gangster – What I Learned Tomorrow

The Family (2013)

Fun movie with plenty of violence perpetrated by both adults and children, making this a black comedy. Deniro is a mobster turned state’s evidence and now in the witness protection program. Tommy Lee Jones is his FBI handler, a thankless and difficult job because Deniro keeps committing crimes while hiding in France. Just a murder here and there, a savage beating or three, and a reasonable bombing at the local factory.

On the other hand, it’s not all Deniro’s fault. His wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) blows up the local supermarket on their first day in town, and both son and daughter unleash separate reigns of terror in high school, with more beatings, bribery, extortion, drug dealing and general racketeering. All in all great fun, and if the French townsfolk had a nebulous uncertain unease about Americans before the Blake family moved in, well now they have a much more clear idea about why they fear Americans.

A little unrealistic, because not even in small-town France can someone get away with a crime wave like this. And the way that the mob in New York gets wind of where The Family is laying low (!) is very unbelievable. But that’s OK, a couple suspensions of belief are not too much, since this is not a gritty gangster movie, it is a comedy. A gritty black comedy, but still.

Since it’s a witness protection program comedy, we know what’s going to happen, in broad outline at least, so no reason to give any details or spoilers. Suffice it to say that there’s good performances from Bobby and Tommy and Michelle, the kids are a riot, and the mobsters all wear black.

Rating and more info…

Gangster Squad (2013)

Los Angeles, barely post-war, it’s 1949 and Mickey Cohen is a gangster on his way up, a rise fueled by particular violence which we get an inkling of in the opening minutes, where Mickey (Sean Penn) has an emissary from the Chicago mob torn in half, fully on camera. Ewww. But it’s a gangland drama, and it’s made in 2013, so let’s not skimp on the gruesome violence.

Of course this serves as our motivation to see Mickey get what he’s got coming, and it comes in the form of a deeply undercover team of LAPD white-hats who report to nobody and answer to nothing but a smoking gun. Based on the true story of how the mafia was turned back from inroads into LA, this flick is half detective thriller and half vigilante rampage. In the historical sense, this is the story of how the mob only made it as far West as Las Vegas, and this nipping of the buds of organized crime saved, in the end, the whole West Coast from turning into Chicago or New York.

Since it’s 1949, the film is full of glorious old cars, Packards and Hudsons and De Sotos, all curvy bodies with flat windows and no radios. Speaking of curvy bodies, Emma Stone turns in a great performance as expected, as the moll with the gams and a sweet streak, and she’s lovingly introduced as a “tomato”. Ahh, the 1940s.

Since it’s the 40s, the soundtrack has lots of nice jumps from Hoagy Carmichael, Pee Wee King and Stan Kenton, and we even get an actress portraying Carmen Miranda. One gripe is that not much thought was applied to marrying the music to the video, and few of the vintage songs go on past a few bars. There is a ton of music which would have been current on the radio in 1949 and applicable to our story, but this score seems to have been assembled in isolation of the film production, and by someone bereft of a broad knowledge of 1940s pop. The one bright spot in the score is using Peggy Lee’s “Bless You” in its entirety as the credits roll.

The ending of the movie is too quick and pat, with little feeling of real denouement, but otherwise the story is good and the acting more good than poor. A great span of supporting cast: Michael Pena, Giovanni Ribisi, Nick Nolte, and Anthony Mackie all turn in good roles, and the leads (Penn, Brolin, Gosling and Emma) all do a fine job. Josh Brolin is wooden, but that’s on purpose, that’s why he was cast as the main good guy, he’s what we expect from him, the grizzled toughie with a gold heart.

A pretty good movie overall. Period piece but not drenched in itself, great pacing of the action, and a range of heroes easy to root for and baddies we’re glad to see get shot. It’s The Untouchables redone, 30 years later and set 15 years later, and it was about time someone flattered that great movie. I recommend watching this.

