If the
Hollywood western set out an American foundation myth for the first fifty years
of popular cinema, then the Mafia movie took over with a darker vision for the
past forty. Western heroes were all Anglo-Saxon individualists, steeped in rugged
Protestant decency, striving for the rights of the ‘little man’ against supposedly
uncivilised hordes of pagan aboriginals, superstitious Catholic Mexicans, or the
twisted mirror-image of themselves (outlaws, corporate-minded Easterners,
corrupt sheriffs, etc.) Francis Coppola’s
The Godfather (1972) acknowledged for the first time that
not all US citizens were descended from north Europeans, that American individualism was all about free
enterprise in business, and that those two facts had created a far more complex
and less innocent basis for the society in which most of his countrymen lived.
The racism which had excluded Italian immigrants from the Anglo establishment
gave rise to alternative social structures, based on ethnic clan loyalties; the
free enterprise principle that profit should be made by whatever means could be
got away with involved the bypassing and manipulation of that establishment’s
rules. The Sicilian Cosa Nostra portrayed
in the first two Godfather movies (Part II in 1974) is criminal and
violent, but also social and, within its own terms of reference, recognisably
moral. That’s what makes these a new kind of film about US social history, as
well as compelling stories. Brian de Palma did the same kind of thing for the Hispanic
criminal underworld with Scarface (1983),
Sergio Leone for Jewish gangsters in Once
Upon a Time in America (1984.)
Jon Polito (Johnny Caspar)
By the
time the Coen Brothers made Miller’s
Crossing (1990) the struggle between Italians, Jews, Anglos, Hispanics,
Irish, and, to a lesser extent,
African-Americans, for dollars and the
nation’s soul (which may or may not be the same thing) was an established
cinematic paradigm. Being the Coens,
though, this was never going to be a simple genre piece. On one level, the film
is a blackly comic pastiche of everybody else’s gangster movie. It opens with an
outraged Sicilian mobster (Johnny Caspar) decrying to an Irish gang boss (Leo O’Bannion)
the dubious ethics of a renegade Jewish grifter (Bernie Birnbaum) who has
shortened the odds on a fixed boxing-match, thus diminishing his gambling
profits. It involves a ménage à
trois between Bannion, his ‘moll’ Verna – a cynic from Central Casting and
Birnbaum’s sister to boot – and his lieutenant, Tom Reagan, who gives every
indication of not caring a damn about her. In the course of the action, Reagan is
subjected to a series of savage beatings which in the real world would have
killed or incapacitated him, sustaining no more injury than a cut lip. In
several early scenes, O’Bannion is shown dictating to the Mayor and Police
Chief as though they were underlings; in a later one, the now-dominant Caspar
does the same thing. There are crosses
and double-crosses galore.
L-R: Albert Finney (Leo O'Bannion), Gabriel Byrne (Tom Reagan), Marcia Gay Harden (Verna Birnbaum)
So far, so parodic. But just as
Coppola and Leone, inter alia, demonstrate
the workings of politics and the wider mechanisms of business in the activities
of organised crime, so the Coens introduce the cock-up theory of history into the
mix. Reagan, now apparently working for
Johnny Caspar (keep up !) takes pity on Birnbaum, whom he has been instructed
to murder, and allows him to escape on condition he leave town without trace.
Whereupon he reappears in Reagan’s own apartment to manipulate the situation to
his own reckless financial advantage. The
gang war prompted by his chiselling fizzles out. Caspar himself is murdered by Reagan,
who also (finally) takes out Birnbaum. O’Bannion is restored, diminished, to
top-dog status, with Verna agreeing to marry him but Reagan refusing his offer
of re-employment. The solidarity within all camps – Sicilian, Irish and Jewish –
is fatally compromised. Reagan is the last man left standing, largely because
his ruthlessness, cynicism and ability to take a beating exceed those of any of
the other players, but it is a moot point how long this is likely to last. He
might be killed next week, or he might go on to found his own mob and be
brought down years later in a replay of the kind of machinations in which he
has just played a part. His bloody-mindedness and individualism, like a
perverted version of that of the cowboy-heroes cited earlier, have allowed him
to outwit the collectivities and corporations among which he moves, but the
price is solitude and unknowability, and we're all aware they will not protect him
indefinitely. He is as blank as Melville’s Samouraï, and as doomed.
John Turturro (Bernie Birnbaum)
You might compare to Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine, which has a more emphatic ending to its antihero.
ReplyDelete