Gangster Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (1990/2020) – Blu-ray Disc

January 27, 20211990s, 2020, 2021, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, Gangster

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone
*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Andy Garcia
written by Mario Puzo & Francis Ford Coppola
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

by Bill Chambers I wasn’t a fan of 2019’s Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, but I’m OK with it existing because Apocalypse Now is Francis Ford Coppola’s Great American Novel, and I don’t think he’ll ever truly finish writing it. I don’t care that he recut The Cotton Club, either, especially since his intentions with that one were to give the movie back to its Black performers, who got marginalized in the theatrical version of a film designed to celebrate the Roaring Twenties from inside the Harlem jazz scene. And I enjoyed the bloat of The Outsiders: The Complete Novel, though I’m bummed it knocked the original cut out of circulation–the real scourge of these variant editions. Alas, The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (hereafter Coda), Coppola’s shortened remix of the famously flawed conclusion to the Godfather trilogy, finally tested my patience for his compulsive tinkering. The Godfather Part III‘s problems were always foundational, the result of a studio’s impatience and parsimony and a filmmaker’s baffling interpolation of his own dynasty into the fictional one he helped create, and these are bells that can’t be un-rung. To believe that a new edit was the magic bullet is to blame the heroic Walter Murch–who discovered the movie hiding in The Conversation‘s hot mess of footage back in the day–for the picture’s shortcomings. (Patently absurd, in other words.) It’s interesting to me that in 1991, The Godfather Part III was upgraded to a so-called “Final Director’s Cut” in which Coppola and Murch tried to solve the issue of too much Sofia Coppola by adding more of her, reinstating most notably a rooftop heart-to-heart between Michael (Al Pacino) and Mary Corleone (Sofia) that resurfaces in an abridged form in Coda. (Sadly, the 170-minute Final Director’s Cut permanently resigned the 162-minute theatrical cut to the dustbin of history.) Sans Murch, Coppola sentimentally snips a few of Sofia’s more girlish line readings, as if it’s not too late to spare her from ridicule–as if those weren’t the endearing parts of her uncomfortable performance.

The Story of Temple Drake (1933) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 11, 20201930s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Gangster, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Miriam Hopkins, Jack La Rue, William Gargan, William Collier, Jr.
screenplay by Oliver H.P. Garrett, from the novel Sanctuary by William Faulkner
directed by Stephen Roberts

by Bryant Frazer In 1933, Paramount Pictures released The Story of Temple Drake, an unusually frank melodrama that depicted a brutal sexual assault and its aftermath, with special attention paid to the reputation of the well-liked party girl named in the title. Released during that brief, free-wheeling period before the industry began enforcing its production code to clamp down on screen sex and violence, The Story of Temple Drake took pains to show how a woman could fall prey to sexual predators through no real fault of her own. It also illustrated in detail her downward psychological spiral, fuelled, in large part, by a well-founded fear of the opprobrium of others. Just last week, in an interview recorded for THE NEW YORK TIMES during Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial, reporter Megan Twohey asked the defense lawyer, Donna Rotunno, whether she had ever been sexually assaulted. “I have not,” Rotunno answered, “because I would never put myself in that position.” Twohey was stunned; the conversation suddenly took on a different tone. Rotunno’s response is a textbook example of the ways that privilege blinds people to reality. It must be comforting to believe that you haven’t been raped because you’re just too darned smart to be raped, but it’s also delusional, not to mention hugely condescending to legions of sexual-assault victims who never requested their trauma.

Live by Night (2016)

January 14, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Gangster, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ben Affleck, Elle Fanning, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Ben Affleck, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
directed by Ben affleck

by Walter Chaw I like Ben Affleck. I like him better as a director than an actor, but I like him in both roles. Live by Night is his The Postman. I mean that with affection, and I suspect the film will likely gain some critical and cult momentum in a few years’ time–but not too much, because Live by Night is not quite stupid enough, strange enough, rough-around-the-corners enough, to really latch onto. What it is, instead, is a throwback to the kinds of movies Taylor Hackford likes to make: glossy, edgeless, overheated prestige entertainments that are sometimes, as was the case with his Proof of Life, more interesting for the publicity drama they create than for the films themselves. If you doubt the Hackford-ness of it, consider the embarrassing amount of time Affleck devotes to “steamy” ’80s-era sex scenes, which are made unbearable by the soulful softcore thrusting. For Live by Night, the external mess is the hubbub over whether or not Affleck will direct an anticipated standalone Batman movie to rescue DC and Warner Bros. from their own curious tone-deafness. The spectre of Batman tends to distract from whatever’s going on in the film, especially as Affleck continues to evolve physically into a perfect cube. Since you’re asking, Live by Night‘s earnest corniness does suggest that he is probably the right man to guide a rebooted Batman franchise.

