stumbling virtue

Watch This

 
An unwitting travelling balladeer sings his song about "the dirty coward Robert Ford" to Ford himself (John Ireland) in "I Shot Jesse James."

I've seen a number of movies since I last checked in--I didn't keep track of all of them, and don't remember them all, but it stands to reason that the ones I remember are the best.

A friend lent me a set of just released on video noirs, and I recommend them all:

The Long Night (1947) - Henry Fonda at his complicated best in a story of a man unjustly accused.  A remake of a French movie starring Jean Gabin, it has a complex structure that must have stood out at the time. Also starring Ann Dvorak, Vincent Price, and Barbara Bel Geddes.

Sudden Fear (1950) - Joan Crawford is a successful playwright/heiress who gets involved with Jack Palance, a handsome younger actor. Unfortunately, the saying, "If it looks too good to be true, it probably is" applies here. Great final shot of Crawford. The always entertaining Gloria Grahame also stars.

Railroaded (1947)  - Another tale of the unjustly accused, in a stripped down to nothing Anthony Mann movie. Hugh Beaumont is fine as the good guy cop, but John Ireland knocked me out as the bad guy gangster.

Behind Locked Doors (1948) - A noir that not only features a hardboiled detective and an icy dame (Lucille Bremer, trying to escape her previous title as one of Fred Astaire's worst dance partners), but also the world of psychiatry and mental institutions, a topic of endless fascination to Hollywood in the 1940s. Really fun. A Budd Boetticher movie.

Hangmen Also Die (1943) - Fritz Lang directed this wartime drama set in occupied Prague. Based on a true story, the brave Czechs fight back against the evil Nazis. The bad guys get what's coming to them in immensely satisfying ways. For once, Brian Donlevy plays a good guy. Also featuring Anna Lee and Walter Brennan.

I liked John Ireland so much in Railroaded that I decided to look up some of his other movies (seemingly not many, or least not available on Netflix). I found I Shot Jesse James, Samuel Fuller's first directorial effort, and fell hard for it. In this version of the story, Robert Ford shoots Jesse James for the reward money and governmental pardon for his past crimes so he can buy a farm, marry the girl he loves, and settle down with a clean name. Instead he finds himself the object of scorn, disdained as a traitor by everyone from his brother to the girl who he did it all for. Some haunting scenes, such as the one with the traveling singer pictured above, and the part where Ford, needing money, takes a job in a show where he re-enacts the murder of Jesse James for audiences who boo him. Frank James passes on the opportunity to kill him and avenge his brother because he says that Ford is dead already. Indeed he is. You can die inside long before your body is killed.

The Boss

Al Capone managed to be both public enemy number one and Time Man of the Year. 

You know how there are some movies that you know aren't the world's greatest movies, but for some reason you'll just watch them over and over? One of mine is "The Untouchables," the 1987 story about the fight against organized crime in Chicago during Prohibition. Based on a TV series, there's an awful lot of fiction here, but I still find it a lot of fun.

But of course, once I see the fictional version of something, I want to know the truth. Luckily, the reliable Jonathan Eig has brought us "Get Capone," the story of the crime kingpin who ruled Chicago during the 1920s and early '30s.

This isn't the overtly glamorized Mafia of movies and TV, that people love for all the heavy-handed trials about "family," "honor," "being made" and such. Honestly, the Mafia as portrayed on screen sometimes seems more like the Masons or something, with the added discomfort of everyone being related. Al Capone, though, was involved in organized crime. Yes, family members were involved, but as far as he was concerned, he was a business man. During Prohibition, providing alcohol was big business, and he was the biggest provider in a city that demanded a lot.

Capone got his start in the business pretty much just by falling in with some men from the neighborhood (Brooklyn, to start), who were dabbling in alcohol running, whorehouses, and gambling. He was sent to Chicago to run a whorehouse and ended up, after his mentor and boss was forced out of the business, expanding the empire.

To stay out of the way of the Chicago police, Capone ran most of his business out of the nearby town of Cicero. It was easy to get people on your side if you were involved in an illegal business, especially a business that most people thought shouldn't be illegal, like alcohol sales. You could promise to help someone get elected, offer someone a small cut of a business, or of course, threaten to kill them (and, if someone--including rival gangsters--was too much trouble, follow through on that threat). In Chicago in those days, it wasn't hard to find police officers or politicians who were willing to turn a blind eye to what was going on. Especially because Capone was so popular--he seemed to be always available to a fascinated press, who could find him in his hotel suites, mildly protesting anytime his name was dragged into one of the broad daylight, street shootouts or assassinations that set people in Chicago on edge. Even as his rivals ended up bullet-ridden corpses in gutters, Capone always coasted above the fray. His argument was that he was just a businessman, providing what the people wanted.

