Pre-Code Parade: THE MAYOR OF HELL (1933)

Jimmy Cagney doesn't show up until about 24 minutes into this Archie Mayo picture; until then, it's a Frankie Darro movie. In 1933 the teenaged acting veteran -- he'd been working since 1924 -- got the nearest thing to a big-studio push he'd ever get. Darro would make his biggest mark on Hollywood history later the same year, and also for Warner Bros., in William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road, though for some audiences he may be best known for his role in the one-of-a-kind Gene Autry sci-fi serial The Phantom Empire from 1935. In 1933 Darro seemed to symbolize youth on the precipice during the Great Depression, a kid whose relatively small stature represented an endangered innocence disguised by a wishful toughness.

In Mayor of Hell Darro plays Jimmy, the leader of a small, impeccably multicultural street gang. A presumptive WASP, Jimmy consorts easily with Italian, Jewish and black kids -- the last played by Allen Hoskins under his Our Gang name, "Farina." They're petty thieves and extortionists, offering to watch your car for a quarter and vandalizing it if you refuse. They all seem to suffer from inadequate if not absent fathers -- Warners stalwart Robert Barrat appears all-too-briefly as Jimmy's mysteriously bitter dad during a protracted juvenile-court scene (Arthur Byron presiding) after the gang is pinched. Byron nudges the parents into consigning their kids to reform school, apparently not knowing the horror to which he's condemned them.

Jimmy (Frankie Darrow, on the ground above left) blames his dad (Robert Barrat, below center) for his abrupt decline from honor student to juvenile delinquent.

This particular reformatory is run by Thompson (Dudley Digges), a petty tyrant who seems interested only in putting the kids to work. Conditions prove unbearable for Jimmy, who takes advantage of the confusion created by the abrupt arrival of a new deputy state commissioner to attempt an escape. Patsy Gargan (Cagney) is a political appointee, a "ward-heeler" who controls 5,000 votes and wants an undemanding sinecure as compensation. He's breezily indifferent to the responsibilities of his office, expecting Thompson to write his reports for him, until he witnesses Jimmy's escape attempt. The lad doesn't get very far, ending up stuck on a barbed-wire fence as Thompson flogs him until he falls off. Something stirs in Gargan at the sight. Something else stirs when he meets the pretty, conscientious head nurse (Madge Evans), who has progressive theories on reforming delinquent youth. Resenting an inferred slight at his own background when Thompson condemns the kids as slum scum, Patsy resolves to be a hands-on commissioner, implementing many of Nurse Dorothy's ideas, if only at first to remain near her.

Thompson (Dudley Digges) turns squeamish at the thought of drinking from Patsy Gargan's flask, but relishes his work flogging Jimmy.

Dorothy has been reading up on the "boy's republic" idea, already implemented in real life in several states, in which troubled boys build character through self-government. Deposing Thompson and driving out his old guard, Patsy turns the reform school into a model boy's republic, with Jimmy its unlikely president. The boys run their own legal system on egalitarian principles; Farina is seen acting as a defense attorney when a white boy is accused of stealing a candy bar from the new store -- run stereotypically by one of the Jewish kids. The boys eat well and sport snappy new uniforms. But Patsy's past catches up with him as he returns to the city to put down an uprising in his political organization. When the dispute turns into a gunfight, Patsy has to go on the lam, opening the door for the vindictive Thompson to reassert his authority.

Allen Jenkins (above, left) doesn't get enough to do as Cagney's stooge. Cagney gets plenty, of course.

Things grow worse than ever as Thompson forces Dorothy out and cracks down on the most spirited kids, i.e. Jimmy's crew. When a tubercular pal dies after being left in a cold punishment shed overnight, Jimmy is ready for war. Mayor of Hell becomes a characteristic film of its period in its imagination of an apocalyptic uprising as the kids take over the reformatory and subject Thompson to a kangaroo court trial.  His escape attempt is as futile as Jimmy's earlier effort, but ends more gruesomely. Driven by the flames of a burning building, Thompson falls off a roof, bounces off the barbed-wire fence and lands ignominiously in a pig pen, where one can imagine what the pigs do with him. When Patsy, rediscovering his responsibility to the boys, arrives to calm the crisis, there's a long moment of tension when it seems possible that the enraged boys may turn on both Patsy and Dorothy, both of whom they assume to have abandoned them to Thompson's tender mercies. But movies allow us to eat our cake and have it too, to imagine the insurrection many in 1933 felt was just around the corner but also to reassure themselves that we can all step back at the urging of a voice of reason, to ensure a happy ending. Mayor of Hell has it both ways, ultimately coming out in favor of law, order and peace but pretty much condoning the hounding of Thompson to his death as an act of justice.