Telluride ’15: Black Mass

September 7, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Gangster, Telluride, Telluride 2015

*½/****
starring Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rory Cochrane
screenplay by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth
directed by Scott Cooper

by Walter Chaw I liked Scott Cooper's Out of the Furnace well enough. It's miserabilist poverty porn, but it features an impressive cast doing ugly work, and I was fine with its stock pleasures as a deep genre exercise in the Next of Kin/hillbillysploitation mold. I like Black Mass considerably less. It's a cartoon with a cartoon performance by Joel Edgerton, cartoon makeup for Johnny Depp, and cartoon accents from everyone else, including a miscast Benedict Cumberbatch, tasked with sounding South Boston rather than South London c. 1882. There's a scene early on when the respectable senator played by Cumberbatch, Billy, is at home for the holidays with older brother and star of this show, Jimmy "Whitey" Bulger (Depp), that plays exactly like an outtake from Johnny Dangerously–card-cheatin', tough-talkin' Irish ma and all. It's funny. Unintentionally so, I'd wager, but in any case funny in a cruel way. Edgerton's big, showy, Townie turn as former boy from the old neighbourhood (I should say "NAY -buh–hud") turned FBI agent Johnny is also funny–for the wig, yes, but for the outrageous overacting, too. It's the first time since maybe What's Eating Gilbert Grape? that Johnny Depp has been out-hammed by someone, so at least there's that.

Boardwalk Empire: The Complete First Season (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

February 12, 20132000s, 2010, 2013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Gangster, Television

Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
"Boardwalk Empire," "The Ivory Tower," "Broadway Limited," "Anastasia," "Nights in Ballygran," "Family Limitation," "Home," "Hold Me in Paradise," "Belle Femme," "The Emerald City," "Paris Green," "A Return to Normalcy"

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Two things right off the bat about HBO's "Boardwalk Empire". First, the Martin Scorsese who directed the pilot would eat the tedious old guy who made Hugo for lunch. Second, for as good as the first season turns out to be, it's based almost entirely on the strength of a cast minimizing the disappointment of opportunities lost. Even the actors, though, can be something of a liability, in that the mere presence of Michael Shannon cues us that straitlaced, proto-Untouchable Agent Nelson Van Alden is on his way to becoming a full-blown nutter. The premise is tired, too, as almost a century's remove from the 1920s American gangster cycle has made the whole genre exhausted. There are no new delights in a midnight Tommy-gun execution in the woods, or an unhinged Guido unloading on a hapless shopkeeper. There's not much joy, either, in trainspotting the parade of gangsters, the Lucky Lucianos (Vincent Piazza) and Al Capones (Stephen Graham, late of Public Enemies) and Meyer Lanskys (Anatol Yusef), partly because if you're a student of gangland history, you're immediately cued to their fates. Implanted spoilers, if you will. The real revelations of "Boardwalk Empire" are Jack Huston as a mutilated WWI doughboy and Gretchen Mol, who spent the first half of her career as Cameron Diaz's haircut (see also: Malin Akerman) but emerges in this venue as an actress of complexity and intelligence. It's enough to wonder what the series might have been were the casting not so otherwise on the nose–a strange liability, I know.

Gangster Squad (2013)

January 10, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Gangster, Theatrical

*/****
starring Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn
screenplay by Will Beall
directed by Ruben Fleischer

by Angelo Muredda In his recent chat with David Poland, Ruben Fleischer bristled at the suggestion that Gangster Squad shares any DNA with Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy. That’s the sort of aesthetic family resemblance a lightweight like Fleischer ought to milk for all it’s worth, but hear him out: Sean Penn’s enterprising mob boss Mickey Cohen, he insists, isn’t a cartoon bruiser in the tradition of Al Pacino’s Big Boy Caprice, but a real guy whose face only looks a little off because it’s been molded by other men’s fists. He isn’t a comic-strip grotesque, then, but a seasoned boxer-turned-kingpin reanimated by a grand old actor and his team of historically-faithful makeup artists. What more could one ask of a Warner Bros. crime movie than such attention to detail? A lot, apparently–especially if the finished product looks more like Elmer Fudd than any retired amateur boxer. Verisimilitude is a nice goal, but it doesn’t suit Gangster Squad, at once a lumbering history lesson and a squib of a gangster picture–a zit on the ass of Mulholland Falls, Lee Tamahori’s somehow more accomplished stab at L.A. noir.

