Public Enemies: Gangsters and Gangster Movies
The reality and fiction of Prohibition-era organized crime — and an inspiration for Brecht’s satire THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company September 5 through October 13, 2019, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is an anti-fascist satire that revels in the tropes of gangster movies to highlight both the brutality and the absurdity of its subjects. Bertolt Brecht was inspired by the wave of gangster movies that swept America in the 1930s — and by fascination with the real-life criminals who rose to power in early-20th century Chicago.
Chicago became notably associated with mob-related activities in the 1920s. Prohibition and the Great Depression made Chicago ideal for criminal enterprise. The former outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol from 1920 to 1933, and the latter was an unprecedented economic contraction that created mass unemployment and financial hardship throughout the 1930s. Chicago was especially hard-hit by the Depression; the city was dependent on manufacturing, the sector most affected by the crash. By 1933, Chicago’s unemployment rate was 50%.
When Prohibition began in 1920, crime families quickly took over the bootlegging industry, controlling the smuggling and secret sale of liquor, running speakeasies, and damaging businesses that refused to buy their illegal wares. They were also major players in all manner of vices, including sex work and gambling, and “protection” rackets like the one we see in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Some Chicagoans, struggling through both Prohibition and the financial crash, saw the gangsters as men of the people, antiheroes who worked a broken system to their advantage and lived an enviable life of luxury and fun.
Although the gangsters projected a lurid glamour, violence was an inescapable fact of that life. Gangster culture was so synonymous with Chicago that a Tommy gun became known as a “Chicago Typewriter.” And gangsters deeply intimidated the city: in 1926 and 1927, not a single gang murder was solved. Witnesses got “Chicago amnesia” and refused to testify.
Chicago’s most famous gangster, Al Capone, was deemed “Public Enemy Number One” in 1930 by the Chicago Crime Commission. But despite his control over the city’s organized crime, he was actually born and raised in Brooklyn, where he began his life of crime. In 1920, he was invited to work for The Outfit in Chicago by Johnny Torrio, a criminal associate from New York. Within a year, the boss of The Outfit was killed; no one was arrested, but it is suspected that Torrio ordered the hit and that Capone was an accomplice.
By 1925, Capone was in control of The Outfit, and until 1929, he was the most famous mobster in America. Capone positioned himself as both a man of the people and a glamorous figure to be emulated. He wore flashy jewelry and enjoyed cigars and the company of beautiful women; he also donated to charity and operated soup kitchens for the unemployed. He was greeted with cheers at baseball games while maintaining a bomb squad for businesses that refused his illegal liquor. He maintained his image by bribing and intimidating the media and public officials while mob-related conflicts grew more violent during his tenure.
This violence culminated in 1929: seven rival gang members were executed by machine gun in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre— a specific inspiration for The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Capone was in Florida at the time, but it is widely believed that the massacre was his doing. The public turned on him, unable to keep overlooking the violent means to his questionable ends. A month later, he was arrested for contempt of court, which began a series of trials and imprisonments for financial crimes — including a stint here in Philadelphia at Eastern State Penitentiary — that effectively ended his career in crime.
This contradictory love and repulsion for gangsters went beyond Chicago. The country became enraptured by gangster movies — as did Brecht. With these films, audiences could revel in the characters’ badness, watching as these criminals unrepentantly cheated, stole, drank, and murdered their way to prosperity and glamor. There was one rule for these movies, though: no matter how bad his behavior, the gangster had to get comeuppance at the end, usually by way of a gunshot.
The first major hit of the Golden Age of gangster films was 1931’s Little Caesar, starring Edward G. Robinson, and loosely based on the life and exploits of Al Capone.
1932’s Scarface, starring Paul Muni, pushed the boundaries of what pre-code Hollywood would allow. The film was also based on Al Capone’s story — its title is taken from Capone’s nickname — and its violence was extreme for the time. Scarface ran afoul of the censors, and it was not released in New York or Chicago.
The Public Enemy was produced in 1931 and was another classic of the genre, transforming Jimmy Cagney from a song-and-dance vaudevillian to a gangster movie king. It includes the famous Grapefruit Scene: an example of how mundane exchanges could turn on a knife’s edge to violence and how the luxurious domestic life of the gangster was built on brutality.
In 1939, The Roaring Twenties combined Jimmy Cagney’s performance with the directorial talents of Raoul Walsh — one of the preeminent directors of the genre, and the director of 1915’s Regeneration, the first full-length gangster movie. It also teamed them up with an actor who made his early career in supporting roles in gangster films before becoming a star: Humphrey Bogart.
Brecht intended The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui to be seen on U.S. stages as a warning to Americans of the threat of fascism in our own country. In moving the action to Chicago gangsters, Brecht hoped his satire would speak in a cultural language Americans would understand. But translating the events to this often-parodied genre with its highly recognizable tics also makes the real-life events ripe for comedy. According to Brecht, he “intended to render ridiculous the great political criminals, alive or dead,” and “to destroy the common and dangerous respect for the great killers.” Brecht wanted these men of the Third Reich to be seen as clowns, and playing their transgressions in the stereotypical notes of gangster films lets audiences laugh at their small-time criminal exploits.
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is onstage at the Lantern September 5 through October 13, 2019. Visit our website for tickets and information.
