Public Enemy
Richard Maltby
Like many 1930s crime movies, The Public Enemy (1931) begins
with an explicit statement of authorial intent: “It is the intention of the
authors of The Public Enemy to honestly depict an environment that exists today
in a certain strata [sic] of American life, rather than to glorify the hoodlum
or the criminal”. This declaration of civic responsibility is usually regarded
as an empty, cynical gesture intended to appease critics concerned at the
movies’ “subversive” effects, but such an interpretation simplifies the complex
and contradictory cultural position occupied by Hollywood’s representations of
criminality in the early Depression. Contemporaneous reviews treated The Public
Enemy‘s claim to provide “a sociological study” of gangland more seriously,
endorsing its “remarkably lifelike portraits of young hoodlums” as “a hard and
true picture of the unheroic gangster” (1).
The studio did not aim to produce either a sociological treatise or a socially
subversive text, but the “roughest, toughest, and best of the gang films to
date” (2). In the cultural climate of the time, its producers had to defend it
against the persistent criticism that such movies were a source of inspiration
for criminal behaviour. The editorial justification of The Public Enemy as a
contribution to social debate was not, however, something tacked on to the end
of the project to fool the censorious, but an integral part of the movie’s
process of construction. As the script was being written, Darryl F. Zanuck, head
of production at Warner Bros., argued to the administrators of the Production
Code that “if we can sell the idea that … ONLY BY THE BETTERMENT OF ENVIRONMENT
AND EDUCATION for the masses can we overcome the widespread tendency toward
lawbreaking – we have then punched over a moral that should do a lot toward
protecting us” from cuts at the hands of state and municipal censor boards (3).
No one who saw Little Caesar or The Public Enemy in 1931 saw them in a cultural
vacuum. Embodying the metropolitan civic corruption that had been tolerated in
the 1920s, the gangster had been an acceptable representative of
anti-Prohibition sentiment in the popular press until 1929, but in the cultural
catharsis of the early Depression he became a scapegoat villain, threatening the
survival of social order and American values. This shift in public sentiment was
most conspicuously charted in changed press attitudes to Al Capone, who had
ceased to be the celebrated “Horatio Alger lad of Prohibition” long before his
conviction for tax evasion in October 1931 (4).
Contrary to the mythology of a “pre-Code” cinema, the “classic gangster film”
was in fact the product of only one production season, 1930-1931, and
constituted a cycle of fewer than 30 pictures. The box-office success of The
Doorway to Hell in late 1930 and Little Caesar in January 1931 triggered a
series of imitations in a pattern typical of the industry’s exploitation of a
topical cycle, but none of the pictures released after April 1931 were
box-office successes. By then, exhibitors were reporting that audiences had had
enough of gang pictures, while a plethora of civic and religious organisations
complained that these movies continued to endow gangsters “with romance and
glamour”. In response, the industry claimed that the movies were “deterrents,
not incentives, to criminal behaviour” (5), “debunking” gangsters through “the
deadly weapon of ridicule”, and stripping them of “every shred of false heroism
that might influence young people”, most conspicuously through the use of ethnic
stereotyping in casting and performance (6). After the New York censor board
eliminated six scenes from The Public Enemy before permitting its release in
mid-April, however, the MPPDA acted to curtail the cycle, establishing
guidelines for “the proper treatment of crime” in pictures and eliminating
scenes of inter-gang conflict and stories with gangsters as central characters.
The conventional critical identification of The Public Enemy with Little Caesar
and Scarface as the trilogy of “classic” early 1930s gangster movies has
encouraged a reading of its plot as if it portrayed the rise and fall of a
gangster in Capone’s image. Unlike Little Caesar or Scarface, however, The
Public Enemy does not depict the acquisition, exercise or loss of power. Tommy
Powers (James Cagney) remains more hoodlum than gangster, occupying a
subordinate role in the bootlegging business, not an organisational one, obeying
instructions rather than giving them, and untroubled by any ambition to escape
the neighbourhood.
Zanuck’s claim that the movie was “more biography than plot” was not, however,
inaccurate: The Public Enemy might fairly be described as a composite biography
of a neighbourhood criminal gang such as Chicago’s Valley gang, led by Patrick
“Paddy the Bear” Ryan until his assassination in 1920. His protégés Terry
Druggan and Frankie Lake became the first gangsters to distribute beer on a
large scale in Chicago after Prohibition, providing Capone’s mentor John Torrio
with a model of successful collaboration between bootleggers and respectable
business. By 1924 bootlegging had made them millionaires, and Druggan boasted to
the press that even the lowliest member of his gang wore silk shirts and rode in
chauffeur-driven Rolls Royces.
The movie’s press book explicitly identified its two protagonists as being based
on Lake and Druggan, but Tommy inherited his “sunny brutality”, his
impulsiveness and lack of organisational prowess from press accounts of
Northside gang leaders Dion O’Banion and Hymie Weiss, who were depicted as
figures of local colour rather than as Capone-like businessmen. The beer wars
between Capone and the Northsiders were most often represented as a conflict
between two systems of social organisation, Capone’s mercenary capitalism
against O’Banion’s dependence on loyalty, friendship and affection.
