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The closing shot lingers on the lead-riddled brick wall, the opening hints at the blood beneath the February snow of a cold Chicago morning. "Just make sure it's a great big red Valentine, huh?" The Public Enemy is directly cited with George Segal in the speakeasy, Scarface gives the detached ferocity of the tenor. Underworld warfare, Al Capone (Jason Robards) on one side and Bugs Moran (Ralph Meeker) on the other, "just like modern nations and corporations." Bootleggers, torpedoes, enforcers, hijackers, molls, a vortex of archetypes. "A good working-over with a razor sharp on a bare behind" is recommended, Capone promises a string of funerals: "I'll send flowers." Roger Corman at Twentieth-Century Fox, shaking the mainstream backlot with guerrilla crackle. A procession of armed roadsters tears a restaurant to ribbons, an argument with the showgirl (Jean Hale) escalates into a hotel-room demolition, the vendetta against the traditore (Alexander D'Arcy) is consummated aboard a moving train with drawn blade and flashing grin. Young and old faces caught in the crossfire, the struggling husband turned wheelman (Bruce Dern) and the broken immigrant turned pawn (Frank Silvera). (Amid gangland soldiers is Jack Nicholson, explaining why ammunition is soaked in garlic before a rub-out: "In case the bullets don't kill you, you die of blood poisoning.") The Paul Frees narration boils every character down to a terse bulletin that includes date of death, thus the Corman morbidity writ large for a fable of illustrious corpses, as Rosi would have it. Tommy guns in violin cases, a rattling crescendo. "You guys part of a band?" "An orchestra." Cohen displays a keen appreciation of the form in The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, and there's the reductio ad absurdum of Bloody Mama. With Clint Ritchie, Frank Campanella, Richard Bakalyan, David Canary, Harold J. Stone, Joseph Turkel, John Agar, Leo Gordon, and Dick Miller.
--- Fernando F. Croce |