Mighty Joe Young (1949)

  When working in the realm of special effects there is a delicate balance of artistry and spectacle. If the effect is not believable then audiences will complain of the shoddy production values of the feature they are watching, but a film that is all spectacle might easily bore or deaden an audience to what a movie has to offer. A balance between substance and showmanship must be struck. Mighty Joe Young could have easily devolved into cuteness, relying on the audience's appetite for cheap thrills and weakness for animal tricks but none of the cast and crew would let the production sink so low.

  Practically the entire crew from King Kong is back. Merian Cooper provided the story and produced the picture. Ruth Rose, the primary screenwriter for King Kong, is back again to write the screenplay to the story. Willis O'Brien's team is also back with one addition, a very young Ray Harryhausen no older than twenty two and already responsible for a majority of the film's stop motion scenes. And finally Ernest B. Schoedsack is back as director, and unknown to many outside of the production Schoedsack had directed the entire movie practically blind. 

  As for the cast Robert Armstrong returns again as yet another Merian C. Cooper type character, Max O'Hara, who goes to Africa looking for new acts for a club he is opening up in Los Angeles. Whereas in his previous roles for Cooper and Schoedsack, Robert Armstrong had played a character that stomped through uncharted jungles looking for adventure the O'Hara character is more comical and a bit devious.

  While in Africa, O'Hara and his cowboys run into Joseph Young, a very large and irate gorilla. Although towering over every character in the movie Joe is quite childlike and looks to his friend Jill Young, played by Terry Moore, to get him out of trouble. The majority of the story is really about the friendship between Jill and Joe Young. They act like siblings with one another, but it's obvious that Jill plays mother to Joe on more than one occasion. The movie goes out of its way to not label Jill as Joe's owner, but rather show us that each looks at the other as an equal.

  Although the lure of money and attention lures Jill to sign O'Hara's contract to be part of his nightclub show, it is not so easy to condemn her for her actions. She has lived on her father's farm in Africa all her life, and the very first scene where we are introduced to her character she purchases Joe so that she can have a friend to play with. Twelve years later though when O'Hara arrives Joe has grown up and now Jill, an adult woman, is starved for human attention. With the arrival of Gregg, played by Ben Johnson, her attention starts to splinter away from Joe. As she matures her friendship with Joe evolves into that of mother and child while her friendship with Gregg becomes that of man and woman.

  Joe Young is made believable with the help of Ray Harryhausen who creates a character that moves like a gorilla, but emotes like a human. Harryhausen built on Willis O'Brien's work by putting more attention on facial gestures. Joe, unlike Kong, is capable of much more complicated facial gestures. Throughout the film Joe gets angry, drunk, happy, hungry, tired, sad, and this is all expressed through facial expressions.

  As pure entertainment Mighty Joe Young delivers in every way, but underneath the adventure story is a very interesting study of a friendship not between a pet owner and her pet but of a child and her playmate. As Jill and Joe grow older you know that they will always be friends, not because that is what the story tells you, but because you can't imagine either of them apart from the other. Their friendship is what pulls the entire movie together and without that all you have is spectacle.

The Son of Kong (1933)

  With the popularity of King Kong RKO pictures made the most logical decision of putting quickly into production a sequel, The Son of Kong. They gathered back together Willis O'Brien's special effects team and also promoted King Kong co-director Ernest B. Schoedsack to the director's chair. From the very first scene it is obvious that this is more of a comedy than an action adventure.

  The story starts a month after Kong has ravaged New York City and Carl Denham, played again by Robert Armstrong, has been bombarded by lawsuit after lawsuit. To escape his problems he ships off, but lands right back onto Skull Island where to his surprise he meets Kong Junior.

  Although the movie was obviously made to profit off of all the attention the previous movie had received, the sequel is quite enjoyable in its own right. The movie spends a good chunk of the running time reminding the audience of the terror of Kong, but when we finally get there our expectations have completely been upturned.

  Kong Junior is more of a helpless scared boy than a beast. Denham is not a fame hungry adventurer anymore, but rather in this story a remorseful man looking to make up for his treatment of Kong. He faces obstacle after obstacle, but unlike in the first movie it is the human characters which give him the most trouble; because while King Kong was a movie that featured the beasts of Skull Island the sequel is really about the beast of man.

King Kong (1933)

  The ability to breath life into the inanimate is a power that special effects wizards have strived to achieve since the start of the film industry. Whereas today's wizards create using mostly digital material the technicians of the 1930's just had metal, rubber, and paint to use to create the creatures that populated their movie screens.

