When I was a teenager I had a small black and white TV. It used to keep me company as I stayed up all night pondering my puberty. One night, about four in the morning, I switched over to Channel 4 looking for something to keep me awake and I encountered my first gangster movie.
It was a scratchy, rough sounding thing. The people spoke really fast, a machine gun dialect. The movie pumped along from one scene to the next, not stopping for breath. There were no long, drawn out shots and the script was operating at a bare minimum. I almost switched it off but there was a charming vitriol to the leading man that enthused this ancient curiosity with an appealing, engaging energy. The charismatic little hood was Jimmy Cagney and the film was called The Public Enemy.
I had no idea such movies existed. Black and white movies were nearly always lame American romances or limp British comedies from the 40s. This was a punk movie. Uncompromising. It kind of played around with morality but even to my uncultured teen brain this was an obvious ploy to revel, unblinkered, in criminal behaviour.
The prevailing contemporary demands for a positive outcome also, I discovered later, gave rise to one of the great gangster movie traditions: the death scene in the final reel. The Public Enemy's fatal finale was shocking in its unsurprising reality. Old movies were always glamorous, always safe, clean and neat. What had I stumbled on? I felt like I'd strolled into a secret. I was enchanted.
Since then I've seen quite a few gangster movies but only the Jimmy Cagney and Edward G Robinson ones really enchant me still. It's nothing I can put my finger on. The talk, the walk, the vibe, the mean street rebellion. As modern cinema eases itself into a comfortable coma of cheese and organised smarm, these gangster movies only get dirtier in comparison. Like a relative from the old days when things were different and gangsters were murderous little bastards and the girls were platinum blonde.
Bee Bop. July 2006.
email me at beebop@evocrim.co.uk
