American Gangsters

American Gangster: as Russell Crowe commented the other day, it's amazing nobody came up with the title before now; the two words fit together snug as a .45 in your fist.

America didn't invent crime or corruption, and there are some terrific British, Japanese and Hong Kong gangster movies. But it was in America that capitalism was held up as a model for social betterment, that the pursuit of happiness was enshrined in the constitution, and that hundreds of thousands of European immigrants washed up - poor, and hungry, with dreams of making it to the top. In America, gangsters didn't stop at extortion and thievery, they set up businesses; "import-export" rackets that serviced the black market economies - alcohol, prostitution and drugs - that WASP society didn't like to dirty its hands with. The first words we hear in The Godfather: "I believe in America."

Of course, America hasn't always been as enthusiastic about gangsters as gangsters have been about America. In the early 1930s Washington accused Hollywood of glamorizing "public enemies" - as early as 1932 director Howard Hawks was forced to release the original Scarface without censor approval, despite the fact his film showed the title character as an anti-social thug. He even added the subtitle "The Shame of a Nation" to appease the critics. All the same, legend has it that the real Scarface, Al Capone, loved the film so much he kept his own personal print.

Even if we don't necessarily "like" gangsters, we respond to them on a gut level. They're underdogs, and they're strivers; they take on their fate head-on. "No one gives it to you. You have to take it," Frank Costello notes in The Departed. There's something admirable about the endeavor and the energy - and it probably helps that they're doomed to an early downfall.

"The gangster is the 'no' to the great American 'yes' which is stamped so big over our official culture," wrote the critic Robert Warshow in 1948. The classic arc for a gangster movie is the rise and fall. There's a tragic quality here that's unusual for Hollywood. Happy endings are out.

Think of the great gangsters, and you think first of their deaths: the coked up Al Pacino firing on all cylinders in de Palma's Scarface; Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway's jerky dance of death in Bonnie And Clyde; Jimmy Cagney running down a city street and halfway up, then halfway down the steps of a church before crumpling into a heap in The Roaring Twenties, or the same actor going out in a blaze of glory on top of an oil tower in White Heat ("Made it, Ma! Top of the world!").

Asked about his trademark death scenes, Cagney talked about seeing a wounded gorilla die in a nature film, how it died in a slow, "amazed" way. Looking back, it seems like John Wayne hardly ever died on screen, but Cagney died over and over and over again…"Each Dawn I Die" must be the archetypal Cagney title. The irony is, no one was ever more alive on screen.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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