  The most important single individual of the King Kong special effects team would be Willis O'Brien who took all his energy and directed it to perfecting the art of stop-motion animation. He began not in films though but as a sculptor; chipping away at marble til the Edison Company called upon him to utilize his skills into making several short dinosaur pictures. Although his characters were crude and made mostly of clay audiences were instantly enthralled by his three dimensional creations and he quickly carved a place for himself in the industry.

  Stop-motion animation's next great innovator would be Marcel Delgado, a sculptor, who split his time between a convenience store that he worked at and art classes at the Otis Arts Institute. While in art school he caught the attention of Willis O'Brien who was dazzled by Delgado's work. O'Brien quickly offered Delgado a job and a salary that was four times as much as he made working at the convenience store, but Delgado refused. Delgado's goal was not to work in the movies, but rather to be an artist. It was only after O'Brien gave him a tour of the studio and showed Delgado the workshop where he could sculpt, create, and experiment that Delgado finally relented and accepted the job.

  What Marcel Delgado brought to the Willis O'Brien special effects team was that he replaced the clay models O'Brien had been using with more intricate life-like models. Delgado accomplished this by first building an intricate metal skeleton of the model which he then wrapped with foam rubber to create the musculature and finally bound it together in a latex skin. Delgado's creations were easier to move while shooting and looked more believable.

  It would be more appropriate to call Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack adventurers rather than movie directors. Merian Cooper spent a good chunk of his life flying in bomber planes and maneuvering through enemy air space, and his movies themselves incorporate planes, aerial shots, or deal with flight in some capacity. Both men first met each other as soldiers right after the first World War and eventually worked for Paramount Pictures as a directing team.

  What Cooper and Schoedsack brought to theaters were movies which blended on-location footage with staged sequences. Cooper craved danger and didn't think it unusual to put himself in the middle of an elephant stampede just so he could capture it on film. Both men took their love of adventure and combined it with the technical innovations that they themselves spurred on with their story ideas and created films that still excite audiences.

  For all of it's spectacle King Kong tells quite a simple story about Carl Denham, played by Robert Armstrong, who is looking for an interesting subject for his next movie, he gathers a crew and an actress, played by Fay Wray, and sets off for adventure. The entire film can be seen as a dissection of Merian Cooper. Denham like Cooper is an adventurer that carries his camera everywhere with him. Both men are willing to put life and limb in danger to capture something never before seen in their cameras. And just like Cooper neither had any patience to deal with women.

  Denham is driven by a singular goal of capturing Kong on film. He achieves his goal at the cost of several lives. Carl Denham is a man who has not quite grown up, he lives for danger and whoever is left standing is stuck with the task of cleaning up his messes. In the film it is not Kong who is the monster, but rather Denham. Kong does his share of damage, but he is motivated by his affection for Ann, Fay Wray's character. His affection for her makes him more human than Denham who thirsts just for something to capture in his movie camera. 

  The story of Kong can also be seen as a story of death. The wild tropical jungle which is inhabited by creatures from prehistory live in peace till the intrusion of human beings. Their very presence undoes the balance. And when Kong is transplanted to New York he must adapt to an urban jungle where man is at the top of the food chain. While the jungle is populated by beasts of all shapes and sizes that can kill a man in all sorts of gruesome ways, it is the city which kills Kong. The antiseptic environment of the urban jungle with it's concrete and steel infrastructure brought on by man's industrial revolution is what does Kong in. The monster in this film is not the furry beast Kong but the world of man which steam rolls through the land till the earth is paved for further civilizing.

Regeneration (1915)

  During film's infancy there were countless individuals that helped to elevate the medium from novelty act to legitimate art form. The techniques and devices that go into making a movie took years to develop. One person, now sidelined for better known film innovators, is Raoul Walsh. Trained as an actor, Walsh made a name for himself on the New York stage. Although his good looks could have led him to a very comfortable life, his path would be to work behind the camera instead of in front of it.

  When Walsh started out New York was still the hub of the film industry and he made money by starring in several Westerns for a small production company in New Jersey. Eventually Walsh made the move to California and became an assistant director to D.W. Griffith. Walsh's apprenticeship to Griffith taught him how to utilize film's then untapped potential to tell epic stories about ordinary people. When Griffith's The Birth of a Nation went into production not only did Walsh serve as assistant director, but he also played John Wilkes Booth.

  After the completion of Griffith's film, Raoul Walsh took crew and equipment back to New York and started production on Regeneration. The script was adapted from a play that was itself based on a book, the gangster autobiography of Owen Kildare.