By the time Cagney finally shows up, you get the impression that he's been grafted onto what may have been first imagined as a self-sufficient social-problem film, as Wild Boys of the Road would be. While Cagney gives a fine, charismatic performance, his character's improbably evolution into an idealist may be the weakest part of the film. The boys certainly need a sympathetic friend in a high place like Patsy Gargan, but after the first 20 minutes you get the feeling that Darro, Hoskins et al could have carried this picture by themselves without help from a star as big as Cagney. Strange to say, the star's overpowering presence probably prevents Mayor of Hell from being the kind of definitive Depression document that Wild Boys has become in retrospect. Even so, it captures a bit of the dangerous zeitgeist of 1933 in entertaining fashion.

If it's a Warner Bros. picture, TCM.com has the trailer.

Michelangelo Antonioni's I VINTI (1953)

The last thing you expect from an Antonioni film is a moralistic lecture about the corrupting effects of pop culture on youth around the world. But that's how his international anthology opens and closes. What's wrong with kids today? About sixty years ago, the narrator's answer, spoken over a montage of newspaper headlines in many languages, is that they have an egotistical craving for notoriety, for easy money, or just for kicks. So I vinti ("the vanquished") is Antonioni's j.d. picture, the stuff of American B pictures, albeit with much more style and something of a subtext. It consists of three episodes, with French, Italian and English actors each speaking their own language, though all were dubbed into Italian for the film's original home release. In the opening French episode, an unlikely gang of teenagers, with a kid sister in tow, go on a merry outing to a ruined chateau, where one of their number is to be killed. Antonioni heads home for the middle episode, where a young man is involved in a cigarette-smuggling operation and suffers a mortal injury, mortality catching up with him only gradually as he heads anywhere but home. In the closing English episode (13 years before the director's more famous Channel crossing for Blow-Up and oddly scored to "Danny Boy") an aspiring poet turns his discovery of a corpse into a media payday, but his craving for fame and fortune threatens to incriminate him further. He can't help seeming to observe his own trial as a spectator rather than a defendant.

The bracketing narration invites us to deplore these young paragons of depravity, and they're a dubious lot, to be sure. The Italian protagonist seems the most sympathetic of the group, since he's simply desperate for opportunity, while the English would-be poet (Peter Reynolds) is an absolute creep, and the French kids are almost stereotypically indifferent to the enormity of their scheme. Theirs is a banal evil, while the Englishman is a pretentious psycho and the Italian comes closer to noir. Yet the common thread linking their stories isn't necessarily youth itself -- Reynolds hardly comes across as a juvenile -- but the cluelessness of the older generation. Each of the troubled protagonists lives with his parents or with other elders -- the Englishman lives with a grandmother. None of them (including Hollywood arch-heel Eduardo Ciannelli as the Italian father) has any inkling of the evil the younger folks are up to. When the Italian boy is out late at night, Ciannelli assumes he's with a girlfriend, for instance. This disconnect separating the generations seems like a likelier theme for the director eventually identified with representing alienation on screen, but a growing global indifference to life isn't really outside his zone of presumed interest, either. In many ways, Vinti looks and feels like a characteristic work in the manner the world only really discovered years later with L'avventura.

Antonioni is a master of spatial relationships between actors and landscapes. His films have a sense of immensity, not just because of his love for architecture -- buildings loom large in his films to both dramatic and satiric effect -- but because of the way he stages action. A typical scene in any episode of I Vinti will have characters advance from a distance into the foreground, where they are tracked as the continue moving until they walk or run off toward the horizon, growing ever smaller as the camera stands still, letting the dwindling figures measure the vastness of the location. Vinti is the earliest Antonioni film I've seen, and it seems as if by then the 40 year old director had his style fully in place. He closes the English episode with one of his signature shots, panning from a reporter talking in a telephone booth to a sparse landscape in a manner often taken to represent spiritual emptiness in our modern environment -- something I Vinti is designed to portray.

