similar ground while working hard to keep ahead of the censor, resorting to patriotism in one instance and to parody in the other.In all these brisk, cheerfully immoral pictures, women continue to enjoy sexual freedom, but only as calculating hussies whom the protagonist will abandon as soon as the good girl enters the picture. Another difference between male-dominated films and those gathered in “Forbidden Hollywood” is that the molls get their faces slapped, hair pulled, rumps kicked, and bodies tossed into hallways or out of doors. Also, gangster films spend almost as much time in lavatories as in boudoirs.In the 1960s, Jack Warner, the last old-time mogul to rule a Hollywood studio, regarded the gangster films that had put him and his brothers on the map with chagrin. They were movie pulp, pandering to the public’s unslakable thirst for sex, violence, and stylish irreverence. While Paramount went Continental and MGM sought class, the Warner brothers drank from the working man’s trough, where ethnic groups boiled without quite melting.The uncommon common man was exemplified by two unexpectedly fascinating yeggs: Jewish Edward G. Robinson and Irish James Cagney. Both grew to resent the characterizations that made them famous, but audiences didn’t pack theaters to see them expand their ranges; they came to see them assert and defy authority. Notwithstanding the fatal climaxes of “Little Caesar” and “Public Enemy,” they often got away with it, as Robinson developed comedic chops and Cagney showed that tough guys danced and sang. The directors, including the journeymen represented in this new collection, knew the key objective was to keep it moving fast.The vibrancy of these films is matched by their moral combativeness. In that respect, the films continue to incite wonder. When the pre-Code era was first revived in the 1980s on cable (thank you, Ted Turner), audiences raised on the Production Code could scarcely believe that the studios had ever been able to get away with candid depictions of casual sex, impulsive violence, and Depression iniquities. An audience raised on Internet pornography will be less impressed by skimpy lingerie and dialogue such as “You’ve been rubbing noses with movie stars” / “Call it noses if you like.” Yet time has not gentled the buoyant cynicism of these movies, which prize gambling, petty crime, prostitution, and extortion over corruption, piety, prejudice, and unkindness to children and small animals.In the earliest picture in the package, Alfred E. Green’s “Smart Money” (1930), Robinson is a small-town barber with a lucky streak and the hubris to match who’s given a stake to take on big-city poker players and gets fleeced. To use a frequently repeated phrase in these films, he “gets wise to himself,” fleeces them back, and creates a gambling empire. Defending the honor of the woman he loves, he accidentally kills his best friend (Cagney); betrayed by that woman, he gets sentenced to 10 years. He’s the hero.With Robinson center stage, how could he not be? Frog-faced yet lean, he used his nervous giggle and boyish vanity to transform himself into an exceedingly likable popinjay. His every comic gesture compensates for the formal stagnation of filmmaking in an era when the slightest camera pan called attention to itself. Cagney was co-billed despite a small role, which allows him a few silent reactions that make up for the paucity of lines. The film negates insinuation by bringing it into the open: Cagney musses Robinson’s hair and says, “Mother knows best.” Robinson replies, “She’ll be gone in a couple of days and then you can be my sweetheart again, dearie.”“Smart Money” would make a perfect double feature with Robinson’s autumnal poker movie, “The Cincinnati Kid” (1965), though the critical moment does not involve a game. It occurs when the D.A., who insists that ends justify means, frames Robinson and orders his men to break into his casino, smashing windows with hatchets like barbarians storming a refuge of civilization. As he is finally led off in handcuffs, he remains a portrait in indomitable pizzazz.In Roy Del Ruth’s “Lady Killer” and Lloyd Bacon’s “The Picture Snatcher” (both 1933), Cagney’s electricity energizes the now supple mise-en-scène. His characters are complicit in gambling, robbery, and other crimes, but he is allowed to win the girl and complete exoneration. “Lady Killer” begins as a near remake of “Smart Money.” After Cagney’s unemployed usher is conned by Mae Clarke and Douglas Dumbrille, he turns the tables by taking over the mob and Clarke. Then things take a twist: While he is on the lam in Los Angeles, talent scouts find him on Skid Row and pave his way to stardom.The satire of studio life in “Lady Killer” (a Michael Curtiz-like director insists, “In all my pictures, everything must be real … light the moon!”) is milder than that of newspaper ethics in “The Picture Snatcher,” based on the notorious 1928 Daily News photo of the murderess Ruth Snyder frying in the electric chair. It’s a comedy. Cagney toys with a reporter played by Alice White, who sends him out of her bedroom window so she can welcome her fiancé (Ralph Bellamy) with the line, “I was in bed thinking about you.” Lavatory scenes include a Cagney bath with lavender and his hiding out in a ladies’ room already occupied by White. His character betrays everyone, yet emerges triumphant.Bacon, one of the most dependable of the Warner Bros. directors, had a subgenre specialty: gangland comedies. He made three with Robinson, which exemplify unapologetically barefaced low humor: “A Slight Case of Murder” (1938) was included in a previous “Gangsters” set, and “Larceny, Inc.” (1942) will be along. For now, we have the middle feature, “Brother Orchid” (1940).When Cagney’s would-be reporter quits crime in “The Picture Snatcher,” a goon asks, “Whatcha gonna do, open a flower shop?” That’s pretty much what Robinson’s Little John Sarto does in “Brother Orchid,” when he sacrifices his woman (Ann Sothern) to a right-friendly rancher (Ralph Bellamy, of course) and goes off to a monastery, having turned in his former henchman (Humphrey Bogart), who was muscling in on the flower trade. The ending would be risible if it didn’t richly exemplify Production Code philosophy.The two films directed by the strangely morbid Archie Mayo are the most bizarre of the lot. In “The Mayor of Hell” (1936), Cagney plays a crooked ward heeler who sets out to reform a reformatory that is run by a pathologically violent director (Dudley Digges). The film borrows from Dickens and Brontë and anticipates Anthony Burgess, as the punishment visited on the delinquents is more appalling than their crimes. Note that the performance by Allen “Farina” Hoskins is entirely free of racial stereotyping. The same cannot be said of the treatment accorded his character’s father or the Jewish inmate, who is elected treasurer.In “Black Legion” (1936), one of Bogart’s first starring roles and a singularly expressive one, no black or Jewish characters appear, although the legion (despite the opening disclaimer) is based on an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, called the Black Legion, centered in Michigan and Ohio. The targets here are foreign anarchists, chiefly Polish and Irish, but the film — powerful despite stagy direction and invocations of Lincoln and the Constitution — focuses on their tormentors: blue-collar immigrant-bashers nourished by hard times, and shady businessmen who hide behind the flag. The decent guy — transformed by a mob into a madman who destroys himself and his family while killing and flogging innocent people — is the victim. But that’s true of most gangster films.Mr. Giddins is the author of “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books.”

Gangsters We Love To Love

Gangsters We Love To Love

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