The Big Heat (1953) – Blu-ray Disc

December 6, 2012****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Gangster, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound C+ Extras B
starring Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando, Alexander Scourby
screenplay by Sydney Boehm, based on William P. McGivern's SATURDAY EVENING POST serial
directed by Fritz Lang

by Walter Chaw The pinnacle of Fritz Lang's American noir output, The Big Heat vacillates between hard-bitten and surprisingly tender. A movie of dualities, it positions Glenn Ford's Det. Sgt. Bannion on
the liminal borders between dialectic states: he presents a familiar hardboiled
veneer on the one side, a broken, exhausted, eventually devastated family man
on the other. The picture partitions noir bodily, forcefully into the margins of
the gender divide, and it confronts, full-on, the popular conception of the
'50s nuclear family. It appears fully formed, an irritant to the hegemony of
the American myth of nuclear/consumer nirvana, and it suggests that the cultural
upheaval that would result in the helter-skelter '60s started showing its
fatigue early. The Big Heat is Rebel Without a Cause, except the
mother is killed and the gay kid lives.

TIFF ’12: The Iceman

September 12, 20122012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Gangster, TIFF

*½/****
directed by Ariel Vroman

by Bill Chambers Although The Iceman proves that a movie cannot get by on Michael Shannon's dark charisma alone, Shannon has reached that point in his career where his casting supplies the lion's share of subtext. Hence, a line like "I dub cartoons for Disney"–uttered not two minutes into the film, before there's enough context for it to be a joke or a lie–induces titters of recognition. Of course, most will know going in that Shannon's playing real-life contract killer Richard Kuklinski, who's thought to have dispatched over 100 people, professionally-speaking. In The Iceman, the film version of his life, smut-bootlegger Kuklinski starts a family with winsome Barbara (a baby-talky Winona Ryder) at the same time mobster Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta) makes him an enforcer. He keeps Barbara in the dark about his new profession (his old one, too), telling her he's a stockbroker to explain the conspicuous infusions of cash; by the time their angelic daughters are in middle-school, he's settled comfortably into the schizoid role of suburban-dad-slash-serial-killer. Eventually, he sub-contracts himself out to Pronge (Chris Evans, so skeevy I mistook him for Bradley Cooper), a free agent who operates out of a Mr. Softee truck and gives Kuklinski the idea to freeze his victims, and thus his eponymous nickname.

Mean Streets (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

July 31, 20121970s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Gangster, Robert De Niro

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, David Proval, Amy Robinson
screenplay by Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Bill Chambers I had my suspicion that there is no archetypal Martin Scorsese fan perhaps confirmed for me after doing an oral presentation on him in my "American Cinema" class: A football jock taking the course as an elective sauntered up to me asking to borrow my tape of Mean Streets. He couldn't believe there existed anything like the scene I had just shown–the one where Harvey Keitel's Charlie takes Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy into the back room of their hangout to get to the bottom of Johnny Boy's unpaid dues–despite the strong scent of Abbott & Costello in its staccato rhythm. (For what it's worth, this is also the passage that convinced Warner execs to acquire the film.¹ ) I immediately recognized the look in his eye, the Scorsese itch, and began to long for that first high, as they say; and I probably hope to become a mass enabler in reviewing Scorsese's work. Fitting that Mean Streets should be the catalyst for such nostalgia, marinated as it is in a mnemonic broth that makes the picture more explicitly autobiographical than Who's That Knocking At My Door, with Scorsese going so far as to use his own voice interchangeably with Keitel's when Charlie's narrating the piece (or, more precisely, when Charlie's talking to God).

