SMC Founder.Programmer Craig Hammill on Gangster Genre Gems
Like so many evergreen genres, the gangster genre adapts and evolves to fit the times. While it always focuses on those folks who choose a life of crime, the genre is surprisingly expansive in its focuses, concerns.
The Roaring Twenties (1939, dir by Raoul Walsh)
First up, is the great Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart (as the bad guy!) starring The Roaring Twenties. It has a great framing structure of starting with three soldiers in a foxhole in WWI then following them through prohibition as each chooses a different life path. While this movie deals with liquor running during prohibition (as most gangster movies of the 30's did), one could see the update now starting with three soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan coming back and running coke, meth, or whatever. What's amazing about many of the Cagney gangster pictures (barring White Heat which is its own amazing beast) is that Cagney often plays the gangster with a conscience. He chooses a life of crime but he seems to know it's going to lead nowhere and in the end, he often chooses self-sacrifice to save those friends, acquaintances he knows from following his life's path. Gangster movies are also often, implicitly, criticisms of the failings of society at large to take care of those folks society often ignores-veterans, minorities, the poor. This movie sizzles and crackles with great set-pieces, dialogue, and performances. But its startling pointed view of how the times shaped these men give it an added dimension that suddenly makes this gangster picture a criticism of a society not up to the task of accepting responsibility for what it puts its young people through when it ships them out to war then has no plan for them when they come back, scarred and traumatized.
Black Caesar (1973, dir by Larry Cohen)
A blaxploitation movie that riffs on 30's gangster pictures like Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, Black Caesar actually announces itself immediately as being about something much more unsettling (and to our great national embarrassment still topical in 2020): the obvious brutal and unjust treatment of black people at the hands of racist law enforcement. While the movie is a propulsive 70's picture about the rise and fall of Harlem kingpin Tommy Gibbs set to a great original James Brown score, it really focuses on how corrupt racist white people exploit, mistreat, brutalize, terrorize everyone in black society because society at large lets them. Though Tommy Gibbs reaches the heights of gangsterdom when he becomes the godfather of Harlem, he still has to deal with and answer to white cops and the white power structure on the make. When I first saw this movie, I was stunned by the power and electric rawness of a late scene in which Gibbs finally exacts a kind of revenge on the white corrupt good ol' boy cop who has given him grief his entire life. Writer/director Cohen said this scene caused an entire theater of folks in Harlem to get up and scream and shout and cheer. Because gangsterism is a perversion of straight American culture, it can also serve to point out the perversities of straight American culture. Black Caesar, more than most movies with racism on their mind, gets right at the heart of the American hypocrisy that still stains our hands to this day.
Scarface (1983, dir by Brian De Palma)
I know posting about this movie is like saying Star Wars is a good sci-fi movie. Super obvious. But actually Al Pacino's, Brian De Palma's, Oliver Stone's Scarface is a really strange movie. I recently heard an interview with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino where De Niro advised Pacino to have De Palma direct it because De Palma would make the most "strange, unique" version of that story. What great advice. A remake of Howard Hawks' great 1930's Scarface, screenwriter Oliver Stone re-sets the story in 1980's cocaine wild Miami with Cuban criminal exile Tony Montana's rise to top gangster kingpin a wildly perverse negative image version of the American dream. Set to a hallucinatory Giorgio Moroder score, starring a white hot yet ice cold Michelle Pfieffer as the coked up gangster's moll and upping the weirdness (including Montana's incestuous jealousy of any man who touches his sister), Scarface is kind of like watching a Bertolt Brecht play full of cinematic blood baths, driving synth beats, wild camera shots. Pacino gives one of his all time best performances here that somehow miraculously is at 11 the entire time but still feels like it has the integrity of his Michael Corleone 70's work. This movie predicted the excesses of the 1980's because it was an excessive 80's movie. As close as the gangster picture ever got to sci-fi.
