Mob Scenes Movie Nurture America’s Fascination With Career Criminals
Think of how many ways there are to pronounce the word “splatter.”
Now, imagine Tim Roth uttering that exact word in a specific context - as in, “I’ll splatter his blood all over this town” - a line he delivers with characteristic gusto in Bill Duke’s recent gangster movie “Hoodlum.”
In the film, a period piece set in 1930s New York, Roth plays bootlegger and gangster Dutch Schultz, who in real life made big headlines by bumping off a number of his rivals.
Then, on Oct. 23, 1935, he made even bigger headlines by being killed himself.
The victim of his own paranoid ambitions, Schultz was gunned down - so the stories go - by other mobsters who considered him too crazy to trust.
They likely had good reason. All reports indicate that Schultz - born Arthur Flegenheimer - was a sociopath with the temper of a tired 3-year-old and the compassion of a pit bull on attack command.
All of which makes him an attractive character to watch on the big screen. We Americans love our antiheroes, especially when they reject the crumbs that were their birthrights and reach for riches with both hands.
Don’t believe me? Well, answer this: In “The Godfather,” Francis Ford Coppola’s epic study of an Italian gangster family, which Corleone brother makes the biggest impression? Michael? Fredo?
Or Sonny, the eldest sibling who beats his sister’s husband bloody, who takes his men “to the mattresses” to revenge his father’s shooting, who dies in a blazing ambush while on the way (he thinks) to again protect his sister?
As calls go, it’s not even close.
It’s no surprise then that, dead now these six decades, Dutch Schultz still lives in film. In addition to Roth, the pistol-packing Dutchman has been portrayed by a whole range of talented actors, from Dustin Hoffman to James Remar, Vic Morrow to Vincent Gardenia.
And Schultz is hardly alone. Hollywood has glamorized the likes of Al Capone, Ma Barker, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, John Dillinger, Legs Diamond, Bugsy Siegel, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and more.
Most have been the subject of at least one definitive film, marked by a performance that - for one reason or another - has gone down in Hollywood history.
Let’s look at a half-dozen of the more memorable portrayals, starting with…
Dutch Schultz
Typically, we would begin with the godfather of all ‘30s-era gangsters, “Scarface” Al Capone. But as bad guys go, I prefer Schultz. Why? Because Schultz was the classic underdog - a loser who refused to admit it. He was the prototype of a fighter who goes down swinging, the guy who would die rather than face the shame of losing.
The famous photo of him lying on a hospital gurney, looking down at the bullet holes that would kill him just hours later, graphically portrays Schultz’s shock over how events finally had gone beyond his control. “How could this happen to me?” he seems to be saying.
Of course, what other concerns would a self-absorbed sociopath have?
Billy Bathgate - In this adaptation of the novel by E.L. Doctorow, director Robert Benton benefitted greatly from having a two-time Oscar winner play the colorful Dutch. Overall, the film is only half successful at blending its rites-of-passage theme with Doctorow’s study of social Darwinism. But the movie works whenever Dustin Hoffman takes the screen.
Combining bits and pieces of characters he has played over the years - Ratso Rizzo, Rain Man, even Tootsie - Hoffman portrays Schultz as an evil pre-adolescent, the ultimate bad seed. Not wanting to share his wealth, and incapable of believing good of anyone else, he smashes everything and everyone who stands in his way. Until, finally, the adults smash him.
The Cotton Club - James Remar is a character actor who just missed stardom. His looks limit him to offbeat roles, and his acting range doesn’t allow him to stretch far from the bad-guy and sidekick roles he has played in such films as “48Hrs” and “The Phantom.”
But Francis Ford Coppola, who knows a bit about gangsters, chose Remar to play Schultz in this 1982 film about the people who frequented Harlem’s great nightclub. And the actor, with his gravelly voice and hangdog expressions, comes through with the performance of his career.
Hoodlum - Tim Roth is an English actor who specializes in playing offbeat characters in smaller-budgeted independent films. He played the restaurant robber in “Pulp Fiction,” the paroled-but-unrepentant criminal in Woody Allen’s “Everyone Says I Love You” and Vincent Van Gogh in Robert Altman’s “Vincent & Theo.”
Like most actors long confined to the constraints of playing character as written, Roth jumped at the chance to stretch. He spits, he snarls, he chews off his lines with knowledge that he’s coming close to caricature. But while nearly overplaying (think Al Pacino in “Scent of a Woman”), Roth holds back just enough.
The result is a performance that, despite a cast including Laurence Fishburne, Andy Garcia and Cicely Tyson, ends up carrying Bill Duke’s film. The simple truth is, whenever Roth is on screen, “Hoodlum” vibrates with energy; when he dies, so does the film.
Al Capone
Here’s one of life’s little ironies: Accused of every crime imaginable, including being the man behind the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Al Capone was brought down by bad bookkeeping. A tax-evasion conviction ended his reign as Chicago’s top mob boss.