He was indeed a businessman--in addition to the alcohol business, he also made a lot of money from racetracks, both horses and dogs. With a much lower overhead, greyhound racing was immensely popular (and evil and should be banned everywhere, I will mention). Capone understood the importance of breaking up all his businesses into small units, with the information about them and their profits only available to a few people in each case. There were few records available and almost nothing with his name on it.

As the bloody street battles escalated, though, it became too much for everyday people in Chicago. Federal agents were sent in, including Eliot Ness, the self-aggrandizing leader of his uncorruptible "Untouchables," whose role in crime fighting got blown way out of proportion, raising him to mythological status (in truth, Ness became an alcoholic and a failure in every other thing he got involved in after he left Chicago).

Capone served some time in jail on weapons charges, but emerged unscathe. He decamped to  Florida, building a lavish estate there that belied the zero income he declared, and that led tax investigators to the slow, tedious task of proving that he did, indeed, have an income, so they could put him in jail on tax evasion charges. Capone feigned ignorance of any such thing--he was again, just a guy running a business, a good American who loved his mother, adored his son, and didn't treat his wife too badly while running around with a series of girlfriends. When the St. Valentine's massacre happened, the press and the police tried to connect him to it, but Eig makes a pretty convincing case that he wasn't involved. When the Depression hit, Capone opened a soup kitchen for the hungry in Chicago that fed numerous desperate residents.

In the end, though, a couple of lucky breaks (an associate or two willing to turn informant) led investigators to the information they needed and Capone was put in jail for tax evasion. Business was slowing down anyway, with the lifting of Prohibiiton. In prison, the syphilis that had long inhabited his body began to take a toll on his mind. By the time he was released from prison, his brain was essentially mush. Capone was no longer the genial, yet threatening crime boss, so much as a harmless man shuffling around the house, barely aware of what was going on. He died in 1947.

Capone comes off as a good guy, despite his lengthy record and involvement in unsavory activities--not the alcohol sales or gambling, but the hits that he put on others; he probably didn't do as many as people imagined, but he undoubtedly had blood on his hands. People were scared of him, but many also liked him. The surprising thing (at least to me) was how young Capone was when he was on top; he was only 48 when he died, and astonishingly, in his twenties when he had Chicago under control. It's almost hard to imagine how he could rise so high so quickly, but those were the times. That's the kind of thing that happened in the 1920s.

I've read other books by Eig (see here and here), so I felt pretty confident that I would like this one (and oh, what it took for me to get it from the library; that's a story in itself). The book is researched impeccably, as you would expect, and the sense of place--Chicago--very clear; it's obvious that he's familiar with the territory (it's so much easier to write about where you live than give yourself a crash course in someplace else). The writing itself is tough and blunt enough for the topic, without straying into the dangerous territory of pulp novel imitation, a temptation some authors can't resist when covering similar subjects which never turns out well. Trust me, if you want a description of brains on the street after a gangland assassination, you'll get it, but thankfully not done in fake Raymond Chandler. Read it and enjoy it--I always have to recommend a book that passes the "train test," as in it made me miss my stop, or in this case, get on the wrong train.

 

Our Modern Miss

 

Bobbed Haired Bandit Celia Cooney was portrayed as the representation of everything bad about the modern girl.

In 1924, a young woman walked into a Brooklyn grocery store. She made a seemingly innocent request for an item, but when the cashier turned around, he saw the girl now was pointing a gun at him. A tall man, with two guns was now standing behind her, covering the other clerks in the store. The woman said "Stick 'em up!," and all the men followed orders. The couple emptied the register and then made their getaway. The story was in the papers in the morning. The tabloids quickly named the girl the "bobbed-haired bandit," after the very modern short haircut the grocery store clerks had noticed on the gun girl, and a celebrity was born.
 
"The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York," by Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson tells the story of Celia and Ed Cooney, a young couple who saw the full flowering of American consumer culture racing past them, leaving them frustrated by their lower-class standing. They decided that the best way to get the money they needed to live the kind of middle class life they wanted for themselves and their baby (Celia was pregnant) was to start robbing small stores.

