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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Ever since gangsters first appeared on the American screen (officially with D. W. Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley, in 1912) they have been involved in a prolonged battle with the forces of “legitimate” culture. Having fought their fights from the wrong side of the street gangsters have continually drawn attention to the line which separates legitimate from illegitimate Americans. This has raised problems in accounting for the gangster genre's significance. In stigmatizing the ethnic urban poor as criminal, the gangster genre betrays its origins in a nativist discourse which sought to cast “hyphenated” Americans as “un-American” and in need of “ Americanization. ” Yet, as perhaps the most powerful vehicle for the nationalization and popularization of ethnic urban American life, the gangster genre overturned many aspects of its iniquitous origin, playing an important part in the re-writing of American history from the perspective (and, as I shall demonstrate, quite literally in the voice) of the ethnic urban lower class.
This contradiction is characteristic of the dynamic and changing role American popular culture artifacts play in the mediation of the nation's history. Regardless of the poetic and ideological licence gangster fictions take with the very real socio-historical problems of the ethnic urban poor, the central conflict which informs these narratives remains the question of social, economic, and cultural exclusion.
1 A prime “nativist” defence group, The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), published the first edition of their Manual for Citizenship in 1921 (at the time of the first anti-immigration act) as a service to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (and which is still in use today). In its recommendations to those who take the “Oath of American Citizenship” the DAR emphasize that “You are not an ‘Italian-American’” or “any other kind of hyphenated American.”
2 See Chapter 4 of my dissertation, “Screening Crime in the USA, 1929 to 1958: From Hays Code to HUAC; From Little Caesar to Touch of Evil” (University of Minnesota, 1995)Google Scholar for further detail on the censorship war waged over the first talking gangster films.
3 Cagney and Robinson switched sides, as it were, in G-Men (1935) and Bullets or Ballots (1936), respectively.
4 There is work to be done on Eleanor Roosevelt's symbolizing of empowered womanhood in the context of Depression culture. It is interesting to note that in Manhattan Melodrama she comes from the popular, anti-establishment, sexually expressive underworld — all of which lends her a degree of metaphoric power as someone who can speak to the culture of the oppressed.
5 The most famous of the early talking gangster films such as Scarface, Little Caesar and Public Enemy are marked by linguistic games which examine the ethnic attempt to “ape” the master culture. Questions of how to speak, eat, and dress “properly” reveal satirically both the extent to which the ethnic urban lower class are distanced from the mores and codes of “official” culture — and the extent to which those codes are precisely exclusionary and distancing.
6 Burnett, W. R., “The Outsider,” in McGilligan, Pat ed., Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 49–84Google Scholar.
7 The violence of this death may have been underscored by the casting of George Sidney in the Rosen role. He was most closely associated on screen with his comic role as Nathan Cohen in the popular Cohens and Kellys Jewish-Irish comedy series. Audiences used to seeing Sidney in this more jovial part, as recently as late 1933 (The Cohens and Kellys in Trouble), may have been doubly disturbed to see him the object of a riot killing!
8 It could be argued that this scene is precisely symptomatic of the way Hollywood reduces and dissolves political difference into a question of personal difference; an example of cooptation and defusion of dissidence. However, my point here is that given this tendency in Hollywood narrative, this film does something else with it. It uses the personalisation of conflict — that system of “primary identification” with character (rather than political issues) in an aleatory way. While it is clear that the political choices offered do not include something as radical as socialism — neither do they include other more conventional (jingoistic) forms of political allegiance. Manhattan Melodrama's adverse relationship to an array of authorities is typical of Hollywood's gangster film.
9 The same might be said of Cagney and Robinson's reincarnations as federal agents and cops. In the case of G-Men, for Cagney, and Bullets or Ballots for Robinson, it is really their former status as gangsters that lends them legitimacy as cops. In Bullets or Ballots, Robinson plays a cop who goes “underground” to penetrate the mob — something tenable because of Little Caesar's legacy. Equally, in G-Men it is Cagney's upbringing in the underworld (both within the text, and intertextually) which allows him to be effective after he joins the FBI. We could add to this list the case of Humphrey Bogart who played countless “bad guy” gangster roles in the 1930s, and yet emerged in the early 1940s as box-office gold as a romantic lead. His role as Rick in Casablanca (1942) is underscored by a shady past. This past refers not simply to his past within the film (his pre-war affair with Ingrid Bergman), but to his 1930s bad guy image. This image lends Bogart extra-textual help in providing his role a mysterious ambivalence — something apparently necessary to make him an effective lead for a 1940s audience.
10 Powell and Loy play out The Thin Man series as members of the upper-class. Yet it is essential to these films that these protagonists bear an awkward relationship to their class — resenting its formal codes and often involved in cases which expose the seamy underside to being rich and famous.
11 Carey, Gary, All the Stars in Heaven: The Story of Louis B. Mayer and M.G.M. (London: Robson Books, 1982), 193Google Scholar.
12 Geist, Kenneth L., Pictures Will Talk: the Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978), 64—69Google Scholar. Mankiewicz does note that W. S. Van Dyke directed only the first half of the film — being replaced by Jack Conway, who is uncredited. Mankiewicz argues this change was not the product of a disagreement over political views. Rather it was characteristic of producer David O. Selznick, who was out “to destroy the power and concept of the director as the one who makes the film” (68n).
13 Schwartz, Nancy Lynn, The Hollywood Writers' Wars (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1972), 36Google Scholar.
14 This is not an unusual way to resolve the gangster dilemma — Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) uses a similar device — the priest (Pat O'Brien) persuades the gangster (James Cagney) to fake being a coward when he goes to the chair, in order to destroy the East Side kids' identification with him. Here, however, in a post-Code gangster film it is less clear as to whether the gangster genuinely makes a sacrifice — in the end we are left unsure as to whether he “faked” cowardice or indeed “cracked.”
15 Bergman, Andrew, We're in the Money: Depression America and its Films (New York: Harper and Row, 1972)Google Scholar.
16 Chronotope: “Literally, ‘time-space.’ A unit of analysis for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented. The distinctiveness of this concept as opposed to most other uses of time and space in literary analysis lies in the fact that neither category is privileged; they are utterly interdependent. The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring.” Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael, “Glossary,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist trans., Holquist, Michael ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 425Google Scholar.
17 Originally, in 1934, the censors' main attention fell not on the film's obvious but general reflection of the political trajectory of Franklin Roosevelt, but on whether the film cut too close to the bone in terms of certain incumbent political figures in the state of New York — such as La Guardia and Charles S. Whitney — who might have seen their political careers directly critiqued in the plot. La Guardia would have been uncomfortable with the suggestion that his rise to power in New York had been supported by gangsterdom. Whitney would have seen the film as a reflection of how his own political success had been predicated on his successful prosecution of gangland bosses during his tenure as District Attorney. Symptomatically, the Code was invested in protecting the industry from those who had power to intervene in film release and distribution — especially in such important box-office states like New York. (MPAA/PCA File Manhattan Melodrama, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.)
18 de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, Rendall, Steven trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 37Google Scholar.
19 Ibid., 37.
20 Ibid., 36.
21 Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W., “The Culture Industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Cumming, John trans. (New York: Continuum, 1972) (original edition, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 1944)Google Scholar.
22 Susman, Warren, “The Nature of American Conservatism,” in his Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 57–74Google Scholar.
23 Smith, Paul, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xxxivGoogle Scholar.