The Screengrab : edward g. robinson

Public Enemies: The Many On-Screen Faces of John Dillinger

Phil Nugent — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Michael Mann's Public Enemies doesn't open until July, but the appearance last week of the movie's trailer was enough to get chat rooms buzzing and fan boys clapping and speaking in strange tongues. Based on Bryan Burroughs's book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34, the movie features an all-star Depression-era rogue's gallery that includes Channing Tatum as Pretty Boy Floyd, Giovanni Ribisi as Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, Stephen Dorff as Homer Van Meter, David Wenham as Harry Pierpont, Stephen Graham as Baby Face Nelson, and John Ortiz as Frank Nitti, along with such enforcers of the law as Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the G-man who brought John Dillinger to heel and Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover, who was able to turn the headlines about rampaging criminals into a call for a national police force, the FBI. The real attraction, of course, is Johnny Depp as Dillinger, the most charismatic and legendary of the celebrity crooks and a figure who personified the image of the 1930s bank robber as dashing desperado.

Bonnie and Clyde had their doomed-love thing; Baby Face Nelson, who played super-villain team-up with Dillinger for a while, was a genuinely scary thug; Machine Gun Kelly was a hype. But Dillinger, conscious of the good it did him to keep world opinion on his side, actively courted the public with his dimples and courtly manners, so that even his hostages came out talking to reporters about what splendid company he'd been. He tried to avoid the use of violence, pulled off dazzling escapes, and stuck to robbing banks, at a time when nobody had a good word for those financial institutions. It was partly in response to Dillinger's popularity that Hollywood created the movie image of the endearing gangster, and Dillinger himself was not immune to the charms of that image: the movie he was exiting when he was shot down by Purvis's men was Manhattan Melodrama, a juicy ear of corn in which Clark Gable played a lovable rapscallion named Blackie whose best boyhood pal (William Powell) grew up to be District Attorney. When Blackie rubs out a nogoodnik who was threatening to spread some damaging slander about his buddy, who's getting ready to run for Governor, Powell is forced to prosecute Blackie for murder, while Blackie sits through the trial grinning in pleasure at his pal's sturdy principles and courtroom flair. Blackie's last act is to warn Powell, who's now Governor, not to even think about commuting his death sentence, before heading to the electric chair with a smile on his face and a swagger in his walk. Presumably Dillinger spent his last minutes in the theater feeling suitably flattered.

There have been enough wildly different screen takes on Dillinger by now that it's anyone's guess what Depp's will look like. But it seems a safe bet that Captain Jack Sparrow will find a way to clearly differentiate himself from such notable predecessors as these:

Humphrey Bogart, THE PETRIFIED FOREST (1936)

Bogart's character here, "Duke Mantee", represents the playwright Robert Sherwood's theatrical conceit of Dillinger as social outlaw and voice of the blunt common man. (His gang includes a black member, who enjoys goading his opposite number, a subservient black chauffeur.) Duke takes over a roadside diner where the hostages include Leslie Howard as the hero and mouthpiece, a crestfallen intellectual who makes poetic speeches about fate and destiny and other assorted claptrap. Bogart, who has a terrific, untamed look here, had been part of the Broadway cast of the play, as had Howard. His success on stage helped turned around a career that had been stalled, but he was almost denied the chance to be in the movie because Jack Warner wanted his own house gangster, Edward G. Robinson, to play the part. But Robinson was getting tired of waving gats around, and Howard announced that he didn't want to do the movie without Bogart, and there was no way Warner could replace Howard--no one else in the business could have delivered most of his lines with a straight face. The film version did finally get Bogart's movie career properly launched, but his performance wasn't as fresh as it must have been early in the Broadway run, and it would be another five years before another gangster role, in High Sierra, officially made him a star.