Scarface (1983) [Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

September 26, 20111980s, 2011, Al Pacino, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Brian De Palma, Gangster

***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert Loggia
screenplay by Oliver Stone
directed by Brian DePalma

by Bryant Frazer One of the most powerful moments in Scarface is the culmination of a violent, perfectly judged sequence of events crafted for maximum impact by screenwriter Oliver Stone and staged with ferocious efficiency by director Brian De Palma. It takes place at the end of a night when Al Pacino's Cuban gangster, a feisty little hard-on named Tony Montana, has survived an attempt on his life that left him with a bullet in his shoulder. He has overseen the execution of his boss, who was behind the hit. He has shot dead a corrupt cop who was extorting his cash and favours. And he has just been upstairs to collect from between satin sheets his boss's woman, a sleek blonde dressed in white who is his prize. The camera zooms out from a medium close-up on Pacino's face as, still bleeding, arm in a sling, exhaustion writ large across his face, Tony Montana peers through 20-foot-tall glass windows, staring dumbly into a Giorgio Moroder sunrise as an advertising blimp floats over the water, its pithy slogan an empty promise of greatness yet to come: "The World Is Yours…."

Once Upon a Time in America (1984) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

February 4, 2011****/****, 1980s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Gangster, Italy, Robert De Niro

****/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Tuesday Weld
screenplay by Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, Sergio Leone & Stuart Kaminsky, based on the novel The Hoods by Howard Grey
directed by Sergio Leone

by Bill Chambers Such is the level of cinematic sophistication in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America that all of the miserable things that happen in the picture make you giddy, filling you with the joy that is basking in an artist's command of a medium. At first, the powers-that-be didn't get it: Warner Bros. took Leone's non-linear vision and straightened it out, and the result was a picture that, though chronologically told, made no sense. This was a fascinating lesson in syntax–films are composed of "meanwhile"s, not "and then"s, perhaps none more so than Once Upon a Time in America, which is about the co-existence of past, present, and future tenses. (It's like an extrapolation of the riddle of the Sphinx: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?) Luckily, the studio saw the error of its ways and reissued Once Upon a Time in America a year after its butchered American release in its longer, knottier international form, and to illustrate the dramatic disparity between the 139-minute domestic and 227-minute global versions, critic Sheila Benson labelled the former the worst movie of 1984 and the latter the best movie of the 1980s. Pauline Kael wrote, "I don't believe I've ever seen a worse case of mutilation."

Road to Perdition (2002) [Widescreen (Dolby Digital)] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

July 26, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Gangster, Thriller

**½/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Tom Hanks, Tyler Hoechlin, Paul Newman, Jude Law
screenplay by David Self, based on the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw A shot near the end of Road to Perdition, Sam Mendes's follow-up to his honoured American Beauty, needs to be singled-out. It's of a hotel room divided by a wall: on one end sits a boy in bed, weeping; on the opposite side of the partition enters the boy's father, wet from the rain with blood on his hands. With painterliness, Mendes and cinematographer Conrad Hall present this moody tableau in what is a continuation of the picture's running homage to the images, themes, even favourite subjects of American painter Edward Hopper, such as an all-night diner in the middle of nowhere, an unevenly lit apartment, and silhouettes imprisoned in blocks of yellow light.

The Sopranos: The Complete First Season (1999) – Blu-ray Disc

December 23, 20091990s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Gangster, Television

Image B- Sound A- Extras B-
“Pilot,” “46 Long,” “Denial, Anger, Acceptance,” “Meadowlands,” “College,” “Pax Soprana,” “Down Neck,” “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti,” “Boca,” “A Hit Is a Hit,” “Nobody Knows Anything,” “Isabella,” “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano”

by Bryant Frazer By the end of its run in 2007, HBO’s mob drama “The Sopranos” had become a cultural institution. Critics essayed strenuously on the series’ thematic concerns, genuflecting and kissing the ring of Don David Chase, the creator and showrunner whose fingerprints are all over every scene of every episode. The show’s run started in the days before DVRs splintered the television audience temporally, so viewers cleared their Sunday night schedules to take in “The Sopranos” even as they broke off into factions.

