Sunday, April 2 | 7 Films
In their heyday during the 1930s, each of the major Hollywood studios became known for having a particular look and feel. MGM, boasting “more stars than there are in the heavens,” showcased high-gloss glamour. Paramount granted its directors a significant degree of autonomy, notably expatriates like Lubitsch and von Sternberg, who brought a European sophistication, sexiness and wit to their films. Fox prominently featured backlot homespun Americana. Of course, there were plenty of variations and departures within each studio. But nowhere was this “house style” more indelible than at Warner Brothers, whose visual and narrative identity was bound closely to the studio’s production practices and philosophies.
Warner was unique among the majors in its approach to moviemaking, cranking out releases quickly and cheaply on a budget and timeline usually associated with the minor quickie lots. Jack Warner, the brother most responsible for day-to-day production decisions, was reputed to have said, “I don’t want it good, I want it Tuesday.” This approach melded perfectly with the kind of gritty, urban pictures the studio became known for: fast-paced, socially conscious, full of rapid-fire dialogue that rang with the slang and syntax of the big city. It would be fair to say that Warner Brothers was the Depression Era film factory. Other studios offered escape from the harsh economic and social climate of contemporary life; at Warner those realities were the milieu for exciting, sensational entertainment. The style was essential for the melodramas (e.g., Baby Face, 1933), comedies (Grand Slam, 1933), backstage musicals (42nd Street, 1933) and most of all, the crime thrillers that made up a considerable portion of the studio’s output.
It's interesting to note that even the melodramas, comedies and musicals listed above, along with many others like them, also involved crimes of one sort or another. This was not coincidental. In December 1932, Darryl F. Zanuck, then head of production at Warner, wrote an article for The Hollywood Reporter in which he touted the “headline” type of screen stories the studio had been producing for a couple of years.
“Somewhere in its makeup [a story] must have the punch and smash that would entitle it to be a headline on the front page of any successful metropolitan daily,” he wrote, even classifying 42nd Street and Grand Slam as exposés. “The success of the innumerable pictures along these identical lines that we have produced in the past encourages us to continue.”
The fast-paced crime dramas, so sensational and violent in the pre-Code years, fit Zanuck’s “punch and smash” criteria to a T. The Doorway to Hell (1930), marketed as “the picture Gangland defied Hollywood to make,” was one of the first to feature the elements that would become hallmarks of the genre, but it was the success of Little Caesar (1931), along with another hit from later that year, The Public Enemy (1931), that encouraged Warner to continue producing gangster pictures.
The story of small-time hood Caesar “Rico” Bandello, who rises through the ranks of organized crime, was based on a 1929 novel by W.R. Burnett, whose screenplays and works for the page (Scarface, 1932; The Beast of the City, 1932; The Asphalt Jungle, 1950) drew heavily on his early experiences as the night clerk in a seedy hotel, a job that brought him into contact with all sorts of underworld and otherwise dispossessed individuals. It helped that the Rico character was suggestive of notorious gangster Al Capone, whose name was much in the headlines during Prohibition.
The style that became a template for the genre is economically established within the film’s first minute. Suggested within a heavily shadowed longshot, we see a deadly armed robbery at a gas station followed by a diner clock being wound back 20 minutes to create an alibi; we’re quickly introduced to Rico/Little Caesar, described by Burnett as a “gutter Macbeth,” a “nobody” who longs to “be somebody” like the famous criminals he reads about in the papers. “Shoot first and argue afterwards,” he declares, in the tough guy nasal tones of then relatively unknown stage actor Edward G. Robinson. By the time the dying mobster laments, “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?” at the end of the picture, Robinson – short, pugnacious, decidedly unglamorous – had become an unlikely but popular star, one of Warner Brothers’ most important contract players and a much-imitated mainstay of the genre. (Even his co-star, pretty boy Hollywood royalty Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., leans into Robinson’s vocal mannerisms here.)
Despite the appeal of female actors like Bette Davis and Kay Francis, Warner Brothers throughout much of the 1930s was primarily a male-dominated studio, thanks to these dark, violent gangland tales and the men who appeared in them. Robinson’s chief rival in the genre, former song and dance man James Cagney, had become a star in his first leading role in The Public Enemy. These were not your suave sophisticates and classically handsome heartthrobs who led the rosters at other studios, and the characters they played were far from the typical leading male roles of the time. They tended to be amoral, brutal and unrepentant in their quest for personal gain but charismatic and highly watchable all the same, so much so that audiences often found themselves rooting for them, a fact that gave the censors fits.
Cagney would soon balk at his typecasting, but even when he was cast on the right side of the law, as in G Men (1935), he was expected to deliver the same trademark terse, punchy aggression. He plays a mob-financed lawyer who gets recruited as a government agent and, while still in training, becomes the hero of an operation to bring down a notorious gang. Billed as “the first story of Uncle Sam’s great war on crime,” G Men was one of the top-grossing releases of its year. It also helped greatly to deflect the criticism frequently leveled at Warner for glamorizing criminal life and portraying law enforcement as largely ineffectual.
