Tough Guys

The gangster cycle of the 1930s wasted no time in turning the bighearted
crook silent films had considered ripe for redemption into a
remorseless killer. Little Caesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), and
Scarface (1932) were only the most notorious of a new cycle of tough
gangster movies that included The Racket (1928), Alibi (1929), Doorway
to Hell (1930), and Quick Millions (1931). The groundwork for this
new brutality went back to the early 1920s, when high-speed presses
and cheap wood-pulp paper stocks led to an explosion in mass-market
publishing. At the same time newspapers battling for circulation made
folk heroes of bootleggers like Al Capone, pulp magazines like Black
Mask, founded in 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan to
help support their highbrow magazine Smart Set, were chronicling the
exploits of hard-edged detectives like Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams
and Dashiell Hammett’s nameless operative of the Continental
Detective Agency.9
The collapse of the stock market in 1929 lit the match to the toughguy
fuse by sparking a national depression marked by soaring unemployment
and widespread despair over the value of public policy and
the institutions of government, finance, and the law. When police officers
appeared increasingly as enforcers of rich men’s law, banks either
foreclosed on delinquent mortgages or failed their depositors, and
Washington seemed powerless to alleviate the nation’s sufferings, audiences
turned toward strong heroes who offered them the hope of
taking charge of their own future: self-made entrepreneurs in direct
sales (albeit the illegal sale of liquor) like Tom Powers in The Public
Enemy and Tony Camonte in Scarface. At the same time, the arrival of
synchronized sound, as Jonathan Munby has noted, turned the suddenly
speaking gangster from a deracinated outlaw to a member of a
specific marginal ethnic group whose “accent frames his desire for
success within a history of struggle over national identity.”10 Hence
the gangster’s inevitable death at the end of each film was not simply
the necessary price for the hour and a half of upwardly mobile fantasy
that preceded it but a site of the audience’s sharp ambivalence toward
the immigrant gangster hero [Fig. 4]. The pattern of the new gangster
films, tracing the hero’s gradual rise to fabulous power and his inevitable
meteoric fall – which now substituted for the earlier romantic intrigues
of Alias Jimmy Valentine and Underworld – allowed audiences
to indulge both sides of their ambivalence toward an establishment
that seemed less and less responsive to their needs: their fantasies of
personal empowerment and their fears of defying institutional authority,
their despair over the possibility of social justice and their belief
in the rough justice of the movies.
In retrospect, it is remarkable how brief this vogue of the tough
movie gangster, perhaps the most striking figure in the history of
Hollywood crime, actually was. Studio heads were under such constant
pressure from public-interest groups to tone down their portrayal
of professional criminals that as early as 1931, at the height of the
new cycle, Jack L. Warner announced that Warner Bros., whose preference
for low-budget urban location shooting and proletarian milieus
had made it the major studio most active in the gangster film, would
stop producing such films, and that he had not allowed his fifteenyear-
old son to watch any of them.11 In addition, the release of Scar-
face, the most violent of the new movies, was delayed for over a year
while producer Howard Hughes dickered with the Motion Picture Producers
and Distributors of America’s Production Code Office (or Hays
Office, as it was popularly called for its first leader, former Postmaster
General Will Hays) over the film’s bloodletting and overtones of incest.

