I Died a Million Times

Gangster Noir in Midcentury America

Robert Miklitsch

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780252052491
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

In the 1950s, the gangster movie and film noir crisscrossed to create gangster noir. Robert Miklitsch takes readers into this fascinating subgenre of films focused on crime syndicates, crooked cops, and capers. With the Senate's organized crime hearings and the brighter-than-bright myth of the American Dream as a backdrop, Miklitsch examines the style and history, and the production and cultural politics, of classic pictures from The Big Heat and The Asphalt Jungle to lesser-known gems like 711 Ocean Drive and post-Fifties movies like Ocean's Eleven. Miklitsch pays particular attention to trademark leitmotifs including the individual versus the collective, the family as a locus of dissension and rapport, the real-world roots of the heist picture, and the syndicate as an octopus with its tentacles deep into law enforcement, corporate America, and government. If the memes of gangster noir remain prototypically dark, the look of the films becomes lighter and flatter, reflecting the influence of television and the realization that, under the cover of respectability, crime had moved from the underworld into the mainstream of contemporary everyday life.

PART ONE

THE SYNDICATE PICTURE

1

THE COMBINATION

The Syndicate’s tentacles reached everywhere. … However, murder … was not the big business. The rackets were. The assassinations were ordered, contracted, and performed solely to sustain those rackets.

Fantastic? It can’t happen in your town. It did!

—Burton B. Turkus and Sid Feder, Murder Inc.: The Story of “The Syndicate”

711 OCEAN DRIVE: CALIFORNIA DREAMING

In an attempt to determine whether a national crime syndicate in fact existed, the first “menace” that the Kefauver Committee decided to tackle was the racing news wire service, which was the “skeleton of organized crime in America.”1 In the wake of Prohibition, after organized crime had switched from bootlegging to other sources of revenue, the “principal facet” of the new rackets was illicit bookmaking on horse racing, “in which bookies were supplied directly or indirectly with racing information by the monopolistic Continental Press Service, an organization that leased 23,000 miles of telegraph circuits from Western Union and grossed more than 2 million, by its own estimate, in 1949.”2

The California Crime Commission established that “up-to-the-minute reports on track conditions, shifts of jockeys, and changes in odds promoted more fervent play and a more rapid turnover of money by the bigger bookmakers, which in turn ensured larger profits.”3 And where large profits were being made, the organization was not far behind. A tool, according to Kefauver, of the “Chicago-Capone Syndicate,” the wire service would relay its “news hot to the bookies by getting concessions at race tracks or even by such exotic methods as spying with high-powered binoculars and using semaphore signals.”4 The operation was so efficient and remunerative that Kefauver referred to the racing news wire service as “Public Enemy Number One.”5

Directed by Joseph Newman, 711 Ocean Drive (1950) is in many ways a fictional account of what Lt. Pete Wright (Howard St. John) of the LAPD “gangster squad” calls the “National Wire Service, Inc.,” a syndicate whose revenues exceed, as he observes in voice-over, the “combined earnings of the twenty-five largest corporations.” Given the reference to the National Wire Service, 711 Ocean Drive bears, not surprisingly, an intimate relation to the Kefauver hearings on organized crime. In fact, Vice President Alben Barkley had appointed Alexander Wiley, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, to the crime committee, and Wiley was originally supposed to appear onscreen to endorse the film. Although this endorsement was eventually cut, a written prologue still precedes the title credits:

Because of the disclosures made in this film, powerful underworld interests tried to halt production with threats of violence and reprisal. It was only through the armed protection provided by members of the Police Department in the locales where the picture was filmed that this story was able to reach the screen.

Frank Seltzer, the film’s producer, reported to a special Senate Crime Investigating Committee that Las Vegas gamblers pressured the film crew to halt production at a number of locations, including Las Vegas, Palm Springs, and Boulder Dam, because they were unhappy with the picture’s portrait of “past-posting.”6

As the above prologue indicates, 711 Ocean Drive is informed by the semidocumentary movement that was a major influence on postwar classic noir. This semi-documentary angle is epitomized by the fact that the film concludes with an admonitory epilogue that complements both the prologue and Lieutenant Wright’s intermittent voice-over narration. At the same time, if the “voice-over commentary by an establishment figure” (i.e., police officer) is indicative of the film’s “links to the semi-documentary subgenre,” the “swaggering central turn” by the film’s star, Edmond O’Brien, arguably undercuts this exhortative message.7

O’Brien’s character in 711 Ocean Drive, Mal Granger, is reminiscent of his character in White Heat, Hank Fallon, in that both men are “masters of technology.”8 The difference is that Mal is a criminal, like Fallon’s undercover alter ego, Vic Pardo, in White Heat. While O’Brien’s performance in 711 Ocean Drive recalls his frenetic turn as Frank Bigelow in D.O.A., which had appeared three months earlier, it also anticipates Shield for Murder, where O’Brien plays Barney Nolan, a “bad cop” who has been corrupted by his obsession with striking it rich.

