Given the vanishing of so many silent shorts and features, perhaps forever,
the power and extent of the crime film in the years before synchronized
sound may never be fully understood. To the handful of silent
crime films scholars have discussed, Langman and Finn add some
three thousand more in their catalog of the period 1903–28.3 There
may seem little point in speculating about the patterns of silent crime
films when so much of the evidence has disappeared, but a few generalizations
seem safe. From the time of Edwin S. Porter’s Edison film
The Great Train Robbery (1903), one of the earliest of all narrative
films, criminals were more prominent on silent screens than enforcers
of the law. If the robbers in Porter’s seven-minute film are unremarkable,
the posse of citizens that ends up shooting them down is even
more nondescript, and has much less screen time. As its title indicates,
the film is far more interested in the mechanics of crime than
in the necessities of punishment.4
The work most often cited as the exemplary silent crime film is D. W.
Griffith’s two-reeler The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), which is equally
memorable for its realistically grubby urban exteriors and its pioneering
use of enormous close-ups of gang members as they loom surrealistically
before the camera while sneaking out of an alley en route
to a shootout with a rival gang. It is easy to forget not only that Griffith,
for all the fascination of his lead criminal, the Kid, ends the film
with a flourish of his usual sentimentality – in return for the unexpected
chivalry he has shown her, the heroine covers up the Kid’s culpability
by lying to the police – but that crime features prominently
in any number of Griffith’s contemporaneous films, from The Lonely
Villa (1909) and The Lonedale Operator (1911), which focus on heroines
menaced by threatening robbers as stalwart heroes ride to their
rescue, to The Narrow Road (1912), whose heroine, Mary Pickford,
rescues her husband, Elmer Booth (the Kid in The Musketeers of Pig
Alley), from temptation by a counterfeiter and pursuit by a relentless
police officer. The most elaborate story in Griffith’s four-story epic Intolerance
(1916), later recut and released separately as The Mother and
the Law (1919), dramatizes the struggles of an innocent man (Robert
Harron) when he is unjustly accused of murder and is rescued from
the gallows by the last-minute detective work of his faithful wife (Mae
Marsh). In all these films, Griffith’s interest is less in the charisma or
brutality of the criminals than in the dangers they pose the innocent
victims, who remain closest to Griffith’s heart. Intolerance is less an
indictment of its sympathetic, distracted murderer, whom the film
calls The Friendless One (Miriam Cooper), than of the ruthless industrialism
and social hypocrisy that have made its hapless hero and
heroine so vulnerable in the first place. Griffith’s criminals are more
fearsome for what they threaten than for who they are; their romance
lies in their function of bringing to a head the social forces that menace
Griffith’s innocents. Smirking Mack Sennett, who plays the lead villain
in The Lonely Villa, might just as well be the eagle who menaces
the child in what seems to have occasioned Griffith’s first lead role
as a film actor, Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest (1908);5 and the dangers
that brought every chapter of the contemporaneous Pearl White serials
(The Perils of Pauline, 1914; The Exploits of Elaine, 1914–15; The
Iron Claw, 1916) to an end were divided without prejudice between
human and natural agency.
Several silent films go much further in exploring the mystique of
the criminal. Following the success in France of Louis Feuillade’s five
multiepisode salutes to the dashing master criminal Fantômas (1913–
14), Maurice Tourneur, whose son Jacques would make the important
film noir Out of the Past (1947), directed Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915).