That “cleaning up” trend was at work again when Robinson played a police detective who infiltrates a crime gang in Bullets or Ballots (1936). His chief nemesis in what reviewer Graham Greene called “a good gangster film of the second class” was Humphrey Bogart, another actor of offbeat looks and appeal who would soon rise to prominence at the studio. The screenplay was co-written by crusading journalist Martin Mooney, jailed in 1935 for refusing to reveal his sources in an exposé of illegal gambling in New York City. Robinson’s role was reportedly based on celebrity detective Johnny Broderick, who regularly employed the brutal tactics of the criminals he was after.
Cagney had one of his best and most iconic roles in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) as a gangster worshipped by a gang of slum youths played by the Dead End kids, recently signed by Warner Brothers. The studio had a few tricks up its sleeve to counter the many strong objections to the story raised by Joseph Breen, director of the Production Code Administration, which had by this point in the decade solidified its power to censor and shape movies from within the industry.
Cagney was given full rein to portray charismatic thief and killer Rocky Sullivan, but his actions are leavened by the influence of his longtime pal, a Catholic priest (Pat O’Brien), and a young woman from the neighborhood (Ann Sheridan), both of whom fret over the negative influence Rocky may have over the wayward kids. After providing all the excitement and violence associated with the gangster genre, the ending of the film reverses any hero worship of the character by having him display extreme cowardice as he is taken to the electric chair. The ending, and Cagney’s brilliant playing of the scene, leaves us wondering if Rocky is really a coward or if he is merely acting in order to disillusion the boys who once admired him. Either way, Breen was apparently satisfied.
When he appeared in a supporting role as a doomed treacherous crook in Angels with Dirty Faces, Humphrey Bogart was still a second-stringer at Warners and would remain so for a few more years, playing a number of criminal characters and getting offed by Cagney once again in the apotheosis of the Depression Era gangster genre, The Roaring Twenties (1939). Raoul Walsh, the director of that picture and a subsequent Bogart release, They Drive by Night (1940), saw something more complex in the actor than just another tough guy and used it to great effect in the picture that made him a top star, High Sierra (1941).
The script by John Huston and W.R. Burnett, based on Burnett’s 1940 novel, has aging crook Roy Earle agreeing to one last job. When that goes badly wrong, he is forced to go on the lam with a dance hall performer (Ida Lupino) who has fallen for him and the scruffy little dog they’ve adopted. Bogart is still portraying a hardened criminal and killer here, but he is given the chance to show greater range and a striking vulnerability, heartbreaking in his rejection by the crippled young woman whose corrective surgery he has financed and tragic in the stand-off with the law in the titular mountains. The film was a commercial and critical success.
Bogart is again teamed with – or rather against – Robinson in a later release, Key Largo (1948). The John Huston-directed drama was heavily changed from its source material, a 1939 blank verse play by Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Maxwell Anderson. The blank verse was jettisoned and a ferocious hurricane added to the story of an Army veteran (Bogart) who comes to the aid of his dead buddy’s family (Lauren Bacall and Lionel Barrymore) when they are threatened by a gangster (Robinson) who holes up in their hotel.
The story gave the Production Code office the usual jitters, but the studio’s response was bolder and more contentious. In an internal November 1947 memo, producer Jerry Wald contended that “the Breen office is narrowing our range of properties down to where we can either make a musical or a comedy” and warned that the censorship the industry was still being subjected to was resulting in empty, mediocre pictures. “Many important events have taken place since the code was written [in 1930],” he wrote. “Is it possible that the code is dated? Certainly, a re-examination is due.” It was an early shot fired in the battle that would see the code’s stranglehold weakened and finally neutered over the next decade or so.
Although criticized for excessive wordiness, Key Largo ranked in the top 20 of the year’s highest grossers, and the cast got high marks for their work. Of particular note, Claire Trevor gives a touching performance as Robinson’s alcoholic lover, a tormented aging moll, based in part on a woman closely connected to real-life gangster Lucky Luciano. But it is her pathetic, humiliating rendition of the torch song “Moanin’ Low,” forced on her by a cruel Robinson before he allows her to take a drink, that likely won her the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award.
Robinson is on hand once again in the final screening in the evening’s theme, Larceny, Inc. (1942). Departing from the usual Warner formula but making wry references to the style, the picture is a hybrid of the gangster and comedy genres, with Robinson as an ex-con who plans to rob a bank but ends up becoming a successful legitimate business owner. Based on the 1941 play The Night Before Christmas by Laura and S.J. Perelman, the plot bears a close resemblance to Woody Allen’s comedy Small Time Crooks (2000), although Allen has never acknowledged any connection between the two.
