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The gang's still here

By Lewis Beale Newsday

If it seems appropriate that Public Enemies, director Michael Mann's film starring Johnny Depp as Depression-era bank robber and all-around gangster John Dillinger, opened last week in the midst of the greatest economic meltdown in 70 years, that's because the 1930s were the golden age of the gangster film.

With their up-from-the-gutter story lines, movies like Scarface, The Public Enemy and Little Caesar not only helped define the gangster genre but acted as a subtle critique of the capitalist system.

"It's interesting to me that a major gangster film is coming out at a time when we are in a recession," says Michael L. Stephens, author of Gangster Films. "In the 1930s, those films reflected the sentiment of the time, which still exists today, and we still identify with that anti-Wall Street, anti- establishment feeling."

"There has always been a romanticizing of the outlaw in American literature and history, but, unlike the cowboy, who exists in this sprawling landscape, gangster films are urban and appeal to audiences that live in crowded cities," says Jay McRoy, a contributing writer in 101 Gangster Movies You Must See Before You Die, to be released in October.

It's not that the gangster film hasn't changed over time. But ever since 1912, when Kentuckian D.W. Griffith's organized-crime flick The Musketeers of Pig Alley jump-started the genre, the gangster flick has become an American — and eventually international — staple, reflecting the concerns and mythologies of any number of societies.

So, in the United States, those 1930s socialist/ realist dramas, which tended to sympathize with the bad guy and his hardscrabble urban background, morphed in the late 1940s — thanks in part to the anti-Communism sentiment of the day — into the gangster-as-psycho film (think James Cagney in White Heat), the not-so- subtle message being that we're not going to glorify such antisocial behavior. "The rebel figure became identified with anti-American types," says Stephens, "where before, that was not the case."

Then came 1967 and Bonnie and Clyde, which not only ratcheted up the violence level but reflected the anarchic, anti-establishment spirit of the Vietnam era. Five years later, The Godfather melded myth, the family drama and an anti-capitalist critique into one classic package.

"A case could be made that the great American movie is no longer Gone With the Wind but The Godfather," says Eddie Muller, author of The Art of Noir.

"The Godfather is a family drama, but it's about power and capitalism, the dark side of capitalism. Here's a shadow version of the accepted system, and the Godfather movies touch on this notion of how similar are the accepted system and its shadow version."

But the Godfather films also represented the end of the classic gangster era. With the demise of the real mob as an urban power, and the rise of drug lords and inner-city gangs, recent bad-guy flicks are as much about gunplay and bling as anything else (although the sociological underpinnings of American Gangster hark back to Depression-era gangster films). And oddly enough, the most intriguing, and groundbreaking, recent view of mob life came not from a movie but from a TV show, The Sopranos, which gave the genre an entirely new tweak — a sociopathic mob boss as a harried, middle-class family guy who runs his business out of a sleazy strip club. Not exactly Don Corleone territory.

"The Sopranos is groundbreaking in any number of ways," McRoy says. "He can run a mob family but has difficulty controlling his own kids."

Says Muller: "I think the end of the big mob-boss era came out pretty strongly in The Sopranos."

So other than period pieces like Public Enemies, does this mean the classic gangster film is now a museum piece?

"Those old gangster movies were a product of their time," Muller says. "The white-collar criminal has replaced the old-school gangster. People are more concerned about conspiracies than they are criminal behavior. That's been building since the 1970s, the notion of conspiracies that grew out of the Kennedy assassination, the suggestion that somewhere behind this are criminals we can't touch."

Public Enemies stars Depp as John Dillinger, a legendary bank robber. Angered by Dillinger's success in robbing Midwestern depositories, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) sets golden-boy agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) after him. The hood, with his girlfriend (Marion Cotillard), finally meets up with the G-man after taking in a movie at Chicago's Biograph Theater.

Director Mann's most recent film, Miami Vice (a 2006 remake of his TV series), was a critical and box-office dud. And period crime dramas, including Changeling, have not fared that well in theaters lately. So the star power of Depp and Bale might be the key factor in whether Public Enemies will connect with the public.