Expanding on Paul Armstrong’s 1909 play and its basis in the O. Henry
short story “A Retrieved Reformation” (1903), the film follows the adventures
of Lee Randall, alias gentleman safecracker Jimmy Valentine
(Robert Warwick), in what the credits call “his double life” as a member
and an enemy of society. In the film’s most extraordinary sequence,
a high-angle long take shows the interior of a bank shorn of
its ceilings as Jimmy and his confederates, often unaware of dangers
the audience can see clearly one or two rooms away, go about an expertly
planned robbery. When the gang is captured anyway, Jimmy
goes to prison, but he eventually wins a pardon, goes straight, and, as
trusted cashier Lee Randall, wins the heart of the Lieutenant Governor’s
daughter. When a toddler is accidentally locked in a bank vault,
Randall’s expertise in opening the lock threatens to reveal his double
life. But the police detective who, convinced Jimmy never deserved
pardon, has been waiting for him to slip, takes a cue from The Narrow
Road and The Musketeers of Pig Alley and passes the incident off with
a knowing wink. This frees Jimmy to revert to Lee Randall, the better
half of his split identity, which the film had privileged from the beginning.
It is no wonder that Alias Jimmy Valentine was torn between romanticizing
its safecracker and suggesting from the beginning that he
would be redeemed in the end. The lower-class audiences who packed
moviehouses in the first two decades of the century would have
shrunk from any contact with real-life criminals, who were identified
in the popular imagination with the recent waves of European immigrants
who had made America’s cities so unsavory. But with immigration
running at record levels after World War I, it was only a matter
of time before a large portion of the audience was drawn from
the ranks of those very immigrants. In the meantime, Prohibition,
which had become the law of the land in 1920, made it necessary for
any law-abiding citizen who wanted a drink to get liquor from criminals.
Finally, as the average budget for a Hollywood feature shot from
$20,000 in 1914 to $300,000 in 19246 and production companies responded
to the challenge of higher budgets by merging into bigger
and bigger corporations and looking to Wall Street for investment capital,
the financial structure of the few surviving studios began to resemble
more and more closely that of the gangs who would ultimately
finance Harry Cohn’s 1932 buyout of his brother Jack at Columbia
Pictures and William Fox’s unsuccessful attempt to keep control of
the company that ended with its 1935 merger with Darryl F. Zanuck’s
Twentieth Century Productions – the same gangs who would infiltrate
the rank and file of the industry through labor racketeering in the early
Higher budgets to lure bigger audiences, the rapid rise of largely
immigrant audiences, the criminalization of drinking through Prohibition,
and the alliance of Hollywood studios with organized crime all
combined to shift the romance of criminals from the menace they
posed to innocent victims to their own personal mystique. Josef von
Sternberg’s Underworld (1927) retains the redemptive structure of
Alias Jimmy Valentine while granting its lead criminal, Bull Weed
(George Bancroft), a much more glamorous life from which to be redeemed.
8 Underworld gives Bull the best of all worlds by making him
both a legendary professional criminal whose life-style is an endless
round of robberies, parties, and shootouts, and also one of nature’s
noblemen who knows when it is time to give himself up to the police
in order to clear the way for his moll Feathers (Evelyn Brent) and her
lover Rolls Royce (Clive Brook), the lawyer he mistakenly thought had
betrayed him. So successful was the film that all the major studios
rushed to copy it; Sternberg’s own copy for Paramount, Thunderbolt
(1929), also starring Bancroft, was a virtual remake.
Amid the worldwide fascination with larger-than-life criminals, from
Feuillade’s Fantômas to Fritz Lang’s megalomaniacal Dr. Mabuse (1922,
1933), only one fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, held anything
like the same sway onscreen, and for many of the same reasons. Although
Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The
Valley of Fear (1915) had been adapted for the British screen in 1914
and 1916, audiences responded to Holmes’s exotic eccentricities in
many other contexts, from the camera trickery of American Mutoscope’s
short Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1903) to the stage play Sherlock
Holmes (1899), American actor-playwright William Gillette’s fantasia
on Holmesian themes, twice filmed in Hollywood – first with
Gillette in the starring role (1916), then with John Barrymore (1922).
Although Conan Doyle had made Holmes resolutely unromantic, Gillette
ended by marrying him off to the heroine he had rescued from
the clutches of Professor Moriarty, providing audiences with some of
the same pleasures as the redemption of Jimmy Valentine or the unselfish
romantic posturing of Bull Weed.
Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org
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