A Companion to the Gangster Film

George S. Larke-Walsh, George S. Larke-Walsh

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119041740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

A companion to the study of the gangster film's international appeal spanning the Americas, Europe, and Asia

A Companion to the Gangster Film presents a comprehensive overview of the newest scholarship on the contemporary gangster film genre as a global phenomenon. While gangster films are one of America's most popular genres, gangster movies appear in every film industry across the world. With contributions from an international panel of experts, A Companion to the Gangster Film explores the popularity of gangster films across three major continents, the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The authors acknowledge the gangster genre's popularity and examine the reasons supporting its appeal to twenty-first century audiences across the globe.

The book examines common themes across all three continents such as production histories and reception, gender race and sexuality, mafia mythologies, and politics. In addition, the companion clearly shows that no national cinema develops in isolation and that cinema is a truly global popular art form. This important guide to the gangster film genre:

• Reveals how the gangster film engages in complex and contradictory themes
• Examines the changing face of the gangster film in America
• Explores the ideas of gangsterism and migration in the Hispanic USA, Latin America and the Caribbean
• Discusses the wide variety of gangster types to appear in European cinema
• Contains a review of a wide-range of gangster films from the Americans, Europe, and Asia

Written for academics and students of film, A Companion to the Gangster Film offers a scholarly and authoritative guide exploring the various aspects and international appeal of the gangster film genre.

Part I
The Americas

1
Mary Pickford Meets the Mafia

Amy E. Borden

The Mafia, the mob, the Black Hand; these names periodically occur in catalog descriptions and publicity for a handful of nickelodeon and transitional‐era American silent films that we may consider precursors to the American gangster cycle that began in earnest in the 1930s. The US origins of the Mafia‐linked gangster film are traced to Wallace McCutcheon’s The Black Hand: The Story of a Recent Occurrence in the Italian Quarter of New York (1906, American Mutoscope & Biograph). In this one‐reeler, a butcher’s daughter is lured and kidnapped by members of a criminal plot that is conspicuously marked by a nativist depiction of Italian immigrants as near‐illiterate criminals. As seen in McCutcheon’s revenge short, early Mafia‐themed films are marked by a featured kidnap‐ or extortion‐plot perpetrated by members of the Black Hand, a loosely organized immigrant‐Italian underground criminal society. These films depict the police and conscientious citizens as cooperative partners with the relatively well‐off victimized parents – often wealthy business owners or members of the middle class – whose children are unwittingly placed in peril by their parent’s economic success. Set in Italian immigrant communities, the earliest films about the Italian Mafia purport to depict the danger this population faced from the criminal elements within. This creates a distinction between the hard‐working residents of these neighborhoods and the louche element that threatens their assimilation to an American work ethic by drawing them back into an “Old World” mode of vengeance and criminality.

One can perhaps make the argument that it is in the 1930s that cinema’s classic gangster tropes solidify, but these are still influenced by prior cycles. In the introduction to their anthology Mob Culture, Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnett, and Peter Stanfield critique an understanding of the gangster genre as it has codified around Robert Warshow’s analysis, criticizing its attempt to construct generic archetypes from a limited, 1930s‐heavy, data set of films. They claim that Warshow’s work, which they argue provides much of the basis for the genre analysis performed with gangster films, ignores the “production and consumption context[s],” including popular pre‐1930s film cycles. Their work proposes a reconsideration of a canonical conception of genre criticism within film studies due to its basis in a select and limited number of films that are evaluated based on a few shared features of subject and structure. They argue against this approach by emphasizing how it “reifies a particular cycle of films that were closely connected to the particular socioeconomic content of the early‐1930s” (2005, 2). The consequences of this is the effacement of other film cycles prior to this period as well as an erasure of the conditions that contributed to the characteristics of the gangster genre manifest in the 1930s. In effect, their work advocates for the importance of film cycles as more responsive registers of social and cultural change. Before the organized criminal undergrounds featured in Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 classic Underworld and other Hollywood‐produced gangster films of the late‐1920s and 1930s, nickelodeon and transitional‐era depictions of the underworld are less at home with Feathers and Bull and more likely to be featured amid small‐time, storefront criminal gangs who inhabit a liminal space between New York’s urban, Italian immigrant neighborhoods and the so‐called Sicilian old country.

One such film is the Mary and Jack Pickford multi‐reel drama Poor Little Peppina (1916, Famous Players‐Lasky/Paramount, Sidney Olcott), in which Mary plays the titular Peppina and Jack plays Beppo, who both believe to be Peppina’s brother. In fact, Peppina, neé Lois, is the kidnapped child of the Torrens family, an affluent American couple who left Italy’s Sicilian coast fifteen years ago, after their infant daughter was kidnapped from their home and presumed killed. Lois is very much alive, but she is unaware of her identity because she was raised as Peppina, the daughter of an Italian peasant family. Lois/Peppina’s circulation between families marks the removal and transformation of a wealthy American child to that of an Italian peasant in a reversal of the assimilationist tendencies often seen in Black Hand–plotted short films such as McCutcheon’s. Although there is nothing in that film that iconographically marks the butcher and his family as Italian immigrants, the fact that the film was staged and plotted using the well‐reported and illustrated (March 1906) Miano child kidnapping as its model places its action within New York’s Italian immigrant community, which Grieveson has shown was “widely regarded as presenting a racial and civic dissonance with American society” (2005, 37). As represented in early American film, the Black Hand and their chosen intracommunity victims communicate the danger and extent of this dissonance.