  The film is considered the first feature length gangster movie. Yet the gangsters in the movie are not the flashy well-groomed characters that are now commonplace in articles, movies, and television shows. The gangsters in this film are neighborhood toughs. Their days aren't consumed though by street fights and turf battles, but rather on the relief of boredom. Several scenes within the film consist of characters just drinking beer, enjoying a cigarette, or standing on a street corner. There is nothing about the gangster lifestyle portrayed in this film that a contemporary movie audience would consider as exciting.

  As a student of Griffith's the film cares more about the social circumstances that create the type of desperation that turns boys into crooks. Walsh does not clean up the urban squalor. The muck and grime of the streets is a very tangible reality. Even the casting is authentic; most of the extras were real locals from the Bowery area as well as from Hell's Kitchen. Gangsters in this film come in all shapes, sizes, and defects.

  Another technique that Walsh borrowed from Griffith was the use of cross-cutting. By taking two separate events occurring at the same time and selectively ordering the shots in a specific way a director could invariably break the barrier between time and space, construct their own timeline, and have a more assured control over the pace and rhythm of their film.

  The title of the film speaks to the protagonist of the story, Owen Conway, and his transition from street thug to functional member of society. Walsh establishes at the start of the film that Owen is a victim of tenement living; after his parents die he practically becomes a slave to an old couple. He survives by using his fists and although hardened by the callousness of the streets there is a tiny part of him that believes something better is out there. That thing for Owen comes in the form of Marie Deering, his Mamie Rose. Marie is a social worker and unlike many later women characters in a Walsh film she embodies sincere proper goodness. Her love for Owen is what redeems him at the end.

  Although the film has been relegated as an artifact of the 1910's a careful look at it will surprise many with just how contemporary this story is; and in some ways this film is more daring than the typical gangster stories that we see now. This movie does not look away from the denizens of the street. While many directors may try to create a reality that they believe an audience might find palatable, Raoul Walsh was confident that what was already in front of his camera was all he needed to tell his story. 

A Slight Case of Murder (1938)

  During his days as a journalist in New York Damon Runyon crafted the myth of Broadway. He spent his days writing articles about the people that populated New York City's night life. He was known for juxtaposing the respectable law-abiding citizen with the mugs, hoodlums, and dolls that trafficked Times Square. When the english language did not have the appropriate word or phrase to capture the feeling of the streets Runyon didn't think twice about inventing them from everyday words. In Runyon's world a roscoe is a gun, a shiv is a knife, and if you were smart you knew to keep your snoot out of a mug's business when he was packing either of them.

  As Runyon became more and more popular he started to turn his attention away from documenting the real-life travails of New York's gamblers, gangsters, and ever-loving louts and put his energy towards creating original work based on characters he knew quite well.

  A Slight Case of Murder started out as a play but with the help of Lloyd Bacon, the director, Edward G. Robinson, the star, and a cast packed with the decade's best character actors a gangster comedy classic was created.

  Edward G. Robinson plays good guy bootlegger Remy Marco; a character who takes several cues from previous tough guy protagonists that Robinson has played. With the repeal of Prohibition Marco decides to go legit and start a brewery so that he can provide the entire country with beer legally. Marco's desire for respectability almost does him in several times during the story though. As in most gangster stories the stench of the streets is a stink that doesn't easily go away.

  The comedy within the movie is rooted in the audience being well aware of the conventions of the gangster story. It is to the entire casts credit that every actor in the story doesn't overdo the comedic elements of the characters they are portraying, because with just one wrong note the entire movie could have collapsed into a dramatic mess. The level of violence in the movie is ramped up due to the fact that the story is about gangsters, but one never feels the anxiety of the violence being enacted on the screen. You don't believe that the victims of violence within the movie are really human. Not to say that the characters are mere caricature's, but that unlike dramatic gangster movies that had to cater to the whims of the Hays Code, making sure to never show a gangster enjoying or getting away with breaking the law, the comedic gangster movie could get away with most things as long as it was for a laugh.

  With this movie an audience can root for the gangster and not feel guilty for siding with the bad guys. The gangsters in the story are neither good or bad; in fact as you watch the movie it is quite easy to even forget that these characters are gangsters. By treating the characters as people first and gangsters second the movie creates a believable reality that still gets plenty of laughs.

San Quentin (1937)

  The clanging of tin cups on bars, a stampede of inmates marching back and forth inside their cells, and the scared glances from armed guards as the threat of a riot looms; these are the cliches of the prison picture. Yet with San Quentin the aim is not just for cheap entertainment, but also prison reform. The director, Lloyd Bacon, takes all these stock ingredients; brutal prison guards, hardened inmates, a progressive warden, and creates a tight action-packed movie.

