Original Gangsters

Over the past few weeks I've had occasion to take a look at the DVDs in the Warner Brothers Gangster Film collection. While MGM was making musicals, and Universal horror pictures, Warner Brothers cornered the market on the gangster picture, and six of the best are included in this boxed set. They are, in chronological order: Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, Petrified Forest, Angels With Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties, and White Heat.

James Cagney is star of four of the films, with The Public Enemy establishing him as a star. Along with Little Caesar, which also came out in 1931, the template was set: the hardscrabble rise of a criminal from petty thief to mob boss, with an accompanying fall. Cagney's Tom Powers works his way up in the rackets, as does Edward G. Robinson as Rico Baldelli, aka Little Caesar. The main difference in the films is that Cagney has a family life--a mother who chooses not to believe he's a gangster (and a brother who knows he is), while Robinson has no attachments, either a family or a girl. In fact, his partner, played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., leaves the rackets for a girlfriend, which sets in motion the events that propel the plot. As for Cagney, he does have girlfriends, particularly one who ends up with a grapefruit in her face.

Both Cagney and Robinson became stars and tried to play parts other than gangsters, but Cagney went on to make perhaps the quintessential gangster picture of the 30s--Angels With Dirty Faces. This is the classic tale of two childhood friends. One of them runs a bit faster than the other, which means the slower one is caught and sent to reform school, and becomes a habitual criminal. The other grows up to be a priest, working with the neighborhood kids so they don't make the same mistakes. This is the stuff of many satires, but watching the real thing again reinforces how well this story works. Cagney plays off Pat O'Brian, as the priest, so brilliantly it was reassuring to know that Cagney received an Oscar nomination. His character, Rocky Sullivan, is all charm. He knows he's nothing more than a crook, but deep down he has a heart, particularly when it comes to the boys he befriends, played by The Dead End Kids. The film ends in a gut-wrenching scene, when O'Brian asks Rocky, who is on his way to the deathhouse, to show cowardice so the boys won't idolize him. Initially he refuses, but when he's brought to the chair, he screams in terror, while the camera focuses on O'Brian's face, which produces a single tear. If you don't get emotional while watching then you're just too hard.

Cagney also stars in The Roaring Twenties, as Eddie Bartlett, a World War I vet who can't get a job after the war so turns to bootlegging. This film illustrates how Warner Brothers got around censorship--they made sure these shoot 'em ups were infused with sociology. All of the hoods in these pictures are in some ways victims of their upbringings, whether it be coddling parents, impossible living conditions, or economic pressures. In this film, Cagney is clearly a victim of circumstances, contrasted with his foil, played by Humphrey Bogart.

Bogart is in three of these films, all as a heavy. He exploded on the film world in The Petrified Forest, which was adapted from a play by Robert Sherwood. The stars of the film were a very young Bette Davis, as a girl stuck at a diner in a dead end desert town. She is enchanted by a drifter, played by Leslie Howard, who is an intellectual. He is intrigued by the nearby petrified forest, and thinks of it as a metaphor for his own existence. Enter Bogart as Duke Mantee, a gangster on the run, who holes up in the diner with a group of hostages. Bogart gives one of the more menacing performances you're likely to see, paying particular attention to how he holds his hands and hunches his shoulders. You don't want to run across him in a dark alley. Yet he is also vulnerable, giving up a sure chance at freedom to wait for his girl.

In Angels With Dirty Faces and The Roaring Twenties, Bogart played sniveling, sadistic cowards. In one of the extras it is shown how Bogart was killed by Cagney in three pictures (the two mentioned plus a Western). It wasn't until The Maltese Falcon that Bogart began to play heroic characters.

Cagney left Warner Brothers after Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1942 and didn't return until 1949 to make his valedictory gangster picture, the brilliant White Heat. This was a different era, when we were on the cusp of the television era and the gangster picture was already tired. In this film, Cagney plays Cody Jarrett, a psychopathic hoodlum who really has a mother problem--his Ma in this pic, played by Margaret Wycherly, actually aids and abets his crimes. She's great, but Cagney is scintillating as Jarrett, who is clearly battling insanity. Instead of committing crimes because of society, this time it's psychology that's at issue. Cagney was almost fifty when he made this film, a little jowly and wrinkled, but just as unrelentingly terrifying, as he would just as soon shoot you as you look at you. A couple of scenes really stand out: the jailhouse scene where Jarrett learns his mother is dead, and of course the classic ending, when he cries out, "Made it Ma, top of the world!" just before a gas tank explodes beneath his feet.

The discs in this collection have great extras. Each one has a built-in program to recreate a night at a Warner Brothers movie in whatever particular year the film is from. You get a trailer, a newsreel, a short, and a cartoon. There's also an original documentary for each film. Some of the commentaries are excessively academic (they are by film professors, after all), but any student of the golden age of Hollywood would do well to have these in his collection.