Category Archives: gangster films

Buildings and oppression

10 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by in Antonioni, British cinema, gangster films, sewer films

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Nowhere to go is an obscure British thriller made by Ealing Studios in 1958 and directed by Seth Holt, his first film. It is well worth catching, and has shadowy parallels with the gangster cycle Jean-Pierre Melville was shortly to embark on in France (starting from Le Doulos, 1962) such as prison backgrounds, loyalty and disloyalty, and an absence of moral judgement. It displays too a familiarity with American low-budget crime thrillers.

The film opens with a taut, largely silent prison break (as does Melville’s Le Deuxième Souffle) and includes this terrific shot of the prisoner running between tall buildings to reach the wall where an escape rope awaits him.

Nowhere to go

It was Antonioni who so strikingly explored the relation of the human figure to the urban landscape and large buildings that offer a threat as much as a setting,

Notte 5

but Holt does it in Nowhere to go too in order to set a tone for the film, picking up on, for example, He Walked by Night (1948) with its terrific climax set in a sewer system,

He walked by night 3

and on The Third Man (1949) with a similar setting.

The Third Man 1

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

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ASSASSINATION STORIES

17 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by in Bible on film, cinema and culture, gangster films, God, Italy, literature and film

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Consider two narratives. One is from the Modern World: a car travels up a drive to a house and two men get out. They ascend the steps to a balcony to talk to the man of power, bloated with age and the fruits of living, who is taking his siesta. His gunmen see there is no threat and retire. The first man is very respectful and asks to introduce his friend – as a mark of respect. The second man steps forward and asks for the man of power’s blessing, and receives it: the man offers his hand to be kissed, and the second man kisses it. The man of power asks for his name, the second man gives it. But the man of power ‘don’t hear so good’, so the second man leans forward and tells him again, and then adds, ‘And this is for you.’ With that he takes the knife hidden under the coat draped over his left arm and rips open the man of power’s belly. The second man steps back and with the first makes his escape, not without gunfire.

The other narrative is from the Ancient World, indeed the very ancient world. A man goes to a king’s house, to the upper chamber, in order to deliver the tribute of the people under his charge. Those with him then retire, and the man says, ‘A secret word I have for you, King.’ So the king in turn sends away his courtiers. The man says, ‘A word of God I have for you,’ so the king stands up. And the man, with his left hand, takes the double-edged sword strapped secretly to his right thigh, and plunges it into the king’s belly. The king was a very fat man, we are told, and the fat of his belly closed over the blade. The assassin went out, locked the doors, and made his escape.

Speculum Humanae Salvationis, 1360

The first, as you have spotted, is from Godfather 2, a flashback to the episode in which Vito takes revenge on Don Ciccio for having murdered his father, his elder brother, and finally his mother. Aged nine at the time Vito only just escapes with his life – to New York and Godfatherhood.

The second is less familiar. For Lent I read the Book of Judges in the translation by Robert Alter. Not your normal reading, but there it is: the Bible and Lent go together. Choice episodes include the Israelites chopping off the arms and big toes of Adoni-Bezek (‘master of Bezek’): Jael driving a tent-peg through Sisera’s head; Gideon harrowing (literally) the men of Succoth with thorns and thistles; Abimelech burning a tower filled with 1000 men and women; Abimelech killed by a millstone flung from a tower that shatters his skull; a Levite man and a concubine ‘abused all night long until morning by Benjaminites’; not to mention the story of Samson which includes slaying the Philistines, being seduced and blinded, then acting the force of an earthquake in the Philistine temple. The Book of Judges does not just contain death but cruel, violent and degrading death. It is the shockingest kind of pulp fiction.

The story of Ehud’s assassination of Eglon the King of Moab is as vivid and episode as any in Judges, I think because it occurs in a cool upper chamber under a veneer of formality and respect surrounding the delivery of tribute by a subject commander, a scene exploded by an eruption of violence and repulsive detail. When I read it, I instantly thought of the scene in Godfather 2 and instantly concluded that Coppola, and his screenwriter Mario Puzo, were referencing the passage in Judges. Ehud, the assassin, was a left-handed man and it was his left hand that committed the murder; when Vito approaches Ciccio he uses his right hand to kiss the offered hand, the weapon veiled under the coat draped on his left arm. But no, Vito uses the knife in his right hand to kill Ciccio, and the parallelism between the two narratives is just coincidental.

Gf 2.2

Gf 2.3Gf 2.4Gf 2.6

Yet, if one has not influenced the other, they do echo each other in their world-view, of a violence in the world that is tragic without even being cathartic. They both proclaim, “This is what the world is like,” behind our façade of civilisation and of human relations conducted with respect. The idea is so far from edifying to the extent that both stories should be shut out from our lives. Yet this is impossible to do: both of them bewitch us; we watch or read fascinated; and they have that extraordinary quality that when we have read or watched them once, we want to do so again and again, to renew our acquaintance with the ghastly detail.