Lawrence Tierney, DILLINGER (1945)

Made a decade after Dillinger's death, this was the first film that claimed to tell his story and call him by name, and it also marked the big-time starring debut of Lawrence Tierney. These two things do not compute. In his mid-twenties, Tierney still had a thick head of black hair and a handsome profile, but he already had the voice of a mudslide survivor and emitted mean vibes potent enough to turn sunflowers black and fill nearby rivers with dead fish. He was simply not ideally cast as man for whom violence was a last resort, and the screenwriters, Philip Yordan and the uncredited William Castle, having taken a quick check of which of the two men, Dillinger or Tierney, they had greater need to fear, astutely shaped the script to Tierney's personality. Shot under the working title "John Dillinger, Killer", it's a portrait of a hell-raising psycho with a chip on his shoulder. Directed by the no-name Max Nosseck, it's also an energetically slapped-together knuckle buster of a poverty row production, with a running time of an hour and ten minutes and an especially exciting bank robbery scene that Nosseck didn't shoot: the footage was lifted from Fritz Lang's 1937 Bonnie-and-Clyde movie, You Only Live Once.

Warren Oates, DILLINGER (1973)

This film marked the directing debut of screenwriter John Milius, whose nostalgia for old movies and the era they were made in almost matches his enthusiasm for flamboyantly choreographed displays of bloody mayhem. Warren Oates, in one of his rare flings as a leading man, is Big John, while Ben Johnson, who played Oates's brother in The Wild Bunch, is supposed to be Melvin Purvis. (Twenty years older than Purvis was at the time and radiating a confident, bearlike serenity, Johnson might have been more convincing as Hoover than as the junior agent who, a title card at the end of the movie informs us, ultimately committed suicide, but Milius must have just loved the idea of the two time-tested character actors battling it out in the field.) The movie is full of people like Harry Dean Stanton (who goes out in a blaze of shotgun fire, wearing a fur coat he's taken off a carjacked college student, soon after delivering the line that ought to be on his family crest: "Things ain't workin' out for me today."), Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Dreyfuss (as a surly, punk-ass Baby Face Nelson), Frank McRae, and Cloris Leachman as the Lady in Red, and Milius seems to be having a good time staging many of the actual highlights of Dillinger's and the other gangsters' careers--in scrambled order, so that he can close with the killing of Dillinger, which actually predated some of the other events he wants to include. Weightless, never as dangerous as it wants to be, but kind of lovable, seeing this picture is like watching a bunch of people in period dress play cops and robbers on a movie studio's dime.

Robert Conrad, THE LADY IN RED (1979)

Of all the actors who've been cast as Dillinger, Conrad strikes me as perhaps the most unlikely, though all votes for Mark Harmon (who played the role in a 1991 TV movie that somehow never came across my radar screen) will be counted. Dillinger is actually a supporting character in this film, which was one of the first produced screenplays by John Sayles. Sayles told the story of how a poor farm girl (Pamela Sue Martin) who traveled to Chicago and had to use whatever means came to hand to survive life in the cold, hard city during the Depression came to be on Dillinger's arm the night he was gunned down faster than you can say, "Boy, that Clark Gable's a pisser, ain't he?" Tapping into his trademark liberal concern, Sayles tried to use the Pamela Sue Martin character to show how people are driven to desperate measures by an unfeeling capitalist society, and just to make sure that audiences wouldn't miss that she was meant to be sympathetic, he revealed that she had gotten a bad rap as the woman who set Dillinger up; both she and her new boyfriend (who tells her that he works for "the Board of Trade") were the victims of her Linda Tripp-doppelganger "friend" Anna Sage (Louise Fletcher), who deduced the boyfriend's identity and sold them out to the Feds. This protective screenwriting device has the downside of making the Martin character seem more stupid than necessary, and Conrad gives his usual convincing impersonation of a self-satisfied macho dickweed so full of himself that it's easier to see why people would want to gun him down on the sidewalk than it is to understand how he got a date to the movies. The Lady in Red, which was later re-issued under the title Guns, Sin and Bathtub Gin, was directed by Lewis Teague, who would team up again with Sayles a year later for Alligator, a probing, class-conscious exploration of the worst that can happen if you flush your pets.