Lieutenant Wright references this compulsion both in the initial sequence of 711 Ocean Drive and in his subsequent voice-over narration. In the former, while conversing with a junior officer in a patrol car on the way to the airport for a flight to Las Vegas, where they hope to apprehend Granger, Wright speculates that Mal’s problem may have been “too much ambition”; in the latter, Wright concludes that Granger “wasn’t a criminal. He was just a guy working for the telephone company.”

When the film cuts to Mal on the job, it’s obvious that he’s smart—he jokes about “inventing the telephone”—as well as bighearted because he insists on lending money to a coworker whose daughter is sick. Sentiment aside, the scene is significant because the mise-en-scène—the background is cluttered with electronic equipment—suggests that Mal is ensnared by the very same thing that’s the source of his genius. Mal, in fact, has been supplementing his meager wages by playing the ponies—and not the even money, as his bookie, Chippie Evans (Sammy White), reminds him, but the long shots: “box cars or nothing.” Chippie therefore encourages Mal to “lay off the races” and, instead, use his know-how about telephones and electronics: “Dames, clothes, automobiles. You can have anything you want, kid, if you know the right guy.”

Vince Walters (Barry Kelley), the owner of the Tri-State Press Wire Service, is the right guy, and after Chippie phones in another long shot for Mal, he takes him to meet “Mister Big.” At the Liberty Finance Company (a front, according to Wright, for “one of California’s largest bookmaking operations”), Mal and Chippie breeze past the legitimate part of the business—a sign reads “CREDIT IS YOUR GREATEST ASSET”—to the rear of the store. Chippie presses a buzzer and they go through a door and down to where the real action is. For the first time in the film, with the exception of the credit sequence, the lighting is distinctly low-key, and chiaroscuro shadows tattoo the wall. The descent is literal and metaphorical: this is Mal’s Mephistophelian moment. Walters wants to expand his Los Angeles operation (he relates this to Mal and Chippie while they’re standing in front of a map of California), and Mal has the answer: “relay amplifiers,” a new gadget whereby “people in different cities can listen in on a telephone conversation at the same time.” Walters is finishing his pitch when a young blonde woman, Trudy Maxwell (Dorothy Patrick), comes down the stairs and Mal’s mind is suddenly made up: “I always knew there was some way to beat the races.” Out with the telegraph and in with the telephone.

Dissolve via Wright’s voice-over—“[Mal’s] improvements ran the daily take up to staggering figures”—to a wide shot of a new, markedly more streamlined operation as Trudy comes down the stairs again. Though she’s later pinched at the track trying to signal Mal, who’s manning a walkie-talkie and binoculars at a house across the way, the two are cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway—this is the American Dream, California-style (“Dames, clothes, automobiles …”)—when he advises her to “stick around.” No ingénue, she replies, “You sound like someone who thinks he’s going someplace.” Mal’s rise to the top is swift: first he engineers a communications crash in order to force Walters to give him a bigger share of the profits (Mal demands and gets 20 percent of the take), then Walters is murdered when a bookie he’s been “bleeding” guns him down in his office. Wright, interrogating Mal about Walters’s death, reads the tea leaves to him: “It looks like you’re gonna be Mister Big over at Tri-State.”

Cut from a medium shot of Mal as he exits the police station, where he pauses just long enough to toss away his company ID badge, to a wide shot of him running in the Pacific surf with a German shepherd in the brilliant California sunshine. This is the good life, and the address is 711 Ocean Drive, Malibu. If Mal’s new beachfront property and monogrammed robe (“MG”) aren’t sufficient proof that the old wage slave is dead and buried, Trudy says to him, a note of sarcasm in her voice as she brings him the mail while he’s considering which new sports coat to wear that day, “Just wonder if you’re the same guy I used to know.” “The same,” Mal answers, “except for money in my pockets instead of wire, tailored suits instead of overalls.” Then, since she’s about to leave, Mal asks her to “tell the cook to send … some OJ and coffee,” at which point Chippie arrives and warns Mal, “Right now you have all of California tied up and everyone knows it. You get too big and those big guys back East will move in.”

Mal’s days as an independent operator are, like his address, numbered. At a corporate-looking meeting at a corporate-looking office building in Cleveland, Ohio, Carl Stephans (Otto Kruger), the avuncular head of the National Wire Service (he complains about having to drink milk because of his perpetually bad stomach), has decided that it’s time to expand the organization beyond Kansas City. Stephans asks his lieutenant, Larry Mason (Donald Porter), to travel to California and persuade Mal that it’s in his interest to partner with the organization. In order to entice him (Stephans is coded as a pimp here), he also orders Larry to take his attractive wife, Gail (Joanne Dru). At a swimming pool in Palm Springs where, in the background, a sun-glassed Gail can be seen lying out in the sun and seductively rubbing lotion on her legs, Mal can’t resist the bait. He likes what he sees. He also likes the fact that Gail is a class act, the sort of woman who—before she met Larry—went to “smart girls’ schools” and “belonged to the country club set.” While Mal’s desire for his superior’s wife is an Oedipal cliché of the genre (see, for instance, Shakedown [1950], in which ambitious photojournalist Jack Early [Howard Duff] makes a serious play for the wife of his mobster boss, Nick Palmer [Brian Donlevy]), Mal, despite his oft-stated aversion to marriage, falls hard for Gail.