The biblical narrative is paratactic, in other words an ‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’ narrative distilling it into a series of essential details. ‘Cut. . . cut . . . cut. . .’ Coppola’s film narrative has similar qualities: the sequence starting from the car arriving at Ciccio’s villa to its leaving in haste, the deed done, lasts four minutes and comprises some 45 shots, and the sequence on the balcony is a series of shots and reverse shots starting in medium shot and ending in closer shot (but not in close-up). As you watch for the first time, you are lulled with the heat of a Sicilian late summer afternoon, then you palpitate with unease – the rest of the film has taught you that something unpleasant is going to happen – and then you gasp at the sight of the knife being ripped up Ciccio’s front.

I first read Judges as a boy in the King James Version, its violence clear but the detail toned down by the obscurity of the language at certain points. Try Robert Alter’s translation, with his essential commentary, to feel the full starkness of the event.

Finally, I cannot help reflecting in a melancholy fashion that these are both religious narratives. The cultural Catholicism of the Godfather is essential to its atmosphere: the episode of Ciccio’s murder is followed by the sight of Vito and his family leaving church after Mass. And Judges? It is possibly the most violent, God-forsaken book of the Bible – but it is not really God-forsaken since the events happen within the total story of Israel, God’s chosen people. The Bible, like life, ‘contains multitudes’.

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Goodfellas versus The Godfather

22 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in cinema of hyperbole, gangster films

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Goodfellas poster      versus     Godfather poster

I seem to be in a gangster-film fascination at the moment, a consequence of a Scorsese fascination in the UK at present. At the beginning of March, I saw the newly restored Goodfellas in the cinema in Norwich.

This is hyperbolic cinema: a lot of shouting and over-the-top psychopathic behaviour, with performance foregrounded before all else. There were a number of sustained tracking shots (I like these), but also music getting louder all the time (and somehow particularly annoying).

And what crudity, of dialogue and of characterisation, the first perhaps shaping the second. Compare the way Ford humanises his minor characters, or the way Hitchcock ‘highlights’ his marginal characters to make them more interesting.

Look at Tommy (Jo Pesci): his monstrousness needs some inner motivation like Shakespeare gives Richard III to make him compelling. Tommy by contrast is all repellent surface, with not one iota of charisma. And Henry should surely be more like Charlie in Mean Streets, so that some inner disturbance is seen to be working in him. This would help signpost the climax to the audience. Instead the betrayal Henry undertakes just happens, rather than the audience foreseeing it – and fearing it.

It all feels twenty minutes too long. I have been looking at the crime thrillers Anthony Mann made in the late 1940s – Railroaded, T-Men, Raw Deal and so on, which are no doubt admired by Scorsese – and they are tight as a fist, sometimes under eighty minutes, and since they have a kino-fist quality they leave you pummelled.

Compare Goodfellas too to The Godfather: a satyr to a Hyperion, surely. The popular music in Goodfellas is especially crude. It is used to mark the passage of time, ‘the soundtrack of our lives’, but it is Scorsese’s life not that of his characters or even of their milieu. The Godfather on the other hand has a memorable musical theme, the Sicilian essence of which speaks volumes on behalf of a whole culture. And The Godfather has a vivid cast of characters who generate their own drama: the Corleone family versus Salozzo, the non-italian consigliere Tom Hagen,  a grotesquerie like Luca Brasi, and so on. The narrative arc of Goodfellas has Henry starting as a gangster but turning into an informer – a very good story – but The Godfather has an arc transforming Michael Corleone from war hero into godfather living in grim isolation – not just a good story but a tragic one. It is sombrely melodramatic, like nothing so much as Jacobean revenge drama, a dimension which for all its pyrotechnics is missing from Goodfellas.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

REFLECTION ON BRESSON: Bresson and Melville

17 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by in Bresson, cinema and culture, gangster films, Pascalian cinema

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‘Two halves of the same sphere.’ This idea comes from the comparison of Bresson and Melville in my book, ‘The New Filmgoer’s Guide to God’. I wrote there about their pessimistic universes, about Melville’s imprisoning of the American gangster in the French existentialist universe, about how in his prison cycle (A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Trial of Joan of Arc) Bresson interpreted prison as damnation from which escape was only through grace. This counterpointing of ideas was reinforced by a similarity of style: Melvillian is Bressonian, Bressonian is Melvillian. Bresson spoke of actors as models: the word can be appropriated, with a different meaning, to describe Melville’s mythological criminals, without psychology or apparent interiority. But there is a difference as well: Melville’s characters are ‘soul-less’, without a soul, whereas Bresson in his 1950s films was concerned with finding the soul of his protagonists and releasing it on screen. Compare too this counterpoint: Bresson used his models only in one film, whereas Melville liked to reuse the same star in different films, even if they always played the same character. This was notably true of Alain Delon, star of Le Samurai, Le Cercle Rouge and Un Flic.

Cercle Rouge - Corey

Corey in Cercle Rouge

One small but definite strand to Le Cercle Rouge is the philosophical musing of the Inspector General policing the police, in this case Mattei (the Bourvil character) up against the criminals, Cory, Vogel and Jansen. The IG tells Mattei about the corruptability of man: “all men are culpable – all men, Mattei.” The idea recurs to Mattei at the end of the film, not just as a final adornment to the story, but as if to appoint a moral.