Juvenile delinquency may seem like a banal subject for the likes of Antonioni, but if we call it anomie then we're in business. Whether you agree with the narrator's judgments or not, the director films a compelling composite portrait of a world where something's definitely going wrong.

YOUNG, VIOLENT, DANGEROUS (Liberi, Armati, Pericolosi, 1976)

Romolo Guerrieri's film from a screenplay by Fernando di Leo is a juvenile-delinquent action picture with a mystery at its heart. They mystery is why? Why do three relatively well-off young men go on a nihilistic robbery and thrill-kill spree in Milan? What gives the film an extra edge is the suggestion that their motives are unfathomable. The girlfriend of one of the kids, an informant turned diffident hostage, rages at a police investigator (Tomas Milian) who wants to know the answer. He'd rather kill them than find out, she protests, because neither he nor society as a whole really wants to know the truth. The cop wants to blame the boys' neglectful parents, but they blow off his chiding. "You're living in another world," they tell him -- but the truth seems to be that the three kids are. Luis, Blondie and Joe denounce themselves without an authority to hear them with their constant invocations -- most of these come from Joe, the craziest of the three -- of commercial slogans and movie titles. Di Leo name-checks at least two of his own past works, his screenplay for A Fistful of Dollars and his directorial effort La Mala Ordina (aka Manhunt or The Italian Connection) -- and it should be noted in this context that "Joe" and "Blondie" are two names for the "Man With No Name."

Products of a cacophanous pop culture, why shouldn't their motives be incoherent? Why else rob a bank and toss a lot of lira out your car windows as you drive through a public marketplace? Why else hook up with another gang to rob a grocery store, only to turn on your new partners and mow them down inside? "Why not?" suggests itself, and that may have to do, because the boys probably don't understand themselves. The girl, Lea (Eleonora Georgi) finally guesses that some subliminal gay feeling between her boyfriend Luis, aka Luigi (Max Delys) and ringleader Mario, aka Blondie (Stefano Patrizi) has something to do with it. But worse than that in her opinion, the boys are already dead inside, and Blondie is "worse than dead." Blondie himself has a hard time figuring out Luigi, the least violent of the three. "You come to destroy the world but you won't run a red light!" he tells his friend. Why does Luigi run with the other two, the more obvious and hopeless mad dogs? Why does Eleonora follow along so passively, as much as she's repelled by the escalating violence, until Luigi finally has to deny her entry into their car before their last ride? It's too easy for juvenile-delinquent films to answer these questions and promise resolution. But unless you take the gay angle more seriously than the filmmakers themselves probably do, you're left with no satisfaction of enlightenment once this film is done.

Oh great, a gun to my head!

No one would mistake two kids screwing in a field for wanted criminals.

By this point in the picture there are fewer opportunities for jokey captions.

But that's okay if you wanted to see a hard-hitting Italian crime movie, because Guerrieri delivers the bloody goods with picturesque panache. Milan is a great place to stage car chases -- with Carlo Lizzani's Bandits in Milan offering the best example -- and Guerrieri makes the most of his locations. He stages decent gunplay on foot as well. Cinematographer Erico Menczer does screencappers like me a favor by keeping characters in focus in the midst of rapid, rushing action -- it certainly helps that the transfer on the Raro Video DVD is crisp and vivid.

Above, an auto graveyard becomes a human graveyard.

Below, Italian police dogs are not playing!

The four young actors in the lead roles capture the desperate inscrutability of their situation that I presume the writer and director intended. Benjamin Lev as Joe goes over the top a bit, but it's not as if we've never seen creeps like him maniacally calling out catchphrases and laughing like jackasses at death. Georgi, Delys and Patrizi need no excuses for their work. Despite the prominence of crime-cinema stalwart Milian on the Raro box cover, Liberi, Armati, Pericolosi (literally, "Free, Armed and Dangerous") is no standard tough-cop movie, as some viewers may discover to their chagrin. It's the sort of film that ends with the cops shrugging in frustration at the futility of their work.

Milian's detective won't learn the answers to the questions he's asking, and neither will the perpetrators learn the truth about themselves, much less face up to it. Whether we can figure it out for ourselves is open to question. We'll get our kicks from the violence or we'll despair for the rootless, hopeless kids, since this film is smartly designed from a commercial standpoint to please different audiences. It won't please everyone and it's definitely open to the charge of exploiting what it denounces, but I think it anticipates and incorporates that criticism by making the kids pop-culture puppets. It's not necessarily a classic of JD cinema, but there's more here than may meet the eye at first glance.

