IRISH-AMERICAN CRIME FILMS: UNDERWORLD (1927)

There has been a fifteen year gap between the "Musketeers of Pig Alley," which looked at inchoate juvenile delinquency and gangsterism in New York's slums, and "Underworld," which presents a complete culture of brutal dandies at war with each other.

That seems like it is both a long time between movies and too short a time for gangsterism to grow up as much as it did, and let me offer some explanations for both.

Firstly, there were likely other gangster movies during this time, and we have lost them. 80-90% of the films made during the silent era are gone through a combination of general neglect and the short-lived nitrate stock the films were printed on. A significant movie that followed this one is gone -- "Gang War" from 1929, which had a short cartoon paired with it, and the cartoon was none other than "Steamboat Willie," the first Mickey Mouse short. Steamboat Willie is still with us, but "Gang War" is long lost.

So there may have been a rash of films during the 20s that charted the rise of the gangster, which, thanks to Prohibition, had become a lucrative business. The Pig Alley gang felt like a holdover from the 19th century, with their battered suits and their petty crimes. "Underworld" feels like all the gangster films that would follow it, with Tommy guns, bejeweled molls, rivalries between gang bosses, and flashy suits.

But whatever came before that is now lost, I think we can credit the film's director for creating a look that we now associate with the mobster -- a sort of rough elegance, marked by dapper suits and big hats. "Underworld" was directed by Josef von Sternberg, who had a talent for glamorizing the demimonde, most famously with "The Blue Angel," the film that gave us Marlene Dietrich in a top hat.

All the character in "Underworld" have affectations of noir glamor. There is the mob boss, "Bull" Weed, played by George Bancroft as a brutish Irish lout in a fancy suit. He frequently hands out silver dollars as an affected gesture of magnanimity, but bends them with his bare hands before giving them up, like some circus strong man.

His girl is Evelyn Brent, a sulky brunette with bee-stung lips and evening gowns covered in feathers; as a result, nobody ever calls her anything other than Feathers. And there is Bull Weed's consigliere, to use a term borrowed from the Italian mob: He is a former drunk played by Clive Brook, and now named Rolls Royce.

Brook cleans up well -- he slicks his hair back and starts wearing tuxedos and a gangster hat so large it resembles something worn by the Pioneers, and Feathers immediately falls hard for him, which leads to complications.

In the meanwhile, Bull is having a minor spat with another crime boss, and if you're wondering if this is set in the world of Irish-American gangsters, wonder no more, as the other boss is named "Buck" Mulligan.

In a tradition that would be borrowed throughout the history of gangster films, Mulligan uses a flower shop as the front for his criminal enterprise, and he and Bull have a puckish rivalry. They like to get each other riled up, which isn't hard, as both have roiling temperaments, and any perceived slights will cause either to leap to their feat, hair suddenly wild, fists flailing, held back by friends. When Mulligan backs Feathers up against a wall at the end of an annual gangsters ball, things turn deadly.

The remainder of the film is a jail break and a spectacular, preposterous shootout with the cops, who surround Bull's apartment with military-style police vehicles and unload with every automatic weapon they can find, quite literally perforating the building as Bull fire back with a sub-machine gun.

As lensed by von Sternberg, even this looks great -- it may have been the first time anyone had filmed a man in a suit creating mayhem with a Tommy gun, which would become the iconic image of the 20s gangster.

And Bull was based on a real gangster, Chicago's Tommy O'Connor, who was born in County Limerick, Ireland and came to America to make trouble, shooting down a cop named O'Neil in the Windy City.

O'Connor was sentenced to hang but broke free of the courthouse. Nobody knows what happened to O'Connor after that -- he may have gone on to more robberies and at least one more murdered police officer. Director von Sternberg and the film's screenwriters (including Robert N. Lee, who would later write "Little Caesar") give their cinematic O'Connor a more final ending, and even a moment of grace at the end of the film. But they kept the essential brutality of the story, in which, in the underworld, a double-cross is a death sentence, and a cop is just a problem solved with a bullet.

Read More

IRISH-AMERICAN CRIME FILMS: THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY (1912)

I will be somewhat brief in discussing this film, for two reasons. First, the film itself is somewhat brief -- about 17 minutes. Secondly, it's not clear that this is an Irish gangster movie. There are a few reasons to think it might be, which I will detail shortly, but I include "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" primarily because it is reportedly the first film made about organized crime.