The movie borrows freely from the “factual” accounts of the O’Banion gang’s
exploits, incorporating several incidents from newspaper reports of the lives of
O’Banion, Weiss, and Louis “Two-Gun” Alterie. Most famous of these was the 1923
death of Samuel “Nails” Morton in a riding accident, and the subsequent
(apocryphal) execution of the horse by either O’Banion or Alterie. After
O’Banion’s assassination in 1924, Alterie vowed revenge by proposing a publicly
staged shoot-out with O’Banion’s killers, akin to Tommy’s attack on Schemer
Burns’ headquarters. Weiss was notorious for his evil temper and impulsiveness,
and reports that he once pushed an omelette into a girlfriend’s face were cited
as the source of The Public Enemy‘s infamous grapefruit incident. His
assassination in the first “machine-gun nest” murder in October 1926 was
recreated in the killing of Matt Doyle (Edward Woods).
Like other crime movies of the period, The Public Enemy omitted any substantial
or detailed representation of what sociologists at the time described as the
“unholy alliance between organized crime and politics”, in favour of their
representation of the spectacle and melodrama of criminal performance (7). Tommy
does become a member of the nouveau riche, dressing and driving in the style to
which Terry Druggan’s gang became accustomed, and visiting as ritzy a nightclub
as Warner’s set budget would allow. But Tommy and Matt remain “boys” throughout
the movie, and Tommy’s psychological immaturity is most vividly demonstrated in
his relationships with women. Incapable of domesticity – Matt says he is “not
the marrying kind” – Tommy treats women as a form of property, a means to
display his new affluence, along with clothes and cars. When Kitty’s (Mae Clark)
attempts at domesticity start “getting on my nerves”, he trades up for a more
luxurious model, but his relationship with Gwen (Jean Harlow) is never
consummated, since Matt interrupts them with the news of Nathan’s death, and
Tommy is deprived of the social and sexual opportunity she presents because he
has to go and shoot a horse.
The Public Enemy is also a family melodrama, staging the conflict between the
two social worlds of the second generation immigrant, dramatising the family
conflicts generated by the process of Americanisation. Tommy’s father makes only
one appearance in the movie, emerging from the house in police helmet and braces
to beat Tommy for theft. His silence intensifies the symbolic identity as both
Father and the Law bestowed on him by his improbable costume. He is subsequently
absent from the movie, and the law is otherwise present only through the
appearance of the garrulous Officer Patrick Burke, who tells Mike that “the
worst part” of Tommy’s delinquency “is that he’s been lying to his mother”.
Tommy and his elder brother Mike fight in every scene they share until Tommy is
in hospital, and for all his moral rectitude, Mike disrupts every opportunity
for family harmony.
In its plot and character delineation, The Public Enemy attempted to render its
protagonist unattractive, but the picture’s most problematic element was also
its most significant commercial achievement: the creation of a new star in James
Cagney. To an even greater extent than was true of Edward G. Robinson’s
performance in Little Caesar, Cagney’s screen persona was defined by his first
starring performance. Alone among the major stars of Classical Hollywood,
Cagney’s appeal was almost exclusively to an urban male audience.
Although he did not play a gangster – that is, a character making his living
through organised criminal activity and in armed conflict with the police –
again until 1938, Cagney did play a series of gamblers, con artists,
ex-gangsters and reformed criminals who behaved very much as gangsters, and
through these performances he became the mediated, heroic embodiment of the
hoodlum: “good-natured, well-dressed, adorned and sophisticated, and above all…
American, in the eyes of the gang boy” (8). Some of his most disreputable fans
accepted the authenticity of his performance, believing that both he and
Robinson were slum boys who had “made good in a big way in the movies”, and
eagerly imitating Cagney’s dress and mannerisms, in the process supplying
superficial evidence of the movies’ doleful influence on the young (9).
Nevertheless, adolescents with more practical experience of criminality
recognised the repressive artificiality of narrative closure when they saw it.
As one explained, “Sure, I like Little Caesar and Jim Cagney, but dat’s de
boloney dey give you in de pitchers. Dey always died or got canned. Day ain’t
true” (10).
Endnotes
1.Warner Bros. press book for The Public Enemy, André Sennwald, “Two Thugs,” New
York Times, 24 April 1931, p. 27
2.Variety review of The Public Enemy, 29 April 1931
3.Zanuck to Joy, January 6, 1931, PCA Public Enemy Case File. Typography in
original.
4.Fred D. Pasley, Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-Made Man, Faber, London,
1966 [first published 1931]), p. 317
5.Hays to Joseph Melillo, 11 June 1931, Production Code Administration Public
Enemy file, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, Los Angeles.
6.Will Hays, Annual Report of the President of the MPPDA, 30 March 1931, Motion
Picture Association archive, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, 1931, Meetings file.
7.John Landesco, Organized Crime in Chicago: Part III of The Illinois Crime
Survey 1929, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1968, p. 277
8.Landesco, p. 210
9.Paul G. Cressey, “The Community – A Social Setting for the Motion Picture,”
Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy, ed.
Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie and Kathryn H. Fuller, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 181
10.Henry James Forman, Our Movie-Made Children, MacMillan, New York, 1933, p.
264
Richard Maltby is Professor of Screen Studies and Head of
the School of Humanities at Flinders University.