THE WARPED ONES (1960)

Koreyoshi Kurahara's signature film -- or so the curators of the Criterion Eclipse Kurahara collection see it -- has gone by numerous names over the years. In Japan, it's known as "Season of Heat." In the U.S., Radley Metzger released it as The Weird Love Makers before it acquired its DVD tag in a subsequent re-release. Since liner-notes writer Chuck Stephens wants to equate this film with Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, we could give the Kurahara a more suggestive and exploitative title -- "Brainless." That's not a knock on Kurahra and his film, but an acknowledgment that its main character, the ex-con shoplifter Akira (Tamio Kawachi) is an utter malevolent moron. Stephens characterizes Warped Ones as a triumph of style, and to an extent it is that, but it's also little more than the sort of juvenile-delinquent movie made in America at the same time. What sets it apart from the U.S. genre is the triumph it grants the punk at the end and the bleak message about Japan's future his triumph conveys.

Akira is alienated to the point of sociopathy. American jazz is his drug and his anthem of alienation. When someone abruptly switches off the jazz record playing at one of his hangouts, Akira goes berserk and is ready to slice the girl's face with a broken bottle before his black GI buddy stops him. Akira had earlier defended the soldier against a Japanese girl who said she didn't like "darkies." Blacks are the best, he says, because they invented jazz. After that, he goes on, the whiteys stole it, and now the Japanese imitate it. That proves to Akira that "We're the worst of all." Kurahara and screenwriter Nobuo Yamada seem to imply that Akira's enthusiasm for the American art form is an outgrowth of a national self-loathing. It is not part of any greater cultural sensibility. Akira is no beatnik, and his overall attitude toward avant-garde culture is contemptuously uncomprehending. The feeling is mutual between him and the actual would-be avant garde -- who seem more interested in classical music than jazz. The pretentious circles he travels through while seeking to get back at the reporter who got him arrested at the start of the picture regard him as a specimen rather than a person -- "What extraordinary Fauvism!" one exclaims. The others seem more civilized, but Kurahara and Yamada may consider them just as hopelessly alienated, or even just as addicted to the sensory overload that The Warped Ones tries to translate into cinema.

I don't know art but I know what I hate:

Tamio Kawachi is always a critic in The Warped Ones.

Warped Ones is highly regarded for its widescreen compositions and its frantic editing. It seems timed to the erratic rhythms of Akira's restless consciousness, but the overall effect is less a celebration of youth, or of style as an end unto itself, than a kind of horror of modernity. Akira may win in the end, for what it's worth, but Kurahara's strikes me as nearly as reactionary a film as those American B-movies that required delinquents to pay or atone for their crimes, precisely because Akira's victory means misery for others rather than any sort of liberation. But someone can probably watch it quite pleasurably without judgement, digging the unrepentant exuberance of Akira and his pals, taking it like the sort of pop drug they're hooked on. It's a fun film to watch and it is some kind of cinematic achievement, and even a sort of historic document -- but I expect Kurahara's thematic sequel (or remake), Black Sun, to top it. And as for equating it, even thematically, with Godard? Give me a break. Kurahara has a better chance of getting a fair hearing from movie buffs if we don't insist on pretentious comparisons. His boosters ought to have enough confidence in him to let new viewers watch him on his own terms.

[THESE ARE] THE DAMNED (1961-5)

After some austere opening credits, Joseph Losey's only directorial outing for Hammer Studios opens with something like an overture: a pair of tableaux amid the statuary of an English town, set to the bombastic beat of Hammer maestro James Bernard's rock pastiche Black Leather Rock. The camera glides down the length of a Victorian memorial clock. A woman (Shirley Anne Field) emerges from behind it to ask an American tourist (Macdonald Carey), "Never seen a clock tower before?" She swaggers away, the hilt of a knife sticking out of the front of her pants. Cut to a motorcycle gang apparently led by a mufti-clad Oliver Reed, apparently watching what we've already seen from the vantage of a statue of a unicorn. The camera glides upward to reveal this as part of a memorial to the golden jubilee of George III, the monarch himself on top. It's more like a video for Black Leather Rock than the opening of a film, a highly stylized sequence that starts you wondering immediately what kind of film this is and who, after all, are the damned?