Hold ups were not novel, but a hold up where a girl wielded a gun and seemed to be running the job was something new. The fact that Celia had bobbed hair made her both an object of fascination and horror. She was obviously a symbol of the modern world and the destruction of society--she was a woman who didn't know her place and was acting like a man (her male accomplice, the tall, strapping Ed who Celia fell for because he looked like boxer Jack Dempsey, was often inaccurately described as a "cake-eater," or an effeminate man). She also stood for the shallowness of modern young people--surely she was stealing to fuel a materialistic desire for more short flapper dresses, fur coats, and make up. Of course the stolen money probably also supported a habit for wild parties, drinking, and jazz.

The crimes also put the New York City police department under scrutiny--newspapers began to ask how could they not catch a girl robber? To make the case even more difficult, a number of copycat bobbed haired stick up crimes began to take place. In response, Brooklyn police officers began to stop, and in some cases arrest, numerous innocent bobbed haired girls. One girl was turned in by a disgruntled ex-boyfriend and held in jail long after the evidence fell apart, just because the police were trying to save face.

In the end, Celia and Ed were done in by their own mistakes, as is often the case with petty criminals. Their first robbery had netted them well over a hundred dollars (I don't have the exact amount as I read the book about two months ago), but none of their subsequent ones came close to that. In order to keep up with the new, expensive apartment they'd rented and the payments for their new furniture, they had to commit more and more robberies. And the due date for the baby was getting closer. They decided to pull off one last big job, then run off to Florida where they'd use the money for Ed, a mechanic, to buy a garage. There was a Nabisco warehouse near where Ed grew up; they decided to hold up the office when the payroll money arrived. They bought tickets for a ship to Florida, then booked themselves into a Manhattan hotel, so they would cover their Brooklyn trail. They hired a car and driver to tour the neighborhood in Brooklyn (I think their story was that they were a couple out house-hunting). They eventually stopped the driver, tied him up and put him in the back of the car, then set out to do the robbery.

Things went wrong--Celia got into a scuffle with one of the employees, and when Ed tried to defend her, his gun went off and he shot the man. The two made a run for it to Florida as planned. However, they didn't have any of the money they'd thought they'd have to support themselves, and they also had to consider that if the wounded Nabisco employee died and they were caught, they'd be in serious trouble. They lasted for a little while in Florida, moving to worse and worse rooming houses. Celia gave birth, but the sickly baby died in one of their rented rooms after they had to leave the hospital because of their inability to pay. When they were finally tracked down, they didn't put up much of a fight, although the New York tabloids portrayed it as a dramatic shootout between cops and the desperate couple.

Fascinated crowds greeted the couple when they were transported back to New York, and the trial provided plenty of fodder for the tabloids. The confused couple kept changing their plea from guilty to not guilty, as they were surrounded by people trying to give them all kinds of legal advice, including an intrepid lawyer who kept on offering his services (and kept being turned down). Reporters found Celia's parents and sister, expecting a tearful reunion, but barely got that; Celia wanted nothing to do with her family. As the story of a Dickensian childhood of neglect and destitution came out, Celia became a symbol of another societal problem--a poor child who slipped through the cracks in the city as her parents drank away the little money that could go towards feeding and clothing their children. No wonder she turned to crime, many of the papers wrote.

In the end, Celia and Ed went to prison for seven years each. Ed lost an arm while working in one of the prison's machine shops and successfully sued the state for a fairly large sum of money. It was enough to set the couple up in a nice suburban house on Long Island where they began to raise two sons. But the money ran out, and the job the state had promised Celia never materialized. Complications from his accident made Ed too sick to work, and he died only a few years after their release. Celia worked hard to support her children, and never told them about her past. They didn't find out until some of her deathbed ramblings made them do some research, where they discoverd Celia's past as a 1920s celebrity criminal.

Duncombe and Mattson's book is very entertaining. They excel at digging up the different versions of Celia's story that the newspapers raced to put out to demonstrate how she was represented by the press; much of the book is made up of quotes from contemporary newspaper accounts, and Celia's own story that she dictated in prison and sold to a magazine. The book is good, but not quite great, though. I enjoyed reading it but felt frustrated that it wasn't better, or at least my definition of better. I love nonfiction books that are focused on one subject but also present studies of other related subjects--the history of a place or people, biographies of supporting players, information about social behavior in a certain place or time. In "The Bobbed Haired Bandit," Duncombe and Mattson do an excellent job of discussing the various portrayals of Celia in the press, but only provide a sketchy bit of context (it's the 1920s and the postwar boom was on! Prohibition hurt more than it helped! Women were becoming more independent!). They could have covered things like the popular images of women at the time, such as the newly minted movie stars of the time. They could have talked more about Brooklyn, or discussed the impact and reasons behind the fashion revolution of the 1920s, even the prisons of the time (so...was it really like "Chicago?" I'm guessing not). There are a lot of related topics that would have added substance and texture to the story. But it's still a fun read. You'll like it.

