Hollywood In A Television Age : Those Nifty Fifties Part II - The Gangster's Return

It was during the Fifties where the gangster movie produced three entirely new strains, one of which took its impulse directly from the reality of contemporaneous acts of American crime. In this first strain there were two characteristic references; one is of a figure, more often than not a wise-cracking  racketeer who testifies amid considerable media coverage, before a Senate sub-committee - the other is of a caucus of long-in-the-tooth, sober-suited men sitting around the boardroom table and getting a consensus on whether an erstwhile colleague should be fitted for a pair of cement shoes. The actual events to which both these images relate are the 1950 hearings and the conclusions of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, usually referred to as the Kefauver Committee after its chairman, Senator Estes Kefauver. It was the findings of this committee which gave rise to the cycle of gangster movies in which 'the Syndicate' (at times city-wide, at other times state - or nation-wide) figured so prominently.

In many respects, 1951's The Enforcer is the transitional crime film between the Forties and the Fifties. It centered on the activities of 'Murder Incorporated,' it hosts some of the features of the 'semi-documentary' film of the Forties, but resonates the note which was to dominate the Fifties, the existence of an all-embracing crime conspiracy modeled on legitimate business activity. This cycle includes Hoodlum Empire (1952), New York Confidential starring Broderick Crawford, The Brothers Rico (1957) and Samuel Fuller's Underworld USA (1960). This motif, more than any other should have provided the means of offering explanations of crime in terms of its social structure rather than personal disposition; but the form of the classical narrative movie, with its emphasis on individual characters, is not well suited to posing questions and explanations in any objective sense. The Syndicate is usually defeated in this cycle of movies, but almost always through the action of one man who is motivated by his unquenchable desire for vengeance. The two central recurrent scenes of conspiracy and testimony, however take on an polar-opposite political dimension if interpreted as a quasi-unconscious means of dealing with an unmentionable repressed topic - the hearings of HUAC and in the Senate of McCarthy, together with the consequential blacklisting.

The second strain which appeared in the Fifties was testament to Hollywood beginning to have a conscious sense of its own history. This type consisted of a series of films set in the Prohibition and Depression years, an early incarnation of the gangster movie. They would often take notes of biographies of reputed criminals. The films of this cycle would include : Baby Face Nelson (1957), The Bonnie Parker Story, Machine Gun Kelly both from 1958, 1959's Al Capone and segues into the Sixties with The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, Pay or Die (respectively 1960), Portrait of a Mobster (1961), The St Valentine's Day Massacre, Bonnie And Clyde (both 1967) and Bloody Mama in 1970. These self-conscious and highly stylized films often made use of music evolving a sense of period.

From Huston's Asphalt Jungle, the third strain in the gangster Renaissance 

And finally the third strain which materialized in the Fifties had its origins to some degree in the big-robbery films of the decade before, namely Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross and White Heat (dir. Raoul Walsh) which were both released in the year 1949. But it was The Asphalt Jungle (1950), John Huston's irreverently unique telling of the W.R. Burnett story that would serve as template for future American crime movies, for the attention it bestowed upon the methodical aspects of robbery, in how the act is prepared and finally executed. The form which it initiated - the 'caper' movie - is in a great many respects a celebration of cinema itself. Within this particular form, a group of disparate individuals come together to pull off that much coveted 'perfect robbery.' The cycle in the Fifties includes Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956), post-noir efforts; Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), Seven Thieves that starred Rod Steiger and the eternally on form Edward G.Robinson and Ocean's Eleven (both 1960).

Elisha Cook Jr. and Marie Windsor star in Kubrick's ultra-deadly The Killing (1956).

And if the thriller and film noir were less frequently made in the 1950's (noir's coda year being 1958), their spirit would live forever more. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the realization of particular acts of violence in the 1950's. In the classic gangster film of the Thirties, violence was formulated to be swift and not ritualized, it would remain unmarked by specific cinematic effects (such as close-ups) and usually executed by use of the more traditional firearm.

This was the ol' pre-code way they slayed ya (Scarface,1932)

Violence in both the thriller and the film noir of the 1940's entailed beating, burning, crushing, cutting, disfiguring, humiliating, pushing out victims from moving cars and building windows and poisoning beverages. The more tactile sense of violence is evident, primarily in the Fifties wave of gangster movie and thriller, but also in the Fifties, specific genres such as the Western and the war movie. An example which sent audiences and critics alike reeling at the time; was the shooting of James Stewart's gun hand in The Man From Laramie. Among the most disturbing acts of violence in the Fifties gangster movie are those enacted (actually or potentially) on women, such as the shocking facial disfigurement from boiling coffee suffered by Debbie (Gloria Grahame) in The Big Heat (1953), and the threat of acid to the face of Vicki (Cyd Charisse) as her bandages are deliberately removed at a snail's pace in Nicholas Ray's technicolor thriller Party Girl (1958)

Scarry, scarry night - and this was the new sort o' scar face (Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat)

It may possibly be that highly stylized genres like the gangster movie, the thriller and the suspense movie, in the Hitchcock mold offer a better guide retrospectively to the mood of a particular society at a given time and to its hidden stresses and strains than films with an overt, contemporary social message. When viewed today, given the gratuitousness of these themes in modern cinema  the impact of Fifties thriller and suspense is now only a mere shadow of its former formidable self and sadly retains very little of what was once evocative high drama and human interest.