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The Mayor of HellJames Cagney and the formative years of the American gangster movie.

By Mark Harris
Posted Tuesday, April 8, 2008, at 3:13 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

But Cagney can't be suppressed: In his brief screen time, he manages to throw some haymakers and slap around a broad. He and Robinson make a great duo, and even though one ends up dead and the other in prison, the "moral" (Gambling can make you rich! Watch out for duplicitous women! Try not to kill your best buddy by accident!) isn't delivered with the blunt-force thud that would later characterize most Code-approved crime films.

By 1933, Cagney was a much bigger star than Robinson, and hastily contrived productions were being built around his explosive physicality and motormouth momentum. Picture Snatcher opens with his release from prison after a three-year stretch; he heads straight for the tailor and the tub ("I'm gonna stink pretty!"), then tells his old gang he's going straight, taking his cut of their ill-gotten gains and becoming a tabloid photographer with a camera that's "just like a gun—trigger and all!" In a breakneck plot, Cagney finds time for a car chase, a sneak snapshot of a female electrocution ("I'd give my right eye and a thousand dollars for a flash of that woman in the chair!" barks his editor), a romance that begins in a ladies' bathroom, and a massive machine-gun shootout.

Just as Picture Snatcher combines gangster mayhem with the screwball bite of The Front Page, 1933's The Mayor of Hell merges the crime picture and the social-justice movie. "Hell" is a juvenile work camp where bad street kids go to get worse; its "mayor" is Cagney, who gets the job running the place as an act of corrupt political patronage and then discovers he's got a reformer's heart. Within a year, the substance of this picture—its cheerfully vague socialist streak (the kids are encouraged to render their guards irrelevant by turning their prison into a kind of inmate-managed co-op) and its enthusiastic brutality (including the gruesome killing of the despotic old warden)—would be verboten.

The delirious anarchy of movies like Lady Killer would also be tamped down. That's a shame, since it's one of the most winningly loony movies Cagney ever made. By 1933, the peak of the public-enemy-No.-1 era, real-life gangsters were even bigger celebrities than the stars who imitated (and sometimes inspired) them; this movie allowed Cagney to be both. Briefly: Fired for running a craps game at work (he's a movie-house usher), Cagney becomes involved in a gambling racket, lams it to L.A. after a burglary/assault, gets a job as an extra in a prison movie, becomes an overnight star (with the aid of a scam fan-mail campaign that he engineers), lives the high life wooing a famous actress, attracts the attention of his old gang, is wrongly arrested, and ends up in yet another tommy-gun free-for-all before flying off to get married. That epic plot, which unfolds over all of 75 minutes, also finds room for half a dozen movie-industry parodies and, literally, a barrel of monkeys. As in many of these films, Cagney is half-criminal, half-hero, and it's a delight watching him work every angle within that gray zone.

And then Hollywood lowered the boom. After the Code was enforced, crime movies, with few exceptions, were mired in a period of toothless earnestness from which ambiguity was banished until the first stirrings of film noir in the early 1940s. Warner was reduced to cautionary tales like 1937's Black Legion, a feature-length sermon in which an embittered small-town, working-class Joe (Humphrey Bogart, pre-stardom) joins a bedsheeted ultranationalist group that runs "foreigners" out of town. We learn that lynch mobs are bad, though the dogmatic screenplay manages to avoid any mention of what the Klan was really about or which minority they were actually targeting.

Speaking of which, be warned: The depiction of African-Americans in the pre-Code Cagney movies is appallingly offensive. Every shuffling "Yassuh, boss" stereotype of the age is on display. Black servants and sidekicks are given names like "Suntan" and "Snake Eyes" (a character whom Robinson treats as a lawn jockey, even rubbing his head for luck). As for women, they exist to be slapped in the face, dragged by the hair, and kicked in the ass, all for laughs.* With freedom inevitably came irresponsibility and a set of stereotypes that Bonnie and Clyde's creators left behind when they rediscovered what gangster films could be—as well as some things that, even in the Wild West of the pre-Code '30s, they never could have dreamed of becoming.

Correction, April 8, 2008: The article originally noted that in addition to being racist and sexist, pre-Code gangster movies were also homophobic, citing as evidence a line from Lady Killer, in which cops threaten James Cagney by saying, "We'll run you in as a fag, and that'll mean 30 days in the tank." In fact, the line is, "We'll run you in as a vag, and that'll mean 30 days in the tank." Vag, as in vagrant. (Return to the corrected paragraph.)

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Mark Harris is an Entertainment Weekly columnist and the author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.
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Comment from the Fray

So the gangster movies made a lifetime ago portrayed gangsters as being racist and sexist; the KKK-intimidated sons and grandsons of slaves as being subserviant and ingratiating to patronizing whites.

Well, isn't that they way things were?

--fsilber

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