Befitting his stature among the gangsters of his day, Capone and characters based on him have been featured in a number of movies since the early ‘30s. In most, he comes across as the consummate bully - different from, say, Schultz in that he never loses a battle on his own terms.
Scarface - In his day, Paul Muni was known for portraying a range of public figures - from Louis Pasteur to Emile Zola to Benito Juarez. But his first starring role came in 1932 in this Howard Hawks film, which had him portraying a Capone-like character named Tony Camonte.
At times over the top, playing the mob boss with wide-eyed abandon, Muni is campy in the best way. His best line: “I’m goin’ to write my name all over this town in big letters,” he says, holding a tommy gun. “Outta my way, I’m spittin’.”
Little Caesar - Although it predated Hawks’ “Scarface,” and similarly was based on a Capone-like character (named Rico Bandello), this 1930 movie offered Edward G. Robinson the chance to play an unrepentant thug. In doing so, and well, he typecast himself. The flip side was that it kicked off what would be a long career.
The Untouchables - Robert De Niro is known for performances that virtually smolder with repressed emotions (“You talkin’ to me?”). As Al Capone in Brian De Palma’s 1987 feature, De Niro had what amounted to little more than a cameo role. But he made the most of it.
And he especially stands out in what may be the film’s most controversial scene, a banquet where Capone begins lauding a couple of men and ends up beating them to death with a baseball bat. This sequence, which was based on a real event, was judged so violent that a similar scene, though filmed, was cut from the final print of Hawks’ “Scarface.”
De Palma, who made the 1983 “Scarface” update with Al Pacino (“Say hello to my leetle fran”), obviously had no such reservations.
Ma Barker
Kate “Ma” Barker was the real-life leader of a gang composed mostly of her kin (including son Fred), whose crime spree ended in a 1935 FBI ambush. She was portrayed by, among others, Blanche Yurka as Ma Webster in the 1940 movie “Queen of the Mob,” by Jean Harvey in “Guns Don’t Argue” (1955) and by Lurene Tuttle in 1960’s “Ma Barker’s Killer Brood.”
Yet there really has been only one actress with brass enough to give Ma Barker the rush of blowzy energy she deserved: Shelley Winters.
Bloody Mama - Another two-time Oscar winner (one, believe it or not, came for 1972’s “The Poseidon Adventure”), Winters didn’t play shy in this 1970 Roger Corman cheapie. This made her the perfect nightmare Ma.
Typical of producer/director Roger Corman, “Bloody Mama” left little to the imagination. Death comes from every source imaginable, machine guns to bathtubs, and at the center of it all is Winters, her screechy voice commanding incestuous obedience to the very end.
Note: The Barker gang was played by the likes of actors Robert De Niro, Don Stroud, Bruce Dern and Robert Walden.
Bonnie and Clyde
Other than John Dillinger (see below), the bank-robbing duo of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow was subjected to the most colorful fantasies by a Depression-era audience hungry for new heroes.
But they were hardly the Robin Hood types that the movies portrayed. “Persons in Hiding” (1939), which starred Patricia Morison and J. Carrol Naish, is suspect if for no other reason than its source was a book “written” by J. Edgar Hoover. Dorothy Provine played Parker in 1958’s “The Bonnie Parker Story,” which curiously made no mention of Barrow.
Bonnie and Clyde - But then a true master director, Arthur Penn, took on the story, and the result was one of the greatest gangster studies of all. Parker was played by the young Faye Dunaway, Barrow by Warren Beatty, and secondary characters included the Oscar-winning duo of Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons.
Penn’s film - which climaxes in one of the most bloody sequences ever filmed - helped change Hollywood’s attitude toward violence (which is good or bad depending on your viewpoint). More important, though, he tended to see the killers as more complex characters - architects as well as victims of their life and times.
John Dillinger
His life ended on the night of Sept. 22, 1934, when he was ambushed outside Chicago’s Biograph theater. Until then, Dillinger had managed to escape one trap after another laid by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
His actual career was fairly modest, considering all the stories written about him - a few bank robberies, two daring escapes. His reputation was heightened both by the tabloid-type sensibilities of the day and by J. Edgar Hoover’s desire to make the FBI look good.
Whatever, Dillinger made a dashing anti-hero, one who was played by such actors as Lawrence Tierney (“Dillinger,” 1945), Leo Gordon (“Baby Face Nelson,” 1957), Scott Peters (“The FBI Story,” 1959), Nick Adams (“Young Dillinger,” 1965), Robert Conrad (“The Lady in Red,” 1979 and Mark Harmon (“Dillinger,” 1990).
Dillinger - Yet it wasn’t until the 1973 movie debut of director/writer John Milius that someone chose to cast a dependable character actor, in this case Warren Oates, as the charismatic bank robber. And the results were as good as anything else that Oates (“The Wild Bunch,” “In the Heat of the Night”) ever did.
With his crooked grin and backwoods charm, Oates made the perfect fit with the crook whom some reporters compared favorably with Clark Gable.
Hmmmmm, Gable as Dillinger. Now that would have made a good movie.
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