Al Capone

Chicago in the 1920's: rife with political and police corruption and increasingly run by mobsters. The most famous of them undoubtedly was Al Capone. In this bio-pic, Capone is played very effectively by Rod Steiger. Steiger captured both the role and the man. Capone was a guy of humble origins, but was a bit of a contradiction: he had no education but a love for culture; he was a ruthless gangster but for the most part stayed legally "clean." Steiger captured both the ruthlessness and the culture with his portrayal. Based on actual photographs of Capone that I've seen, Steiger even looked the part. He was very impressive.

The movie basically traces Capone's career in crime from the time he arrives in Chicago in 1919 as a bodyguard to a local crime figure and takes it up to his conviction for income tax evasion of all things (it was the only crime they could ever actually pin on him) in 1931, with a very brief look at Capone in Alcatraz, and a voice-over explaining his last years before his death in 1947. Watching his rise was always interesting. A lot of this is fictional. James Gregory's character (the honest Chicago cop who commits himself and his entire career to bringing Capone down, and from whose perspective the story is told) didn't exist, and there's no portrayal of Capone's actual marriage; instead the movie focuses on a relationship he supposedly develops with a woman (Fay Spain) whose husband he had killed in the early part of his criminal career. The character of the newspaperman Keely (Martin Balsam) was based on a real figure, although the name was changed.

By the standards of the modern era of film-making, this is laughably clean. There are a lot of shootouts, but no blood ever appears on those who are shot and killed, and in general these gangsters are awfully polite! There's an extended look on the planning of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre (as Capone used his men to take out many of his rivals in Chicago while he stayed at his home in Florida) although the Massacre itself doesn't take very long and - again - isn't especially graphic.

This represents an interesting and believable (if not quite historically accurate) look at not only Capone but at the state of Chicago in the era and of the role that Prohibition played in promoting the rise of organized crime, and Steiger's performance alone makes this worth watching. (8/10)