Rating and info here…

Kill The Irishman (2011)

Gangster drama about Danny Greene, the true story of his rise and fall through the ranks of the Cleveland underworld. Always an outsider because he wasn’t Italian, but tougher than nails and hard as a brick, Danny was. His bid to take over the Cleveland mob in the middle of the 1970s sparked a war, with hundreds of mobsters dead and dozens of bombings ripping apart warehouses, restaurants and long dark luxury sedans.

It didn’t end until the New York families finally took Greene out, on the 10th try. But the aftermath was nationwide, leading to the downfall of most of America’s crime families, once the feds could no longer look the other way after hundreds of killings. The ripple effect was a wave of rooting out corruption within the police departments in several large cities, and left the traditional mafia so weakened that the door was opened in the 1980s for other organizations to move in, including less respectable and far more vicious gangs of Jamaicans, Russians and Chinese.

So on one hand this is the story about the last of the breed, the dapper dons and sitdowns among capos. On the other hand, it’s the story of how their world ended and a cautionary tale about being careful what you wish for. The old mafia was violent and greedy, yes, but cracking them down meant a new mob with less self control and zero incentive to work anything out with gentlemens agreements among themselves. And then someone invented smokeable cocaine, so the 1980s got real violent in gangland.

There’s a dabble of Danny’s lifestory outside of business, with the wife who left him because, well because he was a gangster. And a new girlfriend, played by the beautiful Laura Ramsey who fills out all those slinky rayon 70’s clothes very well. In the end it’s a pretty good slice of seedy Cleveland and gritty rustbelt gangsters blowing each other up willy nilly. And there’s Christopher Walken. What’s not to like about that?

More info here…

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)

The more years pass, the fewer people who remember this, but before Sylvester Stallone boxed his way through the 1970s and 80s, when you said the name Rocky then everyone knew who you meant: Rocky Sullivan. This movie is why. Jimmy Cagney is William “Rocky” Sullivan, a Bowery hoodlum who gets pinched for his first stint in Juvy in 1923. 15 years later he’s a famous gangster just finished another 3 years in State, and he’s out to find a few things he left on the outside.

He’s found his boyhood hoodlum chum, now Father Connelly, and Rocky’s found the little girl who was sweet on him as a kid, now charwoman at the Bowery flophouse he’s laying low in. Most important, Rocky has left a hundred grand of rumrunning loot with his crooked lawyer, and the story in this flick is Cagney out to find his lawyer and his loot. That’s gonna be a scrape, because Humphrey Bogart is the lawyer.

Along the way he picks up a small army, small as in short. The Dead End Kids, ensemble troupe of the day as the cultural foil to Spanky’s Our Gang kids, now inhabit Rocky’s boyhood hideout. Out of the joint and clawing his way back to the top of the underworld, Rocky has to navigate the pull of the old neighborhood, the lure of easy money, and the people who cling onto that money.

Since this is 1938, there is a code imposed on Hollywood that the bad guy can never win in the end, a screenwriting self-censorship which held fast until the late 1960s. Thus the emotional ending and swelling music. Thus, 1930s ganster flicks are all about the sharp with a heart of gold or the cop who gets his man, and this one is the state of the art. Current box office heavyweight Cagney shines with up-and-comer Bogart, who had a string of bad-guy roles which led to this casting, and here Bogart shows the chops that will soon get him leading roles.

The music is by Max Steiner, and deserves notice for his nascent style of punchnote-3notes-fade in the incidental accompaniment here, which would reach perfection four years later when he scored a Bogart film again: Casablanca.

The filming is taut and angle conscious, someone here has seen German films of the 1920s. Floor-up shots with expressive shadowing, and with recurrence of visual themes via the lighting, we are treated to a cohesive photographic vision. Early in Rocky’s criminal career towering boxcars presage the running theme of incarceration, and late in the movie the Dead End Kids’ boiler-room hideout is soaked with overhead illumination through street grates, completing the circle. Even when out of jail, the life of crime is a prison.

Although produced in accordance with the censor’s boundaries, Cagney fills the film with a personality of snappy banter and tough-guy confidence which is hard to root against. Worth seeing as a cannonical Cagney role, and pre-war supporting performances by Bogart and Sheridan, who would both go to greater heights in the 1940s.

See the full review here…