Early Howard Hawks Blog-a-thon at Only the Cinema

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

The long-awaited, two-week "Early Howard Hawks Blog-a-thon" at Ed Howard's Only the Cinema kicks off today. "During this time," announces Howard, "my blog Only The Cinema will be exclusively devoted to the films Hawks made up until 1936, and I'll also be soliciting and posting links to writing about these early Hawks films from many other bloggers and critics." Howard also explains that This arbitrary cutoff point has been established in order to encourage people to investigate the less often discussed portions of Hawks' career, before he made the majority of his most famous films. Everyone has something to say about His Girl Friday and Rio Bravo, but how often do you hear anyone even mention Tiger Shark?" That would be the one where a damn woman (Zita Johann) has to go and get between Edward G. Robinson (in fine form, Portuguese accent and all) and his best mate, Richard Arlen, while they're trying to catch some damn tuna. I'm sorry, I know it's early in the day for that kind of language, but seeing Edward G. Robinson in a vulnerable place just brings out the mother hen in me. Great tuna-catching scenes, too. When's the last time you saw that on the poster for Michael Bay's latest?

The 1936 cut-off date doesn't exactly restrict potential contributors to a bottomless pit of obscurities: Hawks, who had another thirty-five years of career left him, had already knocked off Scarface and Twentieth Century by that time. That still leaves plenty of movies, especially those from his days in silent films, that don't get the kind of attention now that his "later" stuff gets. So this public service going on at Only the Cinema stands to be educational if a few people with something to say about the movies hardly any of us have seen choose to pipe up. It's not too soon to start giving some back.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Four

Phil Nugent — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

RICHARD CONTE: Classically handsome and deep-voiced, with a trace of something anxious and melancholy behind the eyes, Conte made his Broadway debut in 1939 and was scooped up by the movies later that same year. The studio announced its intention to shape him into "the new John Garfield", but although Conte had plenty of starring opportunities during World War II when many other established and potential stars were busy overseas, he never seemed to be cast right or to have the material he needed to make a real impression. He did solid enough work in war pictures like Guadalcanal Diary and A Walk in the Sun, where his down-to-Earth, Jersey boy quality provided a much appreciated contrast to that film's misguided poetic intentions. But in muddled, sub-par noirs such as Jules Dassin's truckin' picture Thieves' Highway and Otto Preminger's demented, drooling Whirlpool, he just looked as despondent and confused as the people in the audience. He was much better in Joseph Mankiewicz's 1949 drama House of Strangers, which, while not strictly speaking a crime movie, has similarities to The Godfather, with its squabbling Italian family balling itself up over questions of loyalty and patriarchal authority.

It soon became clear that film noir was Conte's natural milieu, but by the time he gave his strongest performance in the strongest movie of his career to date, Joseph H. Lewis's intense 1955 low-budget crime picture The Big Combo, film noir had slid down to a B-movie genre. Conte starred in Fritz Lang's The Blue Dahliah and Phil Karlsen's The Brothers Rico, then rid out the 1960s alternating between TV guest shots and opportunities to hang out with Frank Sinatra. (He appeared in the original Ocean's Eleven and then turned up in three other Sinatra movies, Assault on a Queen, Tony Rome, and Lady in Cement. Maybe Sinatra decided that, on Ocean's Eleven, he'd taken one for the team by agreeing to play the character who is required to say the line, "Give it to me straight, Doc. Is it the big casino?") Conte was reportedly considered for the role of Don Vito himself, but that was in the early stages, when the studio was thinking of making The Godfather as a cheap little action movie. Its elevation to prestige-epic level automatically took him out of the running for the title role, but by casting him as Don Barzini, the smiling-cobra nemesis of the Corelones who plays toastmaster general at the big meeting of the five families, Francis Ford Coppola was counting on Conte's movie past, with its long-time connection to the world of gangsters and other classic movie toughs (such as Edward G. Robinson, who played Conte's blustery Italian papa in House of Strangers) to give added weight to a character whose brief amount of screen time belies his power and importance in the narrative. Barzini was Conte's last hurrah as a Hollywood actor. He died in 1975 after spending the last three busy years of his life working in Italy and France, where even hacks know enough to be impressed with a long-time professional who has Fritz Lang pictures on his resume.