Mal’s fall is as swift as his rise: first Trudy informs him that he’s getting less than 30 percent of the profits of the bookmaking business rather than 50 percent as promised, then Gail happens to fall down the stairs and ends up in a Hollywood hospital with a black eye and broken nose. After Larry nonchalantly relays the news to Mal at a boxing match that’s a blunt metaphor for his marriage, Mal contracts a man named Gizzi (Robert Osterloh), the owner of a Beverly Hills clothing store, to take out Larry. The irony is that if Mal is imitating Stephans (earlier, at the aforementioned meeting, we see Carl casually ordering a hit on a greedy client: “I believe he’s a very sick man. I don’t think he’ll ever get well”), Mal is doing it, at least in part, for reasons of the heart. In other words, it’s not just business; it’s personal. The effect of this twist is to complicate the mercenary thrust of Mal’s character, which has been dominant up until he meets Gail, a sympathetic identification that remains intact even after he murders Gizzi at the Malibu Sport Fishing Pier when the latter threatens to blackmail Mal unless he makes him a “silent partner.”

The fact that this sequence constitutes the credit sequence of 711 Ocean Drive suggests that it represents a point of no return for Mal. Indeed, the credit sequence concludes with a cut from a shot of Gizzi’s body breaking the surface of the water to a telephone ringing at police headquarters. Despite the fact that the police have been unable to prove Mal ordered Larry’s death, they now seize on Gizzi’s murder to build a case against him. Mal himself has previously enacted an elaborate telephonic scenario to prove that he was in Palm Springs when the homicide occurred. Wright, in turn, uses a tape recording of his call (the sound of a streetcar whistle can be heard in the background) to refute his alibi. Cornered, Mal decides to flee to Guatemala but not before trying to make the organization “pay off every cent they owe [him].” His plan: to “past-post all the books that the syndicate owns in Las Vegas.”

The sequence in which Mal taps the “main cables of the wire service that lead to all the horse parlors” in order to “electronically set their clocks back” is remarkable not simply because it’s narrated by Wright—in, I might add, an oddly conspiratorial tone—but because it’s photographed in low-key, high-contrast light. It’s as if Mal has suddenly returned to his earlier hands-on, entrepreneurial self, using his electronic know-how to outwit the mob. As in the ’50s heist film, everything initially goes according to plan—too well, in fact. Chippie wins so much money that the racetrack has to write him a check that he can’t cash until the next morning, and in an echo of Walters’s cruel treatment of Mendel Weiss (Sidney Dubin), another small-time bookie that Mal previously snubbed recognizes Chippie and reports back to Stephans.

The spectacular, Hitchcockian dénouement of 711 Ocean Drive is set up by the film’s penultimate action in which Stephans, after sending his henchmen to kidnap Chippie, tips off the police that Mal is hiding out at the Boulder Inn. Since Stephans can’t be bothered to greet Wright, Steve Marshak (Bert Freed) and another associate meet the lieutenant at the airport while Carl sits watching from a parked limousine. Wright is disgusted—“The only reason I’m here cleaning up your dirty laundry is because we happen to want Granger pretty bad”—but the very last time we see Stephans, he’s temporarily turning over operations to Steve, because he “promised [his] children that [he’d] go back East on the farm with them for a while.” And then he strolls off to a waiting airplane.

The Boulder Dam sequence, which recalls the underground ones in He Walked by Night and The Third Man (1950), is a tour de force of lighting, editing, and camerawork. It’s also metaphorically rich because the “electricity the dam produces … is what powers [Mal’s] particular racket.”9 The dam that dwarfs Mal and Gail therefore provides a quintessential noir foil to his “evil genius.” The fact that it’s man-made and the result of collective labor also puts Mal’s possessiveindividualist character as well as the syndicate’s criminal-organizational ethos in sharp relief.

The mise-en-scène complements the expressive editing, lighting, and camerawork. The moment that Mal and Gail exit their car and start running toward the dam, they’re imprisoned ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Direct Address: To the Reader
• Preface: Gangster/Noir
• Introduction: From the Syndicate to the Classic Heist Picture
• Part One: The Syndicate Picture
• Part Two: The Rogue Cop Film
• Part Three : The Heist Movie
• Notes
• Index
• Backcover