"Organized" is a bit of a misnomer here. Our film's criminals, led by the Snapper Kid (Elmer Booth), just sort of wander around Pig Alley. They rob a musician at random. They seem like they plan to rob a bar and then don't. They go to a dance, where the Snapper Kid flings a drink out of the hand of the musician's girlfriend; historians of the film have suggested the drink was drugged and he was saving her, although this is hard to glen from the movie itself.

Later, the Snapper Kid and his gang get into a shootout with another gang, during which the musician takes his wallet back. The Snapper Kid escapes, and is almost pinched by the police, but the girl he rescued provides an alibi. Somebody hands the Snapper Kid money. The end.

The film was by D.W. Griffith, and there are some stylistic tics that are worth mentioning. Griffith is rightfully understood as one of the first filmmakers to develop film into its own medium -- early attempts at filmmaker often consisted of performances of stage melodramas or vaudeville performances before a stationary camera.

Griffith, in the meanwhile, explored the way camera setup and movement could contribute to storytelling, and in the film he introduced two notable experiments. In one, a girl in a street scene stares directly at the camera, which reportedly always caused excited chatter in the audience. The was Griffith mimicking the look of documentary films, where he had often noticed that bystanders would look directly at the camera, and this may have been film's first attempt at cinéma vérité.

Secondly, for a scene in which the Snapper Kid and his gang creep down an alley for a gunfight, Griffith demanded the cameraman focus on the gangsters and let the background become blurry. This is a common technique nowadays -- it's called "shallow focus" -- but was so outre then that Griffith reportedly had to drag his cameraman to an art museum to show him classic paintings in which the background is blurred to convince him it was artistically credible. And he was right -- the scene where the Pig Alley Musketeers slowly close in on the camera has real menace to it.

There was a Pig Alley in New York, where the film was set. It was right off 288 Greenwich Street, which, unless I'm misreading the map, is in what is now Tribeca. I don't know if this is the Pig Alley that Griffith meant; the name was common enough, always given to streets where locals raised hogs.

New York's Pig Alley was a tenement, housed a large immigrant community, and was the site of a massive conflagration in the middle part of the 1800s. But, again, this may not have been Griffith's Pig Alley. It was common enough to apply to invent alleys to represent immigrant tenements, as the comic strip The Yellow Kid did with Hogan's Alley.

It is interesting that this early gangster film isn't so much about the sorts of organized crime stories later films would focus on -- numbers running, the dope racket, murders for hire, and, of course, booze. This is really about street hooliganism, and the Musketeers of this film feel more like the sorts of characters we would later find in juvenile delinquent films.

They look young -- one, in a checkered shirt, looks like he can't be older than 16, and the Snapper Kid really does look like a kid. They just sort of amble around the tenement in ill-fitting sack suits and battered fedoras, a dapperness that looks taken off a charity clothes drive rather than the sort of bespoke elegance of later gangsters.

And the Snapper Kid, as played by Elmer Booth, has a youthful derring-do; he's like a young version of the cocky, pugilistic Irish gangsters played by James Cagney, forever bouncing on the balls of his feet and sizing the world up with a cockeyed smile.

It's the Snapper Kid that gives the film its only hint of Irishness, or, more properly, it's Elmer Booth, who would die a few years later in a car crash. He was a stage actor, and, at the exact moment "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" was touring movie houses, Booth was on the road with a play called "Stop Thief!" The play was about a group of kleptomaniacs, but Booth played a legitimate crook in it, one with a typically Irish last name: Jack Doogan.

The Snapper Kid is, in fact, so very like a Jimmy Cagney character in looks and mannerisms that there has been speculation that Cagney modeled his performance on Booth's. There is, as far as I can tell, no evidence of that. But it makes "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" worth noting as a starting point, because, whether or not The Snapper Kid was intended to be understood as Irish, he exists as sort of an ur-Irish gangster.

There would be a lot to follow him, and they all seemed to have elements of the Snapper Kid in them, from their hoofer's physicality to their expressive bonhomie to their sudden bursts of unpremeditated violence. Whether or not the Snapper Kid was an Irish gangster, all Irish gangsters going forward would be a little bit Snapper Kid.

Read More