The first scenes in Poor Little Peppina emphasize the presence of the Mafia. The film’s story borrows from what, by 1916, would be familiar Black‐Hand themes and iconography: the kidnapping of a child, a criminal conspiracy, and the escape of the criminals from prison. In the version of the film that survives, its second title card introduces the audience to “Franzoli Soldo, a Mafia chief, under the guise of a butler….” (Poor Little Peppina Title Card, 1916). Performed by Antonio Maiori using a silent‐cinema acting style Giorgio Bertellini understands to “reveal a character’s national and racial identity,” Soldo is a stereotypical portrayal of Italianness that is all hot temper and abundant hand gestures (2010, 208). In addition to its intertitles and title cards, press descriptions also explicitly tie the film’s story and themes to the Mafia. Multiple reviews, such as this one published when the film opened, describe how the first scenes of the film turn on the presence of the Mafia.

The opening scenes show the incidents that occurred 15 years prior to the time Miss Pickford makes her appearance as Peppina. A wealthy American family by the name of Torrens, [sic] reside at their beautiful Italian villa. The family comprises Mr. and Mrs. Torrens and their daughter, Lois, a child about two years of age. The Torrens’ butler, an Italian and member of the Mafia, likes to sample the wine cellar of his employer, with the result that he is reported to the master by another of the servants. The butler is discharged and swears vengeance. (Hollywood Museum Collection)

Soldo avenges the loss of his position by murdering the informant who reported his theft. After being captured, he is tried and convicted of the murder. With “the aid of the Mafia,” embodied by his associate Villato, who is also, as a title card emphasizes, “a member of the Mafia,” Soldo makes a dramatic escape – is there any other kind during this era? His need for vengeance drives him back to the Torrens’ villa. Once there, he breaks in to steal their youngest child. Leaving the area by small boat, Soldo and Villato deliver Lois to Soldo’s relatives: Dominica, his wife Biana, and their son Beppo. The intertitle explains the terms of the gift: “Take this child and raise her as your own. If you tell anyone about her, you will answer to the Mafia” (Poor Little Peppina Title Cards, 1916). Afterward, Soldo escapes to New York’s Little Italy with Villato, where, in true Pickford fashion, seventeen years later they will again meet young Lois/Peppina. Only this time she will be disguised as a teenage boy to ensure a safe Atlantic crossing and her resettlement in New York’s Little Italy after she flees the Sicilian coast.

I’ve quoted the film’s reviews and intertitles at length to demonstrate how the Mafia is significantly and repeatedly referred to in the film’s story, in the intertitle and title card explanations and advancement of its plot, and in the publicity that surrounded its release. Poor Little Peppina does not simply use the basic conventions of a Black‐Hand plot; it embeds those conventions within a more sophisticated narrative that focuses on the grown Peppina’s movement from her Italian home to New York’s Lower East Side, where she will re‐encounter Soldo and Villato on her way to unknowingly reuniting with her birth family. This chapter asks, then, what happens when Mary Pickford meets the Mafia? Bearing in mind Pickford’s enormous celebrity at the time of the film’s release, I will consider how her star image interacts with Black‐Hand cycle conventions in the film’s story and its publicity. How do the burgeoning conventions of Mafia‐themed films bend or reinforce themselves when cast alongside Pickford? To answer this question, I build on Grieveson’s work about the ethnic and cultural immigration contexts found in silent era gangster films. He embeds Black‐Hand‐ and Mafia‐themed films in a cultural and social discourse about urban criminality that positioned Italian immigrants as racialized others. Grieveson sees how “accounts of Black‐Hand … gangs connected criminality directly to immigration and racial difference and articulated a growing sense of organized crime in cities shadowing civil society” (2005, 21). I wish to isolate Black‐Hand‐ and Mafia‐themed films to understand how their depiction of race and immigration is affected by an association with Mary Pickford. Poor Little Peppina – a film that required her to both outwit the Mafia and cut off her famous curls – features a mash‐up of successful American silent film themes which has the effect of both differentiating the film as a Mary Pickford feature and allowing it to chase a growing audience for racial melodramas that Bertellini has argued uses the liminal space of the tenement to claim “liberty and self‐determination” for racialized Italian women denied such gains back home. For Bertellini, the result of gaining such liberty is the ability to reinvent oneself; to become, as he quotes from the title of the 1918 film starring George Beban, the famous portrayer of Italian‐American immigrants: One More American (2010, 234).

Peppina and its cultural and social discourse creates a film that in practice A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: The Americas
• Part II: Europe
• Part III: Asia
• Index
• End User License Agreement