The 1930s…

when Hollywood took a bite out of crime and…

crime bit them back!

Public Enemy #1

 

It was the era of Prohibition, bootleggers, bathtub gin and speakeasies. The stock market crash had

Darryl Zanuck

wiped out vast fortunes, millions of people had lost their jobs and bread line and soup kitchens had sprung up everywhere. Theaters had closed their doors because movies about the rich and beautiful were no longer palatable. Hollywood was feeling the crunch and realized changes had to be made.

Darryl Zanuck, then production head at Warner Brothers, convinced Jack Warner that films focusing on what was happening in the streets would be the ticket out of their predicament. Scripts that used newspaper stories instead of glitzy Broadway plays as their storylines. And things making headlines were robberies, bootlegging and gang wars (486 gangland killings in one year in Chicago alone). It was Zanuck who created America’s newest

Anti-heroes….gangsters! And, not surprisingly, the real gangsters loved it.

Warner Brothers created their own “Murderers Row”. “Little Caesar” with Edward G. Robinson , the small-time hood that become a big-shot gang lord. James Cagney as “The Public Enemy” Tom Powers who used Mae Clark’s face to squeeze grapefruit and ended up dead at the hands of fellow mobsters who wrapped him up like a dummy and left him in his momma’s doorway. Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield and George Raft were also part of the motley crew.

Edward G. Robinson as "Little Caesar"	James Cagney
Humphrey Bogart	John Garfield
George Raft

Meanwhile, right there in Tinsel City , real gangsters were setting up shop. Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein controlled a hefty chunk of Loew’s, Inc., the parent company of MGM. His partner in crime, Julius “Nicky” Arnstein, the dapper international con man and multi-million dollar bond thief was married to comedienne Fanny Brice. Longie Zwillman, the big-time bootlegger was working on “business interests” in Los Angeles and having an affair with Jean Harlow (Mario Bello, Harlow ’s stepfather, was a small-time hood with ties to Al Capone). And the city government itself was riddled with corruption, run by a crime association known as the Combination that was paying off law-enforcement agencies to “overlook” the gambling and prostitution operations (often studio heads would do the same thing to protect their stars from scandal ). After Prohibition ended in 1933, the crime bosses just moved on to other endeavors. Zanuck didn’t need to go to Chicago to find grist for his screenwriters. There was plenty of material right at home.

Arnold Rothstein
Nicky Arnstein	Fanny Brice

Ironically James Cagney, who so often played the bad guys on screen, became a target for the real

Cagney and Raft in "Each Dawn I Die" 1939

mobsters off screen . A Hollywood arm of Al Capone’s organization infiltrated the newly formed IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Operators). Willie Bioff, their strong arm man, was miffed at Jack Warner’s reluctance to answer his demands. He send a message to George Raft through one of George’s friends in the mob that a “lamp” (a top heavy arc-light often called the ‘brute’) was going to be dropped on Cagney during the filming of “Each Dawn I Die”. Raft somehow interceded (he was in the picture, too) and the plan was squelched. Bioff died in Phoenix , Arizona in 1955 when he was blown up in his bomb-rigged pick-up truck, the result of a mob hit.

Of course, the biggest underworld name in Hollywood at the time was handsome, debonaire Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Bugsy was initially in control of the extra guild, where strike threats brought instant results. Take away the extras and you don’t have much of a movie! He eventually branched out to take over gambling and prostitution operations and, later in the decade to follow, the profitable wartime black market. It was Bugsy who was the power behind the Flamingo casino and the rise of a small, dusty desert town called Las Vegas . But somewhere down the line, he ran afoul of his mobster pals and on the evening of June 20 th, 1947 ,while sitting in his bungalow, he was shot to death. Siegel was 42 years old. None of his so-called “pals” attended his funeral.

"Bugsy" Siegel

Annette Bening and Warren Beatty in "Bugsy" 1991

But the new decade brought new enemies..the Axis. America went to war and movies went with her. Crime still flourished even though most of the old guard were dead or in prison. But movies still followed the newspapers and they were now more concerned with the battles in Europe and the Pacific. The stars who couldn’t actually go to war, did so on screen. In the 1940s Cagney went back to being a song and dance man in “Yankee Doodle Dandy”’ Humphrey Bogart went to “ Casablanca ” and Johnny Garfield took up the violin in “Humoresque. All was right in the cinema world.

 

Just a footnote:

John Dillinger

The Biograph just after Dillinger was shot

In a darkened movie house on July 22 nd, 1934 America’s Public Enemy #1 sat watching Blackie Gallagher ( played by Clark Gable) utter his last words “Die as you live” in the film “Manhattan Melodrama”. Less than 15 minutes later, John Dillinger died in a hail of police bullets outside Chicago ’s Biograph Theater.