 

 

Charlie Chan and the Mystery of the Evolving Image

 
Swedish actor Warner Oland played Charlie Chan on screen, but Asian actors played his children. Go figure.

Again, sadly I have fallen far, far behind in telling you about the books I've read (and I'm sure your lives have all been hanging in the balance waiting for my insipid verdicts). So let me try to cover a few quickly here. And I mean super quickly.

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, by Yunte Huang. The Charlie Chan books and movies were big hits when they were released in the 1930s and '40s, but now are looked on as an embarrassing (or camp) artifact of the days when American perceptions of Asians consisted of the "Oriental other," an obtuse figure who spoke strange aphorism in pidgin English and used his super sneaky Asian skills to solve crimes. The casting of white actors to play Chan is more evidence in the history of Hollywood racism.

It is not uncommon for Asians now to denigrate, scorn, or again, simply be embarrassed by Chan. The movies are rarely shown for fear of offending people, or when they are shown, they're shown to make the above negative point about Asians in American culture. However, Yunte Huang, a literature professor born in China and educated in the United States, feels that Chan has been given an unfair place in history; rather than reviled, he should be embraced.

Huang comes at the Chan story from a number of angles. He tells the story of Chang Apana, a Chinese man who lived in Hawaii at the end of the 19th century. He first worked as a rancher, but then a rich, white woman financed his role as the first humane officer in Hawaii. Notoriously wielding a bullwhip, Apana investigated instances of animal cruelty, helping out the horses, dogs, cats and livestock of the island. He was so successful that he got a job on the Hawaiian police force, and became a department stalwart for decades.

Huang also tells the story Earl Derr Biggers, the author who created Chan. Biggers was a Harvard graduate who had written a successful mystery novel, Seven Keys to Baldpate, but struck gold in his second, "   " when he introduced as a minor character, Charlie Chan, a Chinese Hawaiian police officer. Biggers came across his Hawaiian settting honestly--he had been sent there for the winter for his health, but long claimed that he had based Chan on articles about Apana that he found in a newspaper in the New York Public Library. Huang, however, searched and couldn't find any mention of Apana in newspapers of that time period. Biggers couldn't seem to help making up a story about everything--which is why he had dropped out of a career in journalism. Anyway, Chan became a hit, with readers begging Biggers to write a book featuring the detective. He obliged, and Chan made him rich. Biggers did meet Apana during one of his visits to Hawaii; the two died within a few months of each other.
 
Part of Chan's popularity came from the movies based on the books. Huang covers these in detail, pleading their case as a much better representation of Asians in American culture than they seem--Chan is witty, resourceful, and the hero of his stories; he's not subservient to anyone. In contrast, the late 19th century vision of Asians was based on Bret Harte's damning poem "The Heathen Chinee," which depicted Asians as sly and untrustworthy. After that came the dastardly evil and notably effeminate Dr. Fu Manchu. In other words, there was really nowhere else to go but up for Chan. Even though he was portrayed by Caucasian actors (first Warner Oland, and then Sidney Toler), the detective was still the probably the most positive representation of Asians in American culture up to that time.

Huang tells about his own relationship to Chan and how he, as an emigre from China trying to make his way in the United States, sorts out his own reaction to the character. His story is pretty good too--he was protesting in Tianamen Square in 1989 when his family, nervous about the government's response, falsely told him his mother was sick, in order to get him to come home quickly; good call on their part, as that meant he had left the square when the massacre occurred. Additionally, the book contains a great deal of information about various Chan-related topics--Hawaiian history, the experience of Chinese in Hawaii, early 20th the century Harvard, and numerous other related things. It's all a lot of fun and interesting reading, especially if you're like me and you like to stumble across new, unexplored parts of history. Huang doesn't really offer a critical appraisal of the Chan books or movies (other than a close look at one that featured Stepin Fetchit as a sort of sidekick for Chan, which gives students of portrayals of race in Hollywood enough material for about 15 dissertations), but I guess that's a whole other book for another day. Or you could just read them and watch them yourself and decide.

 

The Beginning of the Story

I've never been a big Thanksgiving fan under the best of circumstances, and these are not. As I have for the last few years, though, I would like to take a moment to remember how a few years ago, right around Thanksgiving, I got involved in something singularly stupid, that ended bad. It didn't take place on this exact date--November 25th--but it was Thanksgiving that year. So here's to me, and that particular mistake.