RICHARD BRIGHT: Was ever an actor more misleadingly named? It's not that Bright was dull, by any means. But he seemed to be allergic to flashiness and determined to never call undue attention to himself. He was very close to being the ideal example of a hard-working, serious character actor who finds his place in the overall pattern of whatever movie or play he's in, selflessly executes it with an unfussy mastery, and then recedes into the background until he's needed again. In 1965, he did his part for free expression and the counterculture by playing Billy the Kid (to his co-star Billie Dixon's Jean Harlow) in Beat poet Michael McClure's experimental play The Beard, which ended with a scene in which Dixon delivered a closing monologue while Bright simulated cunnilingus on her; the play so impressed the authorities that every night, the police came around after the performance to take Bright and Dixon down to the station house so that their eager fans there could have their fingerprints. In 1971, Bright appeared in The Panic in Needle Park, a young-junkies-in-love movie that marked Al Pacino's starring debut. The next year, he found the role for him as Al Neri, the most durable and colorlessly loyal of Corleone underlings in The Godfather. He would reprise the role of Al in Part II, and Part III, made fifteen years and set twenty-odd years later, found him still faithfully plugging away. He can also be seen in The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Rancho Deluxe, Mararthon Man, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Citizens Band, Once Upon a Time in America, and a great many other films. In 2002, he contributed a brief but memorable cameo to an episode of The Sopranos, playing the leader of a low-rent murder-for-hire crew, who negotiates a contract between puffs on an oxygen inhaler stuffed up his nose. Four years later, he was accidentally and fatally struck by a New York City bus.

AL LETTIERI: Lettieri kicked around in TV and movie bit parts for a decade or so before starting to get real supporting roles in such movies as The Bobo with Peter Sellers and The Night of the Following Day, a godforsaken kidnapping-plot movie starring a peroxided Marlon Brando. His performance as Solozzo the Turk is not the most subtle and nuanced element of The Godfather--Lettieri's performance was never the most subtle and nuanced element in any of his movies, not even the ones that starred Charles Bronson--but he had energy and the distinctive presence of a man who'd decided to act as if looking like a warthog in spats was really working for him. The Godfather established Lettieri as a good man to hire if you were making a movie whose heroes were killers and thieves and you needed a clearly contrasting type to make it clear why these other killers and thieves were the good guys. If sheer, unadorned vicious meanness is what floats your boat, it's hard to think of a riper example than Lettieri's bad guy in the 1972 The Getaway, who enlivens his pursuit of the movie's ostensible hero and heroine by abducting a husband and wife (played by Archie Bunker's little girl, Sally Struthers, and Jack Dodson, formerly Howard Sprague on The Andy Griffith Show) and indulges in an infantile, trashy affair with the wife while the husband is forced to watch from the back seat. Off camera, Lettieri seems to have been one of those uncontainable, life of the party types who other character actors tell stories about until they turn into legendary figures. He is said to have arrived on the set of the Bronson vehicle Mr. Majestyk in a car full of hookers he'd thoughtfully brought along to service the crew, which definitely puts those gift baskets that Jay Leno sends out into perspective. Once there, he persisted in addressing his co-star, who played a melon rancher in dutch with the mob, as "my melon-Chollie baby," something that all the witnesses agree seemed to strike Bronson as the single least amusing thing in the world. Sadly, Lettieri would have no more time to feel around for the location of Charles Bronson's funny bone. He died of a heart attack in 1975, at 47.

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We recently asked YOU what Top Tens you’d like to see here on The Screengrab and, among the many fine suggestions, “Other Matt” proposed the Top Ten Ignominious Exits (i.e., “...films of an actor that are less than glorious and not [fitting] the last time we see them on celluloid”)... a list we’ll actually tackle NEXT week, since THIS week, in honor of Heath Ledger’s final completed performance (as the Joker in The Dark Knight), we've decided to examine the other side of the Two-Face coin: actors and directors who managed to fade to black with a fitting and/or memorable cinematic swan song.