  Pat O'Brien stars as Steve Jameson the new captain of the yard for San Quentin and he brings military discipline to the harsh environment of the prison. Like all progressive characters from the 1930's he believes in harsh punishment for those who don't toe the line, but is also capable of giving any man a second chance. Opposing him every step of the way is Lieutenant Druggin, played by Barton MacLane, who would rather knock a man down instead of shake his hand. 

  These two men fight each other for control of the prison, and this film concentrates that battle with Humphrey Bogart's character, 'Red' Kennedy, a fresh fish in a pool of hard-edged criminals. The film makes it very clear that 'Red' is a product of reform schools, but with the right type of treatment he has the capacity to clean up his act and make something of himself. Yet bad habits die-hard when 'Red' finds out that the special treatment he's getting from the captain of the yard has something to do with the fact that Jameson is going out with his sister May, played by Ann Sheridan. 'Red' undoes all the progress he's made by letting his anger take hold of him, but like in all Warner Bros. films from that decade redemption is never impossible to attain as long as you are willing to pay the ultimate price.

  With a 70 minute running time their isn't much space for character development, but everybody involved with the film should be proud for turning out a top notch studio picture that neither wastes time, talent, or intensity.

G Men (1935)

  William Keighley shines a light on the FBI with G Men, and by film's end he not only makes popular a colloquial nickname for the bureau's agents but also charts the mythology for the fledgling agency. The movie can be categorized more specifically as government propaganda then it can as gangster movie now, but nonetheless this movie grabs hold of the audience's eyes and ears from the very first scene and doesn't let go till the end credits.

  Not counting the prologue, tacked on more than a decade after the film's premiere on J. Edgar Hoover's orders, the film opens with 'Brick' Davis, played by James Cagney, looking directly at the camera and expounding on the merits of truth, justice, and "keeping on the level." Of course this type of attitude hasn't left him with many viable clients.

  'Brick' Davis came from the slums and thanks to a less-than reputable benefactor he gets a law degree on gratis. This conflict between where Davis came from and where he wants to go is present throughout every scene in the movie. His benefactor, McKay, is a Prohibition era racketeer and is painted, most likely for the censor's benefit, as an apologetic gangster. With the repeal of Prohibition he can't keep up with the less-than savory rackets that are popping up, making him a powerless figurehead in his own organization.

  The relationship Davis and McKay have with one another is quite complicated. Each man is governed by a different set of rules; McKay rules by exploiting personal vices while 'Brick' believes in the power of the law. The only tangible connection they have with each other is geography; both men grew up in the same slums and had to suffer through the same type of obstacles. McKay looks at Davis as a possible do-over, an opportunity for him to help somebody from his neighborhood achieve success without having to corrupt themselves to attain it; for McKay helping Davis is basically a form of penance for all the laws he's broken.

  When the film shifts its focus to the FBI we are treated to the science of crime fighting; criminal investigation has been elevated from a job reliant on snitches and stool pigeons to an exact science where microscopic evidence can lead to arrests. During his training Davis finds a mentor in Jeff McCord, played by Robert Armstrong. Although both men don't think much of each other when they first meet, Davis gains McCord's respect after successfully taking down a few of the FBI's Most Wanted through a combination of street smarts and familiarity with the use of a gun and his fists.

  The gangsters that Davis and McCord have to collar are amalgamations of real life people during the Great Depression, like John Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly, and were familiar to most audience members when this movie first came out. As characters these gangsters are mostly one-dimensional, merely story devices used to illustrate just how ineffectual local law enforcement was in stopping these bandits until the FBI finally stepped in as the nation's protector.

  A sub-plot develops parallel to the main story where Cagney's character falls head over heels for McCord's sister, Kay. The scenes with Cagney and Margaret Lindsay, who plays Kay, are a great break from all the gun play and this secondary story intersects quite neatly with the main story in the third act.

  Keighley traces the FBI's baptism by fire with a re-enactment of two key events during the bureau's war on crime in the 1930's, the Kansas City Massacre and the shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge with John Dillinger's gang. In real life these events were considered embarrassing disasters for the FBI, but within the movie they are used as justification for the arming of the bureau's agents and also for their use of a shoot first talk later strategy when dealing with so-called public enemies. The film may offer a simplistic and exaggerated account of how the FBI came to be born, but due to the film's success with the public the gangster movie had to now make room for the valiant cop protagonist.