Sunday, April 16 | 6 Films
Warner Bros. was king when it came to crime movies. Though gangster films had been around since the 1910s, it exploded in the 1930s as bank robbers and other flamboyant criminals made headlines and Americans struggling through the depression followed their exploits as if they were folk heroes. Little Caesar (1931) and The Public Enemy (1931) thrilled audiences with brutal anti-heroes who blazed a violent path before their inevitable fall and a new wave of gangster movies and crime thrillers followed with Warner Bros. leading the way. The crime movie had come of age with criminals who were more compelling than the heroes who ultimately vanquished them. Along the way, it launched a new galaxy of stars, among them Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Paul Muni, Spencer Tracy, George Raft and Humphrey Bogart.
It was The Petrified Forest (1936) that started Bogart on the road to stardom. It wasn't his first film—the actor had a dozen film credits to his name—but he had little to show for it and had all but given up on the movies to return to the stage. Back in New York he landed the biggest break of his career to date: the role of Duke Mantee, a notorious gangster who takes the patrons of an Arizona diner hostage after escaping prison, in the play written by Robert E. Sherwood. It became a Broadway hit and Bogart earned glowing notices for his performances. Yet he almost missed out on the role when Warner Bros. brought the play and its star, Leslie Howard, to Hollywood for the screen adaptation. The studio wanted to cast Edward G. Robinson, the star of Little Caesar, in the role. Howard, however, was loyal to Bogart and believed that his performance was key to making the dramatic conflict come alive. He also had the upper hand in negotiating with Warner Bros. Not only did they need Howard to reprise his role, the actor controlled the film rights along with the writer, producer and producer of the play. Weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin, Howard cabled an ultimatum to Jack Warner: "INSIST BOGART PLAY MANTEE NO BOGART NO DEAL."
Bogart got the role. He was fifth billed in the credits and the publicity played up the screen reunion of Howard and Bette Davis, his costar in Of Human Bondage (1934), but Bogart's underplayed, simmering performance as the surly criminal (modelled on real-life gangster John Dillinger) commanded all the attention. His performance impressed Jack Warner so much that he immediately signed Bogart to a long-term contract.
Dark Passage (1947) also stars Bogart as a convict who escapes prison but this time he's an innocent man sentenced to death for a murder he didn't commit. There's also another twist: we don't see the face of the film's star for the first half of the film. We watch events unfold through the eyes of the condemned man while Bogart's voice guides our point of view until he finally emerges from plastic surgery and his scuffed face is revealed. "I can just hear Jack Warner scream," Bogart quipped. "He's paying me all this money to make the picture and nobody will even see me until it's a third over." Robert Montgomery had made an entire feature utilizing a subjective camera the previous year, Lady in the Lake (1946), but it was still an unusual and novel approach. In this case it was less a gimmick or experiment than a creative solution to a practical problem and it came with its own technical challenges. The production procured a German Arriflex handheld camera to provide point-of-view angles from positions inaccessible to a heavy, bulky studio camera, including a first-person perspective of our hero rolling down a hill.
The production made extensive use of San Francisco locations, including San Quentin prison and the Golden Gate Bridge, where 1500 fans caused a traffic snarl when they gathered to catch a glimpse of the stars. It also marked a reunion of sorts with filmmaker Delmer Daves, who was a screenwriter on Bogart's breakthrough film, The Petrified Forest, and gave Bogart an opportunity to work with his wife Lauren Bacall again. It was the third of four features they made together.
Crime Wave (1954), starring Sterling Hayden as a hard-bitten Los Angeles police detective and Gene Nelson as a paroled ex-con caught between the obsessive cop and a gang of brutal escaped convicts, is a film noir with a hard edge. According to director Andre de Toth, the film was originally designed as a marquee picture for Humphrey Bogart, but the director fought for Hayden and accepted a smaller budget and shorter schedule in the trade-off. The supporting cast was similarly downsized: Nelson was a musical comedy veteran making his dramatic debut and Ted de Corsia, who plays the brains of the criminal gang, was a busy character actor equally at home playing cops and crooks alike. Two then-unknown supporting players stand out: Charles Buchinsky, soon to be rechristened Charles Bronson, plays the gang's cold-blooded gunman and Timothy Carey is utterly unpredictable as the hophead hired gun brought in to guard the gang's hostage.
The film plays out more like a police procedural than a classic crime thriller and De Toth gives it a quasi-documentary immediacy by shooting much of it on location at night on the streets of Los Angeles. Instead of the intricate lighting of a studio scene, he uses practical solutions: street lamps and spills of neon limn the landscape while hard, single-source lights illuminate the action like a glaring spotlight. They secured an actual branch of Bank of America for the key bank robbery scene, which was shot in a single night, and shot the squad room scenes in the real-life Los Angeles Detectives Bureau. De Toth turns the warren of hallways and connected offices into a buzzing hive of activity and the interrogation rooms into claustrophobic spaces made more oppressive under the harsh, unforgiving glare of the room's bare-bulb fixtures.
