I Mobster

"I Mobster" was directed and co-produced by Roger Corman. This means that the production was done very economically and it made money...and would probably be very entertaining!

Steve Cochran plays Joe Sante, a thug who's worked his way up from a kid running numbers to a leader of the mob. The film shows his life from start to finish and shows both the good (just a bit) and the bad (there's a whole lotta bad). The acting, direction and script are all very good...though nothing so outstanding that it will leave a long and lasting impression. Just a decent gangster film.

I Mobster is directed by Roger Corman and adapted to screenplay by Steve Fisher from the novel written by Joseph Hilton Smyth. It stars Steve Cochran, Lita Milan, Robert Strauss, Celia Lovsky and John Brinkley. A CinemaScope production, music is by Gerald Fried and Edward L. Alperson Junior and cinematography by Floyd Crosby.

Roger Corman was late in coming to the film noir/crime splinter of film making, but in 1958 he manufactured two very accomplished gangster pictures. Machine Gun Kelly starring Charles Bronson was something of a success, so it was hardly surprising to see Corman serve up another helping of gangster cinema with I Mobster.

Pic charts the rise of Joe Sante (Cochran), from a boy running bets for a local hood, to being the leader of all illegal and violent operations in the city. There's nothing remotely new here as per the genre scheme of things, it is what it is, a straight forward tale of a bad man who finds himself getting deeper in the mire the higher up the hoodlum ladder he gets. On the side of this normal trajectory is how his climb affects those closest to him, notably the two ladies of his life, Ma Sante and Teresa Porter.

Come the resolution of the tale, Joe Sante is hit with the stark realisation of the life he has led. But is it too late for him? Along the way there's some sexy sizzle by way of a show put on by burlesque queen Lili St. Cyr, while Corman even inserts a sex metaphor that's so unsubtle that Hitchcock himself would doubtless have approved.

Corman re-teams from "Kelly" with Crosby and Fried, who once again provide crisp black and white images and furious jazz strains respectively. He is well served by his cast, Cochran is too old for the role as written, but he has a magnetic presence. Milan impacts strongly as the one time honest girl turned moll in the name of love, while Lovsky as Joe's weary mother is hugely effective in conveying a parent with a broken heart. Best of the bunch is Strauss as Black Frankie, he's a larger than life henchman and with the writers affording the character some telling passages in the play, Strauss responds in kind.

Recommended fare for genre fans after a quick fix of gangster shenanigans. 7/10

This is the first time I've felt genuine disappointment in Roger Corman's work. I've liked others of his movies less (some a lot less), but this was Corman's first movie with a real budget. Brought in by his brother, Gene, to 20th Century Fox with a $500,000 budget to adapt an anonymous mobster novel for the big screen. And, it looks and feels like something Corman would have made for $50,000. I know that my knowledge of the star system of the late 50s is incomplete, but it's hard to differentiate Steve Cochran from some random actor that Corman pulled off the streets more than 60 years later. He wasn't big, is what I'm saying. And the script is the same kind of rushed affair, trying to get through the action with the bare minimum as fast as possible to be filmed as fast as possible. With nearly ten times Corman's usual budget, he really should have taken more time.

Joe Sante (Cochran) is brought before a Senate committee on organized crime and pleads the Fifth to every question. He then reflects back on his life and the rise he saw in the New York crime scene from his time as a boy to muscling his way to complete control. Along for the ride is his friend, Black Frankie (Robert Strauss), a couple of years older than Joe. They work in the organization run by Paul Moran (Grant Withers). Joe's chosen profession rubs his parents the wrong way, his mother (Celia Lovsky) lying to herself about what he's doing while his father (John Mylong) can see right through the thin lies.

This film is, at best, a generic mobster movie. Joe works hard, gets in with the boss, has a great idea and implements it, has a girl who doesn't like his work but sticks with him through and through. There are some little variations that provide some interest, mostly around the girl, Teresa (Lita Milan), a girl from the neighborhood that Joe has a dance with the night he gets arrested and put in jail for a year. She's faithful to him despite hating his line of work, keeping by his side despite not being his girl for years. Her eventual fall into his arms is the best part of the film and is owed entirely to Milan's performance. She's dedicated, and Corman gives her space.

My problems with the film can centrally be placed on Joe's effort to make himself into a big player in the mob. He decides that he's going to enter the labor/management dispute as an outside labor negotiator, pitting both sides against the middle, he says. The problem is that this is the kind of thing in a dramatic narrative that needs particular attention, filled with specific details about what made him successful. All we get is two meetings with managers in different places, one that works and another that doesn't, that relies on just a bit of dialogue. There's no work on his part. Instead of seeing that, we get stock footage montage with Joe's face double exposed over it. That's it. We actually spend more time watching Lili St. Cyr's striptease (in tight closeup of her face) than this important plot and dramatic point of Joe becoming important to the mob.

And that's where my disappointment comes from. Corman, given a real budget of half a million dollars and access to Fox's resources couldn't do more than what seems like quickly filming a first draft script from Steve Fisher. Corman's production processes, for the first time, feel like an active impediment to him as a filmmaker. It's not that his production processes were great in the tiny budget world of things like Not of This Earth, he could always have used a rewrite, but, with a real budget, he couldn't have funded another week of writing to get some more meat on the script's bones?

And so the final product, a real movie with real money at a real studio and he treats it like something he needs to make in five days before his money runs out. It's at this point where it feels like Corman might have shorn any effort at being an artist, at least implicitly. His production process was more important than the end product. He could hide that when working on tiny budgets, but with a real one, and his efforts are the same? That's a real disappointment.

I will say, though, that the film does look good. I mean, this was his first film done in scope, but I couldn't find a copy in scope. Everything was Academy online (apparently the DVD is in scope, but I didn't have the impulse to buy it). So, it's awkwardly Panned and Scanned, but it really does feel like Corman effectively used the whole frame, reminding more of Kurosawa's first attempt at widescreen images in The Hidden Fortress