Sexy Beast (2000, dir by Jonathan Glazer)
An odd duck among odd ducks, Sexy Beast definitely has the mark of contrarian amazing stylist moviemaker Jonathan Glazer all over it. A mafia heist movie (eventually) that features a terrifying rabbit monster that appears in hallucinations, Beast tells the story of a retired British Mob soldier (Ray Winstone, great as always) who has to entertain a relentless Ben Kinglsey who has come to Spain to recruit Winstone for a robbery. The movie plays somewhere between David Mamet and Terry Gilliam as these two great actors have scene after scene of acting 101: Kingsley wants Winstone to say yes, Winstone tries to find a way to say No that will get Kingsley to leave. The movie morphs into something altogether more expansive and terrifying in its second half. As intimidating as Kingsley is, we suddenly realize the people who sent him are altogether more horrifying. And we meet them including the shark eyed god of death Ian McShane. A great surreal, kinetic gangster movie.
Dead or Alive (1999, dir by Takashi Miike)
Like any genre, gangster movies are sometimes best when they go completely gonzo. I'm not sure Takashi Miike really cared that he was making a Japanese Yakuza movie. Maybe he would have done the same thing if he found himself directing a period drama or a romantic comedy. But for anyone who has seen DOA, nothing can compare with the absolute 1000% gonzo nature of the final confrontation scene. The story of a renegade Yakuza and a renegade Cop who each work to get revenge on a Yakuza clan, the movie, for 95% of its running time plays as early, very engaging if somewhat sleazy/scuzzy Miike. The Yakuza gang is violent and brutal. The lead actors are fascinating to watch as they wage their campaigns of vengeance. But then something happens. . .there's really nothing more I can write here. I've probably written too much already. But it was really here that Miike announced to the world that he was going to be no respecter of genre, convention, story, or whatever. The movie was so popular it became the first in a loose yet excellent trilogy (DOA 2: Birds, DOA 3: Final) where the main actors would return in totally different stories vaguely connected by similar themes. If you're getting tired of the same old thing, check out DOA. It is definitely a different galaxy altogether.
Eastern Promises (2007, dir by David Cronenberg)
This programmer's favorite Cronenbergs are often the left-field surprises: Dead Ringers, Crash, Eastern Promises (look, I love The Fly as well!). They all bear the Cronenberg hallmarks of body horror, neo-classical construction that serves as a kind of transport through subterranean themes almost no other director would touch with a ten foot pole. Here we get the story of horrible violence amongst the Russian Mafia and Russian community in London. Made during Cronenberg's Viggo Mortensen period (History of Violence, Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method), the miracle of this movie is that the story and script are actually surprisingly flavorless. Yet somehow that works in the movie's absolute favor. While the sometimes banal dialogue and plot reveals occur, Cronenberg keeps getting at a subculture and underground and ritual and horrific accepted human behavior that is almost too much to bear. It's as if the surface banality acts as a kind of vaccine or shield so we can walk down a few more steps into hell and bear the heat. Mortensen is amazing in this movie. And there's a jarring naked all out brawl on bathhouse tile I still can't figure out completely how it was filmed (unless the actors just agreed to break some bones). One of those gangster movies that gets at the heart OF the gangster movie: this behavior has been with us for ten thousand years of society. The notion of human beings somehow being better than other animals is a total myth. At best, we're the planet's most horrific shark eyed predators and machines of death.
Gomorrah (2008, dir by Matteo Garrone)
One of the rare gangster movies that is COMPLETELY devoid of any romanticization. We follow interwoven storylines of the mafia in Naples. What's so striking about this movie is that it feels like it's made by the disgruntled, disgusted citizens who've had to put up with this systematic corruption and terror forever. The whole movie plays like a sustained primal scream of "ENOUGH!". You witness folks making horrible decisions you know will lead to their deaths. You also witness the corruption and insidiousness of the mob which is (and maybe always has) been interested in one thing above all else: money. But how, really, is that any different than people on the legal side of the line who exploit minimum wage workers, the law, the tax structure to line their own pockets? While Gomorrah is absolutely an indictment of both the mob AND the government/legal structure that allows the mob to pay off anyone who would take them down, it also becomes a bigger movie about how all our structures need a deep clean and revamp. Human systems are always going to be flawed. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't constantly work to keep them fair, operating, improving. If we the people don't do it, they will collapse.
Written by Craig Hammill. Founder and Programmer of Secret Movie Club.