Corruptability is an Augustinian/Calvinist idea: we are born into sin, and the only way out is through grace. However the IG does not talk about grace – and from the evidence of his films there is no indication that Melville believed in it. (This marginalizing of grace seems to me to be the snare into which Jansenism/Protestantism risks falling – by maturity we are steeped in sin, grace is a long way off, and it’s a suffocating outlook. Is Melville asserting its absence in Le Cercle Rouge specifically to thumb his nose at Bresson? It is intriguing to think so.)

So, if all is irredeemably corrupt, what might virtue look like in the Melvillian universe? It is to be found in honour, which means you practice total professionalism and total savoir-faire as a criminal, and you practice loyalty so that you never renege on a fellow criminal. The criminal code is a code of loyalty.

Pickpocket 1

 

Michel in Pickpocket

Compare Bresson’s view of criminality: one archetype for him is Michel in Pickpocket, who snaps out of criminality by the advent of grace in the form of Jeanne. There is no role for honour in making him do his duty, but is there a role for guilt? It would be a neat contrast between the two directors – to say Melville’s world is a shame culture (like Homeric Greece, like Mafia culture), and Bresson’s is a guilt culture (as in a Catholic culture) — yet such a contrast is not an obvious one since Bresson’s characters never embody the idea that they are suffering from or are strongly conscious of guilt (as they do, say, in Graham Greene’s novels). However, in the 1950s, Bresson was Augustinian in outlook, and human corruptability was a given, requiring no spelling out.

  • A Man Escaped – Fontaine escapes from damnation by his own hands aiding the operation of grace.
  • Pickpocket – Michel escapes from damnation by the love of Jeanne, the vehicle of grace.
  • The Trial of Joan of Arc – Jeanne is released from earthly trial: she suffers human justice but is saved by her faith in divine justice.

With Au Hasard Balthazar, Bresson takes this idea of corruptability to a deeper level, counterpointing the Christ-like sufferings of the donkey with the story of Mary, who falls from grace, or more precisely, who is an angel made to fall by the corruption of the society around her.

‘Two halves of the same sphere.’ Bresson’s portrait of a rural priest in Diary of a Country Priest must surely have been strongly in Melville’s mind when he made Léon Morin, prêtre, but that’s another story.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

Gangster films and God – and the absence of God

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in gangster films

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In chapter 4 of THE NEW FILMGOER’S GUIDE TO GOD I write about gangster films, introducing the subject in this way:

“If damnation comes from the judgement of humans, we can only look to God for salvation. It is a key strand in Christian thought that there is a profound version of justice beyond the ability of humans to order themselves, and if that is the case, we must therefore rely on a divine mercy if we are to escape the risk of damnation. Hence the human soul awaiting the advent of grace (chapter 1), hence our individual experience of resurrection (chapter 6). Hence the importance of the gospel story (chapter 2) in offering two ways out: resurrection in order to overcome Jesus’ cruel and unjust execution, and through the sacrifice of his innocence, redemption from the pain of human sin.

“The notion of sacrifice is a long way from clear-cut American justice in the movies. In Westerns, the hero makes law with the gun settling matters not through any judicial procedure but by natural intuition of how corruption is to be dealt with, a gift that both sanctifies his violence and as it were lends him the necessary skill with a gun. Moral superiority translates into a practical one. But Hollywood has created another version of this myth, that of the gangster who uses violence to assert his difference from, and antagonism toward ordered society. He is the dark doppelgänger of the Western hero, and the central protagonist of dozens of films.

“In the portentous words of the hard-boiled American director, Samuel Fuller, pronounced in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou (1965), ‘film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death . . . In one word, emotion.’   This is a wonderfully concise description of the gangster film, one of America’s notable contributions to popular culture, so popular that many other countries have now taken up the genre.  Yet, while being a battleground, it offers a context to explore the suffering of the world not just by the willed evil in living and dying by the sword, but also in ideas of guilt, redemption from evil, and ultimate salvation.  Although we shall look at examples where these themes are touched on, it is a feature of the genre that they have been largely ignored, perhaps as a result of necessity since the mechanisms of revenge and the conclusion of justice have to be kept at the forefront, as if directors and scriptwriters by and large feel that any consideration of whether these people have any human dignity is an irrelevant one. Questions of right and wrong have been sidelined into formulas of ‘good guys’ (the cops, at least some of the time) and ‘bad guys’ (the gangsters most of the time), and because the films’ purpose is to seduce the viewer into an involvement with the story regardless of rights and wrongs, their creators are most focussed on entertaining adults in an adult world.  One side-effect has been that they have not had any hesitation about putting the gangster film at the forefront of portraying violence on screen, to the point where there seem, over a hundred years on from the invention of the cinema, to be no taboos left as to what is permitted, and the images of violence seem drained of moral meaning.”

Among the films I then discuss or refer to in passing are: The Godfather films, White Heat, The Big Heat, Bad Lieutenant, The Funeral. That leads into a consideration of the ‘atheist’ gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville, especially Le Samourai.

Samurai

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