William A. Wellman
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The better it gets -- and the drama grows in power over its quasi-epic course of 157 minutes -- the more it brings to mind the truly great gangster films of American movie history, starting with "The Godfather" and extending back to such landmarks as "The Public Enemy" and "Scarface."
The desolate landscape is spectacularly captured by cinematographer Ben Richardson - reminiscent of the Robert Mitchum classic "Track of the Cat" and even the more recent "The Revenant".
At least they’ve watched them: such golden age wheezers as The High and the Mighty and Zero Hour (the inspiration for Airplane!
Instead of the shadowy film-noir thrillers that inspired Pakula, Spielberg reaches further back into cinema history by imitating pre-World War II newspaper comedies like His Girl Friday, Libeled Lady, and Nothing Sacred, with their bright tone, deadline-driven pace, rapid-fire dialogue, and editors and reporters who are always quick with a wised-up joke.
1. Which was only appropriate, given that Scorsese considered Mean Streets to be in the tradition of the gangster dramas that defined Warners in the '30s, with The Public Enemy's use of contemporary music serving as a key inspiration.
The most famous of all the films in this mode is assuredly Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings released ten years' after Porco Rosso takes place, but the romance extends into the silent era: the first Best Picture winner, 1927's Wings , is just such a story, and examples can be found still earlier.
In Some Like It Hot, this is first evidenced in how the gangster framing narrative is played entirely straight - some winking nods (the mob boss played by George Raft mocks another character for tossing a coin in the air, the quintessentially Raftian gesture; a grapefruit is almost shoved into a goon's face, après The Public Enemy ), but never open, outright parody, and there are more than enough deaths played as deaths, not as slapstick, to assure us of the dramatic stakes.
That exclusive list includes All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), La Grande Illusion (1937), 1960’s Paths of Glory, Wings (1927), and War Horse (2015).
Movies like "Little Caesar" (1930), "The Public Enemy" (1931), and "Scarface" (1932) elevated the hoodlum to near-iconic status, creating antiheroes of lowlifes.
The 1920s and 30s saw the first Golden-Age of gangster flicks, offering such classics as The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932).
In “Ball of Fire” or “Lady of Burlesque,” Barbara Stanwyck showed only a bare leg or bare midriff.
While there were some notable exceptions, the first 40 years of Hollywood movies about organized crime rarely strayed from the blueprint established by Warner Bros. studios beginning in the 1930s with the classics “Little Caesar” and “The Public Enemy.”
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced by The Public Enemy (1931)
Themes
Belfort’s corpse isn’t dropped at his mother’s front door like James Cagney’s was in The Public Enemy (1931) and he doesn’t go out screaming madly in a hail of gunfire ala Scarface (both the Howard Hawks original and the Brian De Palma remake), but by the end of the film it is clear, as one character puts it early on, that “the chickens have come home to roost,” an expression Belfort tries to dismiss even as it defines his downfall.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Directed by Sergio Leone
influenced by The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
Themes
The movie is like High Noon and The Ox-Bow Incident and a dozen others all scrambled together and playing in a giant echo chamber.
The air section of “Dunkirk,” in particular, is a visual wonder—less because Nolan’s direction of the sequences is distinctive than because solo flight in combat is irresistibly, sensuously fascinating to watch, and has been so since William Wellman’s “Wings” (1927) and Howard Hawks’s “The Dawn Patrol” and Howard Hughes’s “Hell’s Angels” (both from 1930)—and the expanse of sky is all the more engulfing, thrilling, terrifying on a screen the size of an apartment building.
The fact of the matter is, Scorsese makes crime films as well as or better than anyone has since the idiom first came to life with movies like Scarface, Little Caesar and The Public Enemy in the early 1930s.
Helgeland, whose most recent film was the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 (2013), wrote the script based on John Pearson’s 1995 book The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins, and as the book’s title suggests, the film falls very neatly into the time-honored narrative arc associated with the gangster film since The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932).
The trailers for "Flight" suggest "The High and the Mighty" crossed with all four "Airport" disaster movies.
Blending The High and the Mighty and The Lost Weekend — or, from this year’s movies, The Grey and Smashed — Flight at its best marks an advance for its director and a triumph for its star.
…complete with Tommy guns, smoky backroom deals, and corrupt power structures that would not be out of place in Scarface or The Public Enemy.
Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
Directed by David O. Russell
influenced by Nothing Sacred (1937)
Plot
Answer: If a perplexed paleontologist can fall for a madcap heiress in "Bringing Up Baby," and a cynical newspaperman can succumb to the charms of a fraudulent victim of radium poisoning in "Nothing Sacred," why not?
The Hateful Eight (2015)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced by Track of the Cat (1954)
Visuals
What follows is a string of events that’s often outrageous, sometimes hilarious, but rather than cool or stylish, the film is bleak and severe in the classic tradition of snowbound westerns such as William Wellman’s Track of the Cat and André de Toth’s Day of the Outlaw .