Public Enemies (2009)

June 30, 20092000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, Gangster, Japan, Theatrical

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup
screenplay by Ronan Bennett and Michael Mann & Ann Biderman
directed by Michael Mann

by Walter Chaw It's possible that Johnny Depp in a zoot suit, firing a Tommy gun from the running board of a vintage Ford, is so distractingly perfect an image that all other considerations are shunted to the soft shoulder–possible for the audience to only realize afterwards that there was nothing much of substance revealed about John Dillinger in Michael Mann's gorgeous Public Enemies. (Possible for Mann, too, who in the process of creating another of his odes to masculinity and bloodshed, accidentally crafted this pedestal upon which to worship the cult of iconic stardom.) Maybe no accident at all, as the movie closest to this one is Terrence Malick's Badlands–right down to a scene amongst law-enforcement officials in which our Johnny is treated like a Hollywood demiurge of a street-thug bank robber. And if Mann is trying to craft a film along similarly fetishistic, Americana-informed lines, then the media is the massage as they say. Aside from that, somewhere down the road from today, we may look back and wonder about the sudden proliferation late in this decade of films centred on Robin Hoods literal and allegorical, robbing from a broken system of fiscal governance to give to (or, at least, not directly take from) the common guy. From our current vantage, though, what we see is the biggest movie star on the planet playing the most famous and admired "public enemy" of the outlaw era, 1931-1935 edition. While there are intimations now and again of darker contextual rumblings, they don't feel convicted; and in the end, there's left just a collection of beautiful pictures as inert as a coffee-table book.

American Gangster (2007); I’m Not There (2007); No Country for Old Men (2007) + No Country for Old Men [’08 BD + 2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

April 15, 2009****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Coen Brothers, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Gangster, Germany, Music, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

AMERICAN GANGSTER
***/****
starring Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cuba Gooding, Jr.
screenplay by Steven Zaillian
directed by Ridley Scott

I'M NOT THERE
***½/****
starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere
screenplay by Todd Haynes & Oren Moverman
directed by Todd Haynes

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
****/****
'08 BD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
CE – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly Macdonald
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Consider the moment when an overly enthusiastic police search results in the demolition of a replica dresser commissioned by Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) for the Carolina plantation he's bought to house his extended family. In one canny instant, there's the suggestion that nothing ever changes: the things we lose in time we will always lose. The image Ridley Scott provides for us as he moves the Lucas clan into their new digs is loaded and dangerous, with a group of African-Americans walking up the lush green lawn of an antebellum plantation–usurpers of a corrupt American Dream that, American Gangster posits, is still corrupt and in essentially the same way. True, there's a cartoon bogey in a New York cop (Josh Brolin) erected as the straw man for all of New York's Finest who's profiting off French Connection junk (gasp, he shoots a dog, and probably also smokes)–but the real villainy in the picture is the idea that the path to true status and achievement in the United States is on the backs of not just others, but entire groups of others.

The Untouchables: Season 1, Volume 1 (1959-1960) + The Scarface Mob (1959) – DVDs

June 20, 20071950s, 1960s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Drama, DVD, Gangster, Television

THE UNTOUCHABLES: SEASON 1, VOLUME 1
Image B+ Sound B Extras D+
“The Empty Chair,” “Ma Barker and Her Boys,” “The George ‘Bugs’ Moran Story,” “The Jake Lingle Killings,” “Ain’t We Got Fun,” “Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll,” “Mexican Stake-Out,” “The Artichoke King,” “The Tri-State Gang,” “The Dutch Schultz Story,” “You Can’t Pick the Number,” “The Underground Railway,” “Syndicate Sanctuary,” “The Noise of Death”

THE SCARFACE MOB
***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D+
starring Robert Stack, Keenan Wynn, Barbara Nichols, Pat Crowley
written by Paul Monash, based on the novel The Untouchables by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley
directed by Phil Karlson

by Ian Pugh I love Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables precisely for the self-consciously fictionalized varnish that curiously seems to have earned it disdain among the director’s devotees. Apart from its romantic, “pure cinema” thrills, however, its Hollywood gloss is the perfect complement to De Palma’s penchant for effortlessly transforming assaults on the body into assaults on the mind: an undercurrent of violence constantly threatens to erupt and destroy the gentle exterior of a make-believe 1930s Utopia dictated by fedoras and pinstripe suits. No such undercurrent exists in the original 1959-63 Robert Stack television series on which the 1987 film is ostensibly based–it, too, is pure romanticism, but of a sleazier, more straightforward breed. Corruption and greed are obvious and rampant in “The Untouchables”‘ world, and the violence that greets dissent is treated as an accepted fact of everyday life. Each episode of the series begins with a brief preview of the scene featuring the most gunfire (usually taking out some poor schmuck who crossed his superiors), which quickly establishes the down-and-dirty rules in play. The greatest aspect of “The Untouchables” lies in how these scenes incite both a visceral thrill and the soon-fulfilled desire to see justice served.

