The Tartan

This is a continuation of a piece which began last week. If you haven’t, check out part I right here.

What’s dead may never die. We’re not gonna let something as silly as the Production Code keep us from making the movies we want to. That mentality that began to revolutionize Hollywood in the sixties as media began to reach back into the recesses of depravity that the Code had protected us from and explored sex, violence, and whatever else could be lumped into it. It was the era where we were finally allowed to influence the youth, in whatever way we felt. We were free from the unfortunate drag of it all — movies were back, the screen had never seemed bigger, and we were about to unspool new stories that we had only dreamed of telling for a few decades.

The Gangster returned. The Gangster, martyred for the sins of a cinematic apparatus that had only just begun to question what rules they could break, returned in glory in the 60s, the tumultuous decade facing its own fair share of tumultuous movies.

Oh, but what movies they were.

Perhaps what the Old West needed was a few gangsters, and Bonnie and Clyde were always willing to lend a hand, or rob a bank, whatever the task at hand required. Their movie was something romantic told in the lens of a gangster flick. Sure, there were a few horrifying moments, the classic “and then they all died” ending, the strange subplot of Clyde’s impotency. It’s a weird movie. It was the 60s, it happens to the best of us. But “Bonnie and Clyde” taught the Studios that there was something left in the gangster flick. One last hurrah.

We never got a hurrah. We never got anything close to a hurrah. 

What we got, against all odds, was a masterpiece. A movie which drove the gangster flick into the new era with aplomb unseen in any era. We weren’t watching the gangs, we were watching the mob – the Italian mob. We weren’t watching the cops take them down. There was nothing that could take them down, and there never would be. They had greased enough palms and taken enough pictures of cheating senators to make sure that never happened.

What we were watching was “The Godfather.”

“The Godfather” cannot be understated for its importance. It made the gangster mainstream again, sold them as these high-class, brilliant, scheming perpetrators of the crime in the cities. In an era when the mobs probably still controlled too much of the unions — or so it felt — it felt right to see them resurrected as the mastermind, the king in the shadows, the whispering madness that could descend upon those daring to wrong them.

The gangster of the 30s was flashy. The gangster of the 30s was killed. The gangster of the 60s was distinguished. The flashiness died, and it was replaced with cold, hard, power. No longer did the gangster try to show off his wine, his women, his wondrous wealth. He had no need for trifles.

We saw in this time a new reimagining of what it meant to be a gangster. The Italian mob now took center stage, along with it a distinctive Brooklyn accent. No longer was the gangster a poor migrant trying to make a name for himself — he may be a migrant, but not a poor one. He’d made it here, and by God he was going nowhere.

Somewhere, that no-longer-young man must be watching, chuckling, as he sneaks to his car quickly before the credits come on so he can beat the traffic. He’s in a rush home — he’s got some new furnishings in that house he’d finally managed to buy. He’d made it. It only took a World War and a half to show that to him.

What is dead may never die, but it can never truly live either. The gangster was back. His flashiness was lessened, his gravitas increased, but he was not untouchable. It’s hard to explain though, when it was so easy to want to be Michael Corleone, to want to live a life outside of the law.

Nobody has ever wanted to be David “Noodles” Aaronson, the so-called protagonist — if you could even delude yourself into calling him that — of “Once Upon a Time in America.” Nobody ever will. There are sniveling excuses for a person, with backbones made of so much rubber and pork pâté, and there is Noodles Aaronson, and not a single person would hesitate to be a sniveling mess over the so-called person, Noodles Aaronson.

I don’t know what taught director Sergio Leone to portray the very worst in humanity. I don’t think I will ever understand a man who can comprehend the depths of the horrors of the human experience. But he did it with the Western, and he did it with the Gangster. He stole our innocence, he stole our love of the wild life of crime. He stole the drugs and the alcohol and the women and the guns and replaced it with something we couldn’t overlook.

For Leone, the mob was nothing more than a bunch of wasteful scoundrels bullying the average Joe into giving them money because the government was too cowardly to stop them. It was a hodgepodge of refuse and scum we really never had thought about — for every one Tom Powers, there were a dozen men like Noodles and they were what ran America’s criminal underbelly.

And suddenly, it became so much harder to ignore the cops, the feds, the other gangs and the fall. Oh, we fell back in love with those falls, those Icarus-like collapses from heights hitherto unseen into pits unexplorable.

Was “Once Upon a Time in America”  Leone’s masterpiece? Was it just one more revolving piece of art in the portfolio of a man who saw the institutions of America and took it upon himself to destroy them one by one? He took a sledgehammer onto the gangster and the genre has never once recaptured that silly optimism or simple flashiness that had so enamored us to Tom Powers and the Corleones. The film pulls no punches, holds back no criticisms. The disgust is apparent in every scene, every painful camera angle and harsh light. The tropes we had so long associated with wealth and freedom are thrown back in our faces, the endless reminder of how damned worthless it all is.

Noodles is pathetic. He deludes himself. He lies to himself because he’s too much of a coward to believe that he lost it all, that his friends were no better than him, and that there is no honor among those calling themselves thieves.

The Studios, on the other hand, did not make that mistake. The gangster had been crucified again, now at the will of one Italian and his directing prowess, and Hollywood never let us forget it.

There’s a sort of quiet hopelessness among the movies that came after “Once Upon a Time in America”. There are classics, titans of the genre, but they focus on something different — Crime Doesn’t Pay. It’s a cliche, sure, but these movies showed us that, in a way that was meant to make us uncomfortable. “Goodfellas” ends with court testimony — the poor bastard’s sitting in the defendant’s chair, a snitch and a crook. He’s less than worthless, a man whose word will never be taken at face value in polite and impolite society. In “The Untouchables,” the war on the mob ends as Capone is slowly trapped in a cell of his own making. The Chicago mob was brought to its knees. The RICO trials — “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations” laws which made it  much easier to prosecute crime — that took down the Five Families of New York found themselves in good company in popular media. It had never been less profitable to be a gangster, and movies were hellbent on making sure you knew that.

We did get our own end card, our own notification from the Motion Pictures to tell us that Crime Doesn’t Pay. We watched the gangster become Tom Powers, become Michael Corleone, become Noodles Aaronson. We saw it rise and fall and rise and fall and each time morph and change and turn itself into something new. From the romps of the 30s, to the tales of high-class crime of the 60s, to the collapse of the mythos of a mobster of the 90s, the gangster evolved into something so fundamentally unrecognizable to that young man who stepped off a boat in Ellis Island. The flashy gangster is a relic, left in the past, just like the island itself — the island hasn’t been used in seventy years. That immigrant is gone now. He’s an American. He’s one of us, he’s a part of this strange blend of culture that we call home. He’s not alone — at least, I hope not — but the gangster no longer speaks to him. Not in the way it once did.

Perhaps we all outgrow movies, one day. Or perhaps, the movies outgrow us.