Robert Altman's A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (2006)

When this project was first announced, it was a real head-scratcher for many: the sensibilities of Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor would seem to blend together about as well as bourbon and buttermilk. While no one in their right mind would ever equate A Prairie Home Companion with one of Altman's masterpieces, the result is a genial slice of faux-Americana that leaves you grinning from ear to ear. The wisp of a plot concerns the closing of the theater that has served as the long-time home of Keillor's homespun radio program, spurring the cast and crew to put on one last show for the folks at home. The specter of death hovers over the proceedings, but Companion is never morbid – how could it be when said specter is embodied by sweet-tempered Virginia Madsen? The backstage shenanigans and onstage farewells lend Companion the highly appropriate aura of a curtain call for a great American master – the icing on one of our culture's richest cakes.

John Wayne in THE SHOOTIST (1976)

After winning his Academy Award for the 1969 Western True Grit, a movie that gave him the chance to make fun of his anachronistic image and his physical decline yet still emerge heroic, John Wayne didn't seem to know what to do with himself. He spent most of the 1970s alternately starring in stale cowboy flicks (Rio Lobo, The Cowboys, Chisum) that tried to deny that he, or the movies, had changed, and embarrassing himself in imitations of the new bullying cop movies that had displaced the Western (McQ, Brannigan), like some combination of Clint Eastwood and a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a bad rug. He rallied, though, for his last film, in which he played a character specially tooled to provide a send-off for Wayne's screen image. He's J.B. Books, a legendary gunfighter who rides in from the plains to take a room in a small town and wait to die of cancer. The movie itself is sentimental and uneven, but Wayne, fitter-looking than in True Grit and dandified with a moustache, performs with more dignity and grace than he'd demonstrated onscreen in years. He must have suspected that this would be his last chance to tone up the tail end of his filmography, and he didn't let himself down. Although Wayne would live another three years, The Shootist was his last film, and 1977 would be the first year in which he didn't appear in a movie since his film debut in 1926.

Edward G. Robinson in SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

Soylent Green is a cheesy camp landmark of a dystopian sci-fi picture, but it has greatness in it, in the form of Edward G. Robinson. Robinson played the ancient researcher who is partner and roommate to Charlton Heston' tough-cop hero. As someone old enough to remember the planet before overpopulation, global warming, and the depletion of its natural resources turned it into a sweltering hellscape, Robinson's character is an emissary from another world, and so was Robinson, who began his career in movies before talkies and became a star in 1931 when he landed the title role in Little Caesar. He and Heston have an old-married-couple rapport that gives the movie its bit of heart; theirs is the only human relationship we see, maybe the last one left in a world that turns people into scavengers and victims. (Heston and Robinson had almost played together in the first of Heston's future shock films, Planet of the Apes, but after playing Dr. Zaius in a test scene, Robinson concluded that he wasn't hale enough to endure wearing the ape makeup for long stretches of time.) To its credit, Soylent Green gives him a beauty of a send-off, gazing wistfully at old nature footage while waiting for his lethal shot to kick in at a euthanasia clinic; it renders the famous "Soylent Green is made from people!" finale an anticlimax. Robinson died in January, 1973, four months before his last picture was released.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s THE SACRIFICE (1986)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is a masterpiece by any yardstick, a beautiful, uncompromising meditation on the encroaching apocalypse and one man’s attempts to stop it in order to protect his family. Yet if one considers that Tarkovsky was suffering from lung cancer -- the disease that eventually claimed his life -- while making the film, it takes on a poignant new layer of significance. Once, in an interview, Tarkovsky stated “the only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise.” Having built up one of the most acclaimed bodies of work of any filmmaker of his generation, Tarkovsky might have been forgiven for retiring from filmmaking and living out the rest of his days in peace. But Tarkovsky, scarcely 53 years old at the time, wasn’t about to pass away without making one more offering to the gods of cinema. So when the film’s hero (played by Erland Josephson) lays down his life to spare those he loves, it’s impossible not to think of the filmmaker himself, making one final effort to better the art form he loved so passionately and uncompromisingly. Fittingly, The Sacrifice was one of Tarkovsky’s most celebrated films, not only as a tribute to a major work by a master filmmaker, but also as the final film from an artist who had, as always, raged against the dying of the light.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