A Slight Case of Murder (1938) – DVD

November 22, 20061930s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Gangster

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Edward G. Robinson, Jane Bryan, Allen Jenkins, Ruth Donnelly
screenplay by Earl Baldwin and Joseph Schrank, based on the play by Damon Runyon and Howard Lindsay
directed by Lloyd Bacon

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's nothing much that can be said about the creamy goodness of A Slight Case of Murder. Debuting at the tail end of the gangster cycle, the film spoofs Edward G. Robinson's Little Caesar persona as Remy Marko, a limitlessly vulgar bootlegger who's gone legit with the end of Prohibition, though his beer still tastes of the bathtub and isn't selling well. Marko thus finds himself in several binds: how to fend off creditors while being $500k in the hole; how to reconcile the fact that his daughter (Jane Bryan) is engaged to a state trooper (Willard Parker); and how to deal with his country house having just played host to five armoured-car robbers–four of whom were plugged by the most sociopathic of the bunch. All good fun, to be sure, but it's not a film for the sussing out of complexities: everything here is blunt, on the surface, and immediately gratifying without the necessity of comment.

Bullets or Ballots (1936) – DVD

November 7, 20061930s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Gangster, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Edward G. Robinson, Joan Blondell, Barton MacLane
screenplay by Seton I. Miller
directed by William Keighley

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover On evidence of three films I've recently screened (the others being G Men and Each Dawn I Die), I'd say that William Keighley is a sadly underrated director, if not quite an auteur. He's the kind of lively entertainer who'd trade drinks with solid studio craftsmen like Michael Curtiz. The fact that he doesn't rate a mention in the Sarris canon is a bit surprising to me: on evidence of those two films and Bullets or Ballots, he deserved at least a footnote in the Lightly Likable section. "Lightly likable" also sums up the charms of Bullets or Ballots, which doesn't offer much of the meat and bone of art but moves briskly, offers the occasional smart line, and schools its audience in the ABCs of crime and punishment in a manner befitting a Warners crime melodrama.

The Departed (2006)

October 6, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Gangster, Hong Kong, Jack Nicholson, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg
screenplay by William Monahan
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is his funniest–and most nihilistic–film since After Hours, which remains for me the most enjoyable of his pictures, not the least for its travelogue of the Wasteland, complete with a gallery of freaks and grotesque statuary. It’s a bleak, Kirkegaardian thing more oppressive as fraught cityscape than Travis Bickle’s New York, seeing as how there’s no filter of the unreasonable to buffer against the assertion that scum does, indeed, need to be washed off those mean streets. That city finds a doppelgänger in the blasted, depressed Boston of The Departed, whose set-pieces unfurl inside dives, abandoned warehouses, and condemned buildings, and in which we find the only relationship worth saving is between a brilliantly profane Massachusetts State Trooper Sergeant, Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), and his captain in the Special Investigations Unit, Queenan (Martin Sheen). The brutality with which that relationship is preserved, in fact, ultimately delineates this as a rare comedy (in the traditional sense) among Scorsese’s long legacy of American tragedies, albeit one that’s laced with poison and the unmistakable taint of a post-millennial/post-apocalyptic stench.

Each Dawn I Die (1939) – DVD

September 25, 20061930s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Gangster, Prison, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring James Cagney, George Raft, Jane Bryan, George Bancroft
screenplay by Norman Reilly Raine and Warren Duff, based on the novel by Jerome Odlum
directed by William Keighley

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Ever the superficially civic-minded studio, Warners saw fit to release this lovely prison-reform drama in the banner year of 1939. It holds up remarkably well: lacking much of the florid speechifying that makes watching 'classic' Hollywood inadvertently risible, it's taut, tight, and unpretentious for most of the way. James Cagney once again delivers as journalist Frank Ross, whose framing for manslaughter (long story) sends him up the river to Hell. The actor is constantly on the edge of tearing someone's throat out with his teeth, a fitting restraint for a film about the pent-up horror of living in stir. Though they inevitably break out the thesis statements for a rather unconvincing finale, Each Dawn I Die is solid entertainment until that point and in spite of its higher instincts.