|
The question ("What's happened to the old mob?") is out of Walsh's The Roaring Twenties, and goes into Becker's Touchez Pas au Grisbi. The gangster Thirties are a dim memory in the noir Forties, the holdover is a former bootlegger (Burt Lancaster) freed after a decade and a half in the clink. (At Grand Central Station, he stares pensively at reflected grids: "Bars... I guess I'll never get away from them.") The fall he took for his partner (Kirk Douglas) is not forgotten, the Regent Club is a fancy veneer, his pal (Wendell Corey) is a shame-faced bookkeeper. At dinner the chanteuse (Lizabeth Scott) grows philosophical about champagne ("After the buildup, the letdown"), the jailbird requests "Isn't It Romantic" and later she croons "Don't Call It Love." The gag is that you can't muscle in on a board of directors, tough-guy bluster shrinks in the face of corporate legalese. "There's a lot of things you have to do for business, kid." The tight structure is served by the multiplicity of Byron Haskin's camera setups, precisely the adroit treatment from a special-effects man turning director. The antihero can't wrap his head around the abstract new racket, he rages against a suitcase of documents only to get pummeled in an alley. The accountant with "lots of brains but not much stomach" takes a stand but sees his doom from inside a phone booth, a low-angle tracking shot of elongated shadows captures his demise. All is sorted out in a darkened office illuminated by gun blasts. "You say that like it was spelled in capital letters." Polonsky in Force of Evil runs the theme to its tragically logical limit. With Kristine Miller, George Rigaud, Marc Lawrence, Mike Mazurki, Mickey Knox, Roger Neury, and Freddie Steele. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |