Al Capone

Al Capone (1959 directed by Richard Wilson) is an Allied Artists' B-picture chiefly interesting for its photography (by Lucien Ballard) and an odd, curiously muted, performance by Rod Steiger as the titular crime-boss.  There's a little misdirection at the film's outset -- the picture is narrated by someone that we can't exactly identify.  At first, we take the narration, which is cynical and a bit indifferent, to be words spoken by a sleazy journalist who seems attracted to hoodlums (played by Martin Balsam).  Near the end of the picture, the narration becomes judgmental and didactic -- the narrator starts to use the first-person and we discover that the speaker is, in fact, an incorruptible Chicago cop.  Of course, if we knew at the outset that the narration would be tendentious support for law enforcement (and an admonition to root out organized crime) we would probably have rejected this perspective as uninteresting, obvious, and preachy.  Accordingly, the picture conceals the identity of its narrator until close to the end of the film.  The voice-over narrative is also peculiar in that it doesn't add anything to what we are seeing.  In fact, someone was uncomfortable with the whole concept of the film -- the picture wants us to identify with the righteous cop (at least when this is convenient) but first causes us to accept the point of view of the journalist, someone who is exploiting Capone's story for cheap, sensationalist effects -- exactly the sort of trashy appeal that this film presents as well.  Accordingly, the whole thing is more than a little inauthentic and, even, seems to be in bad faith.

The movie is 105 minutes long and presents a straight-forward chronicle of Al Capone's career in organized crime.  The plot seems rooted in real events and appears to be factually based.  Capone appears at the outset as a minor-league thug working for Johnny Torrio, a bartender who runs gambling rackets in Chicago.  Torrio works for Big Jim Colosimo, a gangster who controls most of the South Side of Chicago.  Capone's ambitious and charismatic.  He talks Torrio into bumping off Colosimo and, then, when Torrio is machine-gunned as part of an ongoing gang war, Capone takes over the whole South Side. (The logic of the film is that Capone will also arrange for the death of Torrio -- but he's oddly loyal to the man, allows him to retire, and, later, even calls on him to mediate a gang-war.)  One by one the other mobsters are whacked.  Capone engineers the St. Valentine's Day massacre from Miami where he is hiding out.  An incorruptible cop, someone who has disdained him from his earliest days in Chicago, colludes with the Feds and Capone is convicted of tax evasion and sent to prison for 11 years.  Some of his enemies plot to beat him savagely while he's imprisoned at Alcatraz.  We see him sprawling on a rock-pile with his face smashed almost beyond recognition while the narrator, whom we now know to be the cop, earnestly tells the audience to cooperate with local authorities to "root out" organized crime of the kind represented by Capone.  Along the way, the unscrupulous journalist is enlisted to betray Capone, gets threatened by the mobster, and defies him -- he gets whacked in a subway.  When Capone killed Big Jim Colosimo, his gunsels also shot down a kid who is in the wrong place at the wrong time -- this is our assumption, otherwise, we would have to assume the young man is just another expendable gangster.  Capone delivers flowers (from O'Banion's place) to the young widow, falls for her, and, like Richard III, courts her, basically on her husband's casket.  She becomes his mistress closing her eyes to what is obvious -- that is, that Capone killed her husband.  (He has made some other thug confess the crime to her --but it's obviously staged.)  When Capone oversteps the bounds of decency, attempting to bribe the righteous cop when he's out on the town, celebrating his anniversary with his wife, the outraged police chief snarls that the gangster killed his mistress' husband -- thus, precipitating an awful confrontation with the woman back at her apartment.  Capone slaps her up a bit, while she dramatically begs for the mobster to kill her and put her out of her misery.  This dramatic quarrel leaves Capone fatally wounded emotionally and the next thing that we see is a Courtroom where he's being sentenced to prison.

Curiously, Steiger's performance isn't over-the-top.  He imagines Capone as rather courtly, a cultured man who loves the opera --he's impressed by Colosimo's signed picture of Caruso and can sing tenor parts from Verdi and, even performs a little aria, while he's gunning down the big boss who has, in fact, treated him as a son.  After that killing, Capone retreats to the sidelines when it comes to homicide.  He doesn't kill anyone else except by proxy.  We see Hymie Weiss, O'Bannon, and the others murdered -- but the dirty work is always done by confederates and Capone is careful to maintain alibis with respect to these assassinations.  Capone isn't psychotically murderous --  he fancies himself a business-man and is happy to venture into legitimate pursuits, including trucking.  Prohibition is visualized as the chief cause of the crime-wave in Chicago.  The only time Capone has to use his fists, he gets beat up -- this is early in the film when he is working as a bouncer for Johnny Torrio.  (He doesn't bash out anyone's brains with a baseball bat as in films like The Untouchables). Lucien Ballard's dramatic photography features big, dramatically lit and lurid close-ups and several scenes are shot with high-contrast and glaring black-and-white, particularly a very showy sequence in which Capone and his thugs threaten Keeley, the crooked journalist played by Martin Balsam.  The movie looks authentic and the sets are well-configured to provide a documentary feeling to the picture.  The voice-over is superfluous and seems a sop to censors who wanted to avoid a making a picture that could be accused of glorifying the mobster.  Capone has some showy speeches about how he's just a businessman, merely supplying booze, broads, and gambling that people want and that they will inevitably purchase whether he's involved or not -- Steiger speaks these lines with conviction and is good in the role.  The inevitable problem with the Capone story is that the crime boss' death from tertiary syphilis isn't photogenic -- the bad guy doesn't die in a hail of bullets and, so, the audience feels a little cheated.  (We want our mobsters to expire in an apocalypse of gunfire as in Scarface and, so, the quasi-documentary ending of Al Capone, although true enough, is an anti-climax).