Take Five: Sweet Revenge

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Responding to criticism that a review of his had unfairly given information about the ending of a thriller, the late film critic Gene Siskel is said to have replied: "Here is the ending of every thriller ever made -- the bad guy dies." So when, in this week's Take Five, we talk about revenge thrillers, we're not talking about movies where some power-tool-wielding misogynist more or less accidentally gets it in the neck after two hours of tormenting co-eds and/or mapless vacationers. We're talking about movies like Xavier Gens' Frontiers, opening in limited and highly disgusting release this Friday; movies where evildoers show up at the doorstep of innocents only to have the tables turned upon them fairly early on; movies where, for at least a third of their running time, the bad guys aren't in control, and the thrills come from wondering how far those who have been wronged will go to get even. While the revenge flick has a pretty shoddy history, and while Frontiers doesn't look like it's going to bring much more than grosser-than-usual levels of violence and some hamhanded political commentary to the mix, not every movie in the tables-get-turned genre is an exploitative dud. The concept may have reached its nadir with flicks like I Spit On Your Grave, but that doesn't mean you can't savor a pretty tasty dish served cold from time to time.

KEY LARGO (1948)

One of Hollywood's first, and finest, attempts at subverting the conventions of the innocent-people-beseiged-by-evil chestnut was this powerful, terrifically acted quasi-noir. When exiled gangster Johnny Rocco holes up in a Florida resort to wait out a storm, after which he looks to make a triumphant comeback, he doesn't count on two things: the presence of embittered but hard-as-iron vet Frank McCloud (played with icily ironic contempt by Humphrey Bogart) and his own terror at a coming hurricane. As the movie progresses, Edward G. Robinson turns from utterly unflappable master manipulator (as in his famously cruel scene with alcoholic gun moll Claire Trevor) to cowering paranoiac, and the desperate sense of terror is ratcheted up to unbearable levels by director John Huston, at the peak of his powers.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)

Wes Craven announced his arrival as a forced to be reckoned with in the world of horror with this, his feature film debut. Too cheap, too raw and too frankly disturbing to entirely escape the exploitation-flick label, this direly unnerving story about a gang of hoodlums who opportunistically murder a pair of teenage girls only to find themselves, a short time later, staying at the home of the father of one of their victims, has far more going on emotionally, dramatically and philosophically than you might expect. But even if it were just cheap horror, it would be one of the most effective cheap horror films of its era. Powerful, creepy, and almost unbearably tense. Bizarrely, Last House on the Left is based on Ingmar Bergman's masterful medieval drama of 1960, The Virgin Spring!

THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960)

Tellingly, this would be the last of a fertile period in the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's career where he explored his characters' relationship with God. He'd never make another movie like it, and though it netted him an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, its shockingly open depiction of rape and revenge caused waves of controversy at the time of his release. Bergman's favorite actor, Max Von Sydow, gives one of the best performances of his career as the father of a young girl who is attacked and killed by bandits who, through empty fate or inexplicable divine intervention, arrive in his home looking for charity. They find only a bloody end. Bizarrely, The Virgin Spring is based on Wes Craven's groundbreaking revenge-horror film of 1972, The Last House on the Left, through reverse time warp technology!

STRAW DOGS (1971)

Perhaps no revenge thriller in the history of cinema has been more controversial than Sam Peckinpah's brutal meditation on masculinity and cowardice. Easily as vicious and manipulative as the worst grindhouse exploitation flick, it dresses up its blackly beating heart in such undeniable artistry that it leaves even people who have seen it and assessed it time and time again not knowing exactly how to react to it. The film features Dustin Hoffman, in an emotionally exhausting performance, as a mild-mannered professor whose good nature is taken for granted once too often by local bullies; it caused incredibly extreme reactions on its release (with Pauline Kael writing one of the most memorable reviews of her long career in startled reaction to it) and continues to do so even now, nearly forty years down the road.