The woman, Joan, is bait. The American, Simon, bites. The gang, led by Joan's brother, beats him up and robs him. Simon gets cleaned up at a restaurant where he makes the acquaintance of Bernard, a scientist, and Freya, a sculptor. She has a studio on the nearby coastal cliffs, while Bernard works at a top-secret facility nearby. These two know each other quite well, but Freya still doesn't know what Bernard actually does. To tell her, he quips, would be to condemn her to death.

Simon goes back to his houseboat, followed by a conscience-stricken Joan. Her apology takes a while, and before long the gang comes to reclaim her. After a chase Joan jumps back onto the boat and Simon heads for open water. She suggests holing up on the cliff and hiding out in the often-empty sculptor's home until the gang, and her brother King especially, cools down. But King doesn't want to cool down and he has a hunch on where Joan would go. By the time he gets there Simon and Joan are gone, though not before getting it on, but Freya is back. King denounces her "nasty" art and smashes one of the sculptures. Meanwhile, Simon and Joan stray too close to forbidden turf and are chased down a cliff. King is nearly caught in a dragnet and flees down the cliff in turn.

Simon and Joan are rescued by a group of robe-clad children. We've seen them already earlier in the day; they're some sort of special students whom Bernard addresses via a two-way monitor. They seem to be bright kids but are frustrated with being unable to meet Bernard face to face. But that's something he can't do. We get a clue why as the kids interact with their new visitors. Joan discovers that the children are cold to her touch and don't warm when she holds their hands. The kids themselves know that they're being trained for some special purpose, but aren't sure what that is. One boy speculates that they're being sent into space, for instance. Once King catches up with the group, he offers his own diagnosis: "They're dead, I tell you!"

In a movie like this, you'd almost believe that a wrong turn could take our heroes to Hogwarts Academy (above). If so, pedagogical methods were more advanced back in the 60s (below)

This may be a Hammer film, but things aren't that bad. They just might be even worse for everyone involved in this incredible genre-switch of a story. Evan Jones's screenplay, adapted from a novel by H. L. Lawrence, flows naturally from juvenile-delinquent film to near-apocalyptic science fiction, with a dash of conspiracy paranoia thrown in. Even better, it still has time to develop its characters, especially Reed's King and Alexander Knox's Bernard. King is an explosive package of issues ranging from his Scarface-like protectiveness toward his sister to his hysterically hypocritical reactionary self-righteousness about everything from May-December romances to modern art. It did leave me wonder how this weirdo ended up leading a gang, but Reed makes you believe in what you see. Bernard, meanwhile, is set up as the film's true villain, and lives up to that promise, but we also see that he has compassion for his young charges, if not for anyone else. We see him argue with military types in favor of more freedom of movement and decreased surveillance of them, but when it looks like the kids will break out, he has no choice but to act with absolute ruthlessness, proving that he wasn't joking about fatal consequences for anyone who finds out too much. Knox handles the hard chore well of playing a genuinely sinister character who isn't really happy with what he has to do. The other actors acquit themselves well, even Macdonald Carey despite his being pretty much a poor man's William Holden in his role and somewhat unconvincing as a young woman's lover.

Oliver Reed, Art Critic

Losey and Jones also do something provocative with statues, both the monuments in town and Freya's abstract, half-finished work. They seem to be making a statement about the degeneration of man's own self-image from the iconography of George III to the "nasty" expressionism of Freya's figures, and they clearly invite analogies between the statues and both the children at the base (being molded by Bernard) and King (as a case of arrested development). Both are candidates for "the damned," as is just about everybody in the picture.

Hammer had a hot potato in this picture. Filmed in 1961, it wasn't released in Britain (as The Damned) until two years later. It took another two years before it reached the U.S. in heavily edited form as These Are the Damned, premiering in New York as the second feature on a double-bill with Genghis Khan. Turner Classic Movies took cinephiles by surprise a few years ago by broadcasting the uncut version with no fanfare, and that version, retaining the American title, is probably the main attraction in Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's new Icons of Suspense collection. If you're into genre bending, Joseph Losey, Oliver Reed, or absolutely bleak endings, it definitely should be an attraction for you.

The trailer was uploaded to YouTube by elenanoque.


And from AlexV66, Black Leather, Black Leather, rock rock rock!