Late Edition
By Noel Murray
The first real genre director was Fritz Lang, who made sprawling, resonantly metaphorical films that incidentally codified the rules for spy thrillers, sci-fi/fantasy epics, underworld dramas and superhero stories—all before the sound era. Early American cinema fumbled through the creation of its own genres, like westerns and slapstick, until the 1931 Edward G. Robinson vehicle Little Caesar hit. At that point gangster films became one of the first dominant (and quintessentially American) Hollywood genres. A movie-going public that had escaped the eye-opening inhumanity of the Industrial Revolution and World War I—only to land in the thick of Prohibition and the Great Depression—took quickly to the gangster film, with its slangy dialogue, cool hideouts, casual inhumanity and random violence. The movies spoke truths that Americans in the '30s could easily understand.
Little Caesar kicks off the new, essential six-disc Warner Gangsters Collection DVD box set, forging the mold that most of the set's other movies follow. (The exception is The Petrified Forest, an entertaining 1936 Humphrey Bogart thriller that's more Grand Hotel than Little Caesar.) The box's core is its four James Cagney films: 1931's The Public Enemy, 1938's Angels With Dirty Faces, 1939's The Roaring Twenties and 1949's White Heat. Each of the first three tells essentially the same story: Cagney rises in the rackets until a combination of loyalty and bad timing brings him down. The three '30s films span decades deliberately, starting before World War I then tracing the boom and bust of bootlegging with snappy visual storytelling derived from silent-movie grammar. White Heat, more in the vein of film noir and documentary realism, serves as a kind of epilogue. An older Cagney maintains his underworld cool, with a gun in one hand and a chicken leg in the other, but his image is undercut by blinding headaches and a Freudian mother fixation.
Robert Warshow once observed that gangster films were pure American fantasies: rags-to-riches tales in which the ultimate message was "Don't get too rich." But the gangster film—and the fantasy—changed after World War II. A flurry of gamy noir films introduced the concept of original sin to crime thrillers, arguing that cops and criminals and even average shmoes were all on the same continuum of potential evil. The films let viewers—all bound in the same worldly hell—off the hook for the atrocities of the holocaust and the atomic bomb.
The Criterion Collection just released a couple of classic noirs directed by Jules Dassin, who famously fled the country during the HUAC-era blacklists and found his artistic voice in hit European films like Rififi and Never On Sunday. But Dassin was already on a roll when he was forced to quit Hollywood. His last four American films—1947's Brute Force, 1948's The Naked City, 1949's Thieves' Highway and 1950's Night And The City—are all mini-masterpieces of pulp, full of tough, earthy characters and natural locations. Night And The City is widely regarded as the height of Dassin's noir period, with Richard Widmark brilliantly playing an American hustler unable to make a killing as a London wrestling promoter because of the taint of his past associations. But the lesser-known Thieves' Highway is actually better. A trucker story taken from a novel by A.I. Bezzerides (who also wrote the equally fine trucker thriller They Drive By Night), Thieves' Highway stars Richard Conte as a stubborn man who drives a load of apples up the California coast in order to confront the man who cheated his father, only to find that the corruption of the city corrupts universally.
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Criterion has also just put out a pair of early '50s films by Jacques Becker, who like Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jean-Pierre Melville helped define French cinema's more tasteful version of noir. Becker's 1952 criminal saga Casque D'Or and his 1954 anti-caper film Touchez Pas Au Grisbi give the underworld genre a distinctly Gallic spin, with as much emphasis on cuisine and couture as cops-and-robbers. Casque D'Or stars Serge Reggiani as a turn-of-the-century ex-con who falls back with the gangs when he falls in love with moll Simone Signoret; Touchez Pas Au Grisbi stars Jean Gabin as a veteran heister who pulls off a big score that's threatened by his partner's girlfriend Jeanne Moreau. It's not so much guilt as fate that haunts these continental gangster pictures. They treat violence and romance with the same resigned ennui.
That attitude later defined the French New Wave, with its self-conscious jumpiness. The whole package quickly spread east to Japan, where prolific B-movie director Seijun Suzuki puckishly found ways to inject New Wave exuberance into his disreputable little pluggers. Like the demonic opposite of Japan's beloved Yasujiro Ozu, Suzuki cut up sordid crime stories into restlessly dreamy pop pastiches, with visuals so clear that the dialogue and plot almost didn't matter. The 1963 shoot-'em-up Youth Of The Beast (out on DVD from, again, Criterion) is typical of Suzuki's rebel period, as it follows an inconsequential story of rival yakuza families into a series of mod apartments with pop-art décor. But it's the 1966 quasi-memoir Fighting Elegy that may be Suzuki's masterpiece. Suzuki takes yet another "two gangs fight" assignment and turns it into a coming-of-age period piece, set in the '30s, with Hideki Takahashi as a militant youth with a heavy Catholic guilt complex. When he's not masturbating compulsively, Takahashi sublimates his desires by kicking ass.
Fighting Elegy is based on true events, not that it matters: the teen angst and clashing cliques would resonate even if it were all made-up. The years after Suzuki saw a boom in genre deconstruction, particularly among the "movie brats" of '70s Hollywood, but the closest modern analogue to Fighting Elegy may be Dead Or Alive 2: Birds, by current Japanese cinema outlaw Takashi Miike. Birds starts as a hyperviolent crime story and drifts into a reverie about growing up in a small town. Miike—like Martin Scorsese, back in the original home of the gangster film—exploits genre for the sake of making a personal statement, which has been the trend over the past 70 years. Movies that once defined generations now settle for delineating one man's mind.