CAPE FEAR (1962/1991)

This effective psychological thriller, based on a terse little novel by John D. MacDonald, has been made twice -- once in a taut quasi-noir version in the early '60s by J. Lee Thompson, and once in a much darker and more provocative way by Martin Scorsese. The particular twist of both versions of Cape Fear is who, exactly, thinks revenge needs to be taken: the protagonist, Sam Bowden, thinks he needs to take revenge against Max Cady, a vicious criminal who's gunning for his family. Cady, on the other hand, thinks he's the hero of the movie -- he's the one looking for revenge against Bowden, who failed to properly defend him in court years before and doomed him to years of harsh imprisonment. The first is too little seen by modern eyes, and the second is wrongly reviled; both are worth a good look for their tense ambiguity.

James Cagney Stands Tall in "Warner Gangsters Collection", Volume 3

Phil Nugent — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Mark Harris dips into "Volume 3" of Warners' Gangsters Collection DVD box sets and decides that it's all about the minor James Cagney pictures. A taste for Cagney, who who credited by obscure film geek Martin Scorsese with inventing "modern screen acting" when he wasn't dancing like a son of a bitch, is always a mark of superior taste and probably evidence that one's mom was real pretty. The first set in the Gangsters series was stuffed with the movies that chart the evolution of Cagney's gangster persona: The Public Enemy, which made him a star (and where he was originally supposed to play the leading man's best friend, before the director, William Wellman, saw the two men acting side by side and thought, well, that's fucked up); Angels with Dirty Faces, in which he went to the chair like a yellow rat as a favor to his buddy, Father Pat O'Brien, so that the Dead End Kids wouldn't get the wrong idea about a life of crime being glamorous; The Roaring Twenties; and the later, primitive-Freudian White Heat, which closes with a death scene that Rasputin wouldn't want to have followed. They didn't really leave much for Volume 2, but it did include some lively, lesser-known B's, notably G Men, in which Cagney, playing an amoral lawyer, is reformed in the first reel after gangsters whack his pal and immediately joins the feds so he can get revenge on the mob.

The new box mops up various odds and ends starring Cagney, along with the other mainstays of the series, Humphrey Bogart and Edward G, Robinson. Both Bogart and Edward G. are ill-served by the selection here: Robinson at least performs with customary force and humor in the whimsical Brother Orchid, in which he plays a crook who disguises himself as a monk with a green thumb, but Bogart looks paralyzed with boredom by the script for the social-issues drama Black Legion, which actually makes the case against masked secret societies that practice lynching seem almost shaky. Luckily, the B's here starring Cagney--Picture Snatcher, The Mayor of Hell, and Lady Killer (in which Jimbo cons his way into a motion picture contract) serve to demonstrate just how hard it was to get in our boy's way. (So does Smart Money, which offers the dream team pairing of Robinson in the leading role and Cagney as his faithful sidekick.) These movies are scrappy affairs, thrown together with gimmicks and cheap thrills, powered by tabloid fumes and peppered with snappy patter. With all due respect to his A-picture classics, in some ways Cagney never seems more contemporary and alive than when he's at the wheel of movies like these, pushing ahead full throttle as he works simultaneously at keeping the audience entertained and striving to get the picture to the finish line before the budget runs out or his personal assistamt is hauled off by the bunco squad. Harris tends to favor The Mayor of Hell, just on the grounds that it has a title that would improve anything from a Strindberg play to So You Think You Can Dance? As a devotee of old newspaper-room movies, my own favorite is Picture Snatcher, for the way that society recoils in horror when Cagney, fresh out of the jug, announces that he's going to abandon his criminal career for one in photo journalism. (The whole movie is spun off from the incident of an actual tabloid photographer who strapped a camera to his leg and got a shot of the convicted murderer Ruth Snyder in the electric chair, just as the current hit her.)

Harris's Slate article is also worth taking notice of just because it features my favorite appended correction in quite a while, to wit: "The article originally noted that in addition to being racist and sexist, pre-Code gangster movies were also homophobic, citing as evidence a line from Lady Killer, in which cops threaten James Cagney by saying, "We'll run you in as a fag, and that'll mean 30 days in the tank." In fact, the line is, "We'll run you in as a vag, and that'll mean 30 days in the tank." Sometimes, you quote 1930s movie slang at your own risk.