4. Scarface (1932): The Depression-era audience’s ambivalence toward an upwardly
mobile fantasy. (Vince Barnett, Paul Muni, Karen Morley)
Eventually it was shorn of several repellent or suggestive shots; buttressed
by a new sequence shot by Hughes in which a stolid newspaper
editor, faced by a citizens’ board, denounced the glorification
of gangsters in the mass media and urged action on the part of the federal
government and the American Legion; and given a new title for
its 1932 release: Scarface: Shame of a Nation.
The promethean gangster was shackled by the election of Franklin
Roosevelt as president in 1932 and the stricter enforcement of the
Hays Office’s 1930 Production Code, provoked in large measure by the
founding of the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency in 1934. Roosevelt,
an activist president who assiduously manipulated the newly
dominant technology of radio to transform his public image from a
New York patrician crippled by polio to a paternal man of the people
in whom ordinary Americans could believe, launched a series of highprofile
initiatives immediately on his inauguration in 1933: insuring deposits
in Federal Reserve banks, mandating increased prices for farm
products, and launching the largest public-works programs in American
history to start putting the unemployed back to work. That same
year, Joseph I. Breen of the Hays Office finally succeeded, with the inadvertent
help of the outrageous Mae West and the gangster cycle, in
pressing the major studios to abide by the provisions of the 1930 Production
Code, which forbade, among other things, nudity, profanity,
justified violent revenge, the defeat of the law, seduction or rape, and
the ridicule of organized religion or the flag.12
Within a year the Hollywood crime film had undergone a seismic
shift. Gone was the unquenchable ambition of Little Caesar, the coldhearted
brutality of The Public Enemy, the sexual explicitness of Scarface.
But although Roosevelt and the Hays Office could provide new
models and regulations for Hollywood, they could do nothing to regulate
audiences’ desires to see onscreen violence or digs at the justice
system. The new wave of crime films that began in 1934 simply channeled
their toughness in subtler ways.
The most obvious of these ways was to make law enforcers as glamorous
and charismatic as criminals. Since real-life enforcers were by
definition organization men and women, the challenge of bringing
them to melodramatic life was considerable, and it is not surprising
that the first police hero to achieve widespread popularity emerged
from the funny pages. Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, the comic strip that
debuted in 1931, worked by setting its hero – whose creator had originally
planned to emphasize his anonymity by calling him Plainclothes
Tracy13 – against a galaxy of such criminal gargoyles as Flattop, B. B.
Eyes, Pruneface, Mumbles, the Brow, and the Mole. Although Tracy,
with his trademark square jaw and yellow raincoat, was invariably
upstaged by the grotesque villain in each story, he developed a loyal
following as the continuing hero of case after case.14
As Dick Tracy’s readership was expanding among a Depression audience
hungry for heroes, a new publicity campaign for real-life detective
heroes was under way. Inspired by the activist example of Roosevelt,
J. Edgar Hoover, director since 1924 of the Bureau of Investigation
(renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935), promoted bigger
budgets and wider press for his organization and himself through
a well-publicized crusade against such gangsters as Machine Gun Kelly,
Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and John Dillinger – the last
pulling off a brilliantly reciprocal publicity coup when he was shot to
death by FBI agents as he emerged from a Chicago screening of the
gangster film Manhattan Melodrama (1934). Hoover’s fictionalized exploits
were glorified in “G” Men (1935) through the sublimely simple
tactic of recasting James Cagney, famous as the gangster Tom Powers
of Public Enemy, as the equally violent and mercurial, but now officially
sanctioned, FBI hero. Although the film was as brutal and fast-paced
as the gangster films from which it borrowed everything but its moral
loyalties, it had no trouble earning a seal of approval from the Hays
Office and the semiofficial blessing of Hoover in a prologue for its rerelease
in 1949.
The other key crime film of the period, which could not have been
more different from “G” Men, took a completely different approach
to the challenge of Hollywood self-censorship. The Thin Man, shot in
sixteen days in 1934, was a knockabout comedy of crime whose detective
hero Nick Charles (William Powell) and his improbable socialite
wife Nora (Myrna Loy) were persuaded by Dorothy Wynant (Maureen
O’Sullivan) to investigate a series of murders implicating her
father, a vanished inventor. Nick and Nora, aided by their terrier Asta,
were the model of Hays Office primness. Despite Nick’s amusingly extensive
underworld connections, they consorted with criminals only
reluctantly and fastidiously; their bickering was marked by elaborate
courtesy; and each night, after a full day of detecting, they retired to
their chaste twin beds. At the same time, their nonstop drinking, sanctioned
by the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, and their frankly carnal interest
in each other despite the bonds of holy matrimony, proved, like
Cagney’s lively incarnation of a fledgling FBI agent, that Hollywood
Historical and Cultural Overview 27
could sell the desire for violence, thrills, and mystery in the most respectable
forms.
The Thin Man and its five sequels, from After the Thin Man (1936)
through Song of the Thin Man (1947), were only the most popular of
the detective serials that sprouted on both sides of the Atlantic
throughout the thirties. Spurred in England by protectionist laws mandating
a minimal percentage of British-made films to be shown in each
theater, even if these British products were “quota quickies,” and in
America by the rise of the double feature, which demanded a constant
release of “programmers” to fill the bottom of double bills, studios
rushed to release detective B films that traded on their heroes’ and
heroines’ preexistent following. Dozens of literary detectives enjoyed
active screen careers during the 1930s. At the end of the decade Sherlock
Holmes and Dr. Watson, played by the inspired casting choices
of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, made a triumphant return to the
screen in The Hound of the Baskervilles [Fig. 5] and The Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes (both 1939). Most active of all was Earl Derr Biggers’s
soft-spoken Charlie Chan, played by Warner Oland until his death in
1938, and then by Sidney Toler, who starred in a total of twenty-seven
Fox features between 1931 and 1942. The smiling, self-deprecating,
epigrammatic Chan, the globe-trotting Honolulu police detective who
seemed eternally to be drawn into crimes outside his jurisdiction, appeared
the final blow to the tough-guy milieu of the gangster.
One last source of detective films, however, suggested that America’s
appetite for tough heroes had still not been sated. Although
the half-hour time slots of radio demanded brief, action-filled stories
whose leading characters would not need to be established each week
if they were already well-known, the radio detectives who made the
most successful transitions to Hollywood tended to be tough guys
themselves. Among the many crime-fighting heroes of radio, pulp writer
Walter Gibson’s mysterious character the Shadow, alias Lamont
Cranston,15 bolstered by the sinister associations with the criminal
mind crystallized by his radio tag line (“Who knows what evil lurks in
the hearts of men? The Shadow knows”), made perhaps the smoothest
transition to Hollywood in a string of features and serials from 1937
through 1946. But Fran Striker and George W. Trendle’s Green Hornet
and the A-1 Detective Agency, created by Carleton E. Morse for I Love
a Mystery, were not far behind. America’s love affair with the detective
hero continued, for better or worse, to be marked by its fascination
with the dark side of human nature.

Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org