Bullitt (1968) added action spectacle to the crime thriller thanks to a groundbreaking car chase that set the standard for the genre. The rest of the film reworks the classic police procedural for the modern era. Steve McQueen stars as maverick San Francisco cop Frank Bullitt, a lone wolf with his own code of justice clashing with superior officers and shady officials while tracking the killer of a mob witness, and Robert Vaughn, his costar in The Magnificent Seven (1960), is the oily Assistant District Attorney. Though he didn't take producer credit, McQueen acquired the property as the first project for his new production company. Impressed by the extensive chase scenes in the British heist thriller Robbery (1967), he sought out director Peter Yates, and he battled the studio to shoot the film in San Francisco. The production was shot almost entirely on location, making use of the Mission District, the Embarcadero, the San Francisco Police Department, and the San Francisco International Airport. And then there's the ten-minute chase sequence, which memorably uses the steep hills of the city as Bullitt's Ford Mustang careens through the streets and becomes airborne in its high-speed pursuit of his target's Dodge Charger. McQueen insisted on performing his own stunts including the driving sequences. Production records show that stunt driver Bud Ekins was behind the wheel for some of the shots but McQueen handled the rest on his own and can be seen clearly in many shots.
The film ushered in a new kind of cop thriller. McQueen's tough, taciturn loner anticipates Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry (1971), the gritty portrait of cops on the streets and the adrenaline-charged car chase paved the way for The French Connection (1971), and the theme of corruption reaching up to the highest levels of law enforcement informed such classics as Serpico (1973) and Prince of the City (1981).
The Yakuza (1974) took the American crime drama to the Japanese underworld. The yakuza genre of violent crime thrillers was thriving in Japan but was largely unknown stateside when fledgling screenwriter and future filmmaker Paul Schrader wrote his original screenplay with his brother, Leonard. Schrader drew upon his passion for Japanese cinema for the story of an aging American private eye who goes to Japan to rescue a friend's daughter who has been kidnapped by Japanese gangsters. Sydney Pollack, fresh from making the hit romantic drama The Way We Were (1973), signed on after original director Robert Aldrich dropped out and brought in Robert Towne to rewrite Schrader's script. Schrader wrote the part of P.I. Harry Kilmer with William Holden in mind but Pollack cast Robert Mitchum, who brought a legacy of film noir detectives and soldiers of fortune to the role.
The production was shot largely on location in Tokyo and Kyoto and featured a cast of Japanese and American stars. Ken Takakura, a veteran of dozens of yakuza films, was cast as Mitchum's Japanese partner and Pollack courted longtime leading lady Kishi Keiko, who had moved to Paris with her French husband, out of semi-retirement to play the film's love interest. Better known to American audiences was Japanese-American actor James Shigeta, best remembered today as the Japanese executive in Die Hard (1988).
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) opens with the written prologue: "What you are about to see is true – It happened in Brooklyn, New York on August 22, 1972." A lot of classic crime movies were inspired by real life criminals or events of the day, but this film draws deeply from the true story of John Wojtowicz. Though he had a wife and two children, he had secretly married another man and, with a close friend, robbed a small bank to pay for his new spouse's sex change operation. Frank Pierson's Oscar-winning screenplay, based on an article in Life Magazine, changed the names of the characters (John Wojtowicz became Sonny Wortzik) but hewed closely to the stranger-than-fiction details of the robbery, which quickly spiraled into a hostage situation, and the people involved. The richly drawn character of Sonny convinced Al Pacino to sign on and his The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) costar John Cazale was cast as his sad sack partner in crime. Sidney Lumet, who directed Pacino two years earlier in Serpico, gave Pacino the freedom to improvise within the screenplay's structure, which resulted in the memorable scene where Sonny engages with the crowd of onlookers and starts them chanting "Attica! Attica!"
A curious footnote to the film involves a New York State statute that stipulates that "profits gained from a written or dramatic reenactment of the crime of a convicted felon, must be held in reserve for possible judgments in favor of the criminal’s victims." In essence, it means that the perpetrator of a crime may not profit from books or movies before victims of their actions are compensated. The law went into effect in 1977 and Dog Day Afternoon became the first feature affected by the statute. Before he went to trial, the producers had negotiated with Wojtowicz for the rights to his story. Once the law went into effect, his earnings were put into an escrow fund which made payments to, among others, Mrs. Wojtowicz for child support and alimony. Wojtowicz, meanwhile, was released from prison in 1987 and played himself in a short film called The Third Memory (2000) where he reenacted the crime with actors playing the hostages.
