"The Departed" steals Best Picture - and reminds us of the many mugs hanging in filmdom's rogues galleries.
For the Classic Film fan, the surprise capture of this year's Best Picture Oscar by Martin Scorsese's The Departed upsets a veritable paddy wagon's worth of movie hoods past. Let us track down several of these crooks, cons, killers and cutthroats, and render on to them their just desserts: our fondest remembrances.
White Heat - 1949
James Cagney as Cody Jarrett, the hardhearted psycho with the soft spot for his mother. By this time, the gangster picture a la Warners was but a memory; a new, shadowy form of the type, portrayed by the wispy, taciturn Alan Ladd, had inherited the mantle. White Heat, then, was an anachronism - but the whole thing felt new, thanks an infusion of Freud, a higher premium on violence, and the unforgettable performance of Cagney. It's as if Cagney had played the gangster so many times the only way to rejuvenate him, he decided, was to exaggerate, to make him meaner, more energetic, more self-important - and, perhaps in an effort on Cagney's part to show that he could hold his own with the upstart Method generation, to make him more real. This is Cagney at his acting zenith, a period that would last until his last great gangster role, that of Jimmy The Gimp Snyder in 1955's Love Me Or Leave Me.
Pick Up On South Street - 1953
Writer-director Samuel Fuller always played a just a semi-tone above 'B.' This one's no exception, with Richard Widmark as a pickpocket with no less than three factions gunning for him: hoods, cops, and spies, all because he accidentally pinched some microfilm. Forget the tie-in to then timely Communist scare - it's just another excuse for Fuller to do his thing: fill the screen with plenty of grit, low rent atmosphere, and enough belligerent broads, sweaty heavies, and smart talking street rats (including an Oscar nominated turn as an informer by Thelma Ritter) to populate a dozen waterfronts.
The St Valentine's Day Massacre - 1967
Discount horror king Roger Corman's shot at the big time, complete with sizeable budget (at least, for him), reputable D.O.P., and name stars. Naturally, Corman concentrates on the most sensational aspects of the story, leaving any insight into character to an obtrusive narrator borrowed from TV's The Untouchables. George Segal rings hollow as Bugs Moran's big gun, but the ever-seasoned Jason Robards, though the most gaunt Capone ever cast, makes a crass but cool capo, half brute, half media mogul. The film's showpiece is, of course, the climactic mass murder, featuring plenty of ear piercing gunfire and close after close up of freshly bleeding faces.
There are more, of course, many more...but we'll collar those bums later.
