The Public Enemy (1931)
Directed by William A. Wellman
Two young Chicago hoodlums, Tom Powers and Matt Doyle, rise up from their poverty-stricken slum life to become petty thieves, bootleggers and cold-blooded killers. But with street notoriety and newfound wealth, the duo feels the heat from the cops and rival gangsters both. Despite his ruthless criminal reputation, Tom tries to remain connected to his family, however, gang warfare and the need for revenge eventually pull him away.
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What critics compared The Public Enemy to
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."
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.
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.
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).
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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.”
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 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).
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…complete with Tommy guns, smoky backroom deals, and corrupt power structures that would not be out of place in Scarface or The Public Enemy.
As the explanatory anecdotes accumulate, we follow Jamal as a child through his spell with a gang of thieves and beggars on the streets of Mumbai and into adolescence, where he diverges, in the time-honoured tradition of The Public Enemy, from his reprobate brother, Salim (Madhur Mittal).