 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
The St Valentine's Day Massacre
|
 |
|
Three
details from Roger Corman's The St
Valentine's Day Massacre (1967):
-
As each character is introduced into the film, a narrator gives us a quick
rundown on their origins and their destiny. One young orphaned punk is
encapsulated thus: "When he was nine years old his father was murdered. By
the time he was twenty he had personally killed every man connected with his
father's death".
-
Another, older gangster is given a rather more sombre requiem: "On March
19, 1943, while under indictment for income tax evasion, Nidi will use a gun
for the last time, to take his own life".
-
In a key scene of the film, Al Capone/Jason Robards struts around those seated
at a board meeting, conjuring aloud the struggle of gods between himself and
Bugs Moran; Bugs just has to be killed, and pronto. "I don't think that's
a good business move, boss", suggests a crony. "Business!", Al snaps back. "I'm talking about staying
alive!"
With The St Valentine's Day Massacre we
are already deep in a post-genre phase of the crime/gangster film's history.
It's an outsize, mythified comic book of a film in which every move, character
and event is rendered with obvious and exaggerated iconicity (you've seen, for
instance, that heroic strut around the boardroom both before and after 1967 – The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), Hammett [1982]). It's thus a film that cuts right to the heart of the genre – to the
very reasons why it exists and why it fascinates.
Surveying
the history of the gangster genre in all its mutations before and after 1967
can give us a way to understand the resonance of these details cited from The
St Valentine's Day Massacre, beyond their vivid generic and iconographic
familiarity.
Take
the famous motif of revenge, for
instance, in the story form of someone methodically, over years, tracking down
the killers of a lover or parent (Underworld USA [1961], The Bride
Wore Black [1968], or Borges' story "Emma Zunz", filmed in 1992
by Benoit Jacquot), or the various 'rape revenge' films of the past few decades
(including I Spit on Your Grave, Ms .45 [1981] and Positive
I.D. [1987]). What could be more alluring, mythically, to the beleaguered,
subjected individual than the idea of someone being able to map and design the
plan of their life so exactly as to impose their will upon time (the initial primal moment of murder frozen and
revisited, as it were, until it is eradicated, fully 'answered' in the act of
revenge), space (the victims are spied upon, their lives and routines
calculated precisely in preparation for the deadly intervention), oneself
(training in firearms, bodily development, rehearsing fake identities – Legs
Diamond or, a bit further out, Taxi Driver [1976]) and, of course,
other selves (the moment of being able to raise the gun and intone 'say your
prayers' ... or as Nick Nolte puts it in 48 HRS [1982], "you're
dead – end of story"). The revenge-narrative allows, then, the veritable
creation of a self (sometimes a monstrous self) as a fully empowered
individual, often from quite humble or nondescript beginnings (Jeanne Moreau's
transformation from Plain Jane to crack killer in The Bride Wore Black ... and note the whole ripe fantasy of becoming-other in Ms .45 and Positive
I.D.).
In
Corman's film we can also see, summarily, the way the genre plays off
reality-based conceptions of power (the tax department, like the bank in De
Palma's Scarface, being the ultimate arbiter and wielder of power; the
advice concerning 'good business') against fantasising, egoistic
self-perceptions of power ("I'm talking about staying alive!" – the
phrase 'staying alive' being virtually synonymous in our popular culture with being intensely alive). The play-off
becomes particularly intense when the matter of survival is at stake – for, on the one hand, the sense that one is
fighting to 'stay alive' can actually increase the individual's sense that he
is special, magical, indestructible, living on his incredible wits (Legs
Diamond: "the bullet hasn't been made that can kill me!"; Cagney
in White Heat [1949]: "Look, Ma, top of the world!"; James
Remar's disbelief in 48HRS that he is actually bleeding and dying; and,
beyond the action genres, Weir's remarkable drama of assumed immortality Fearless [1993]). Or, on the other hand, it can lead, by necessity, to the adoption of
other understandings and strategies of power – the individual changing with the
game and the rules (by forming alliances, or switching sides, or disappearing,
or changing identity – think of Max's strategy as opposed to Noodles' in Once
Upon a Time in America, or Gabriel Byrne's fate in Miller's Crossing [1990]).
MORE Corman: Frankenstein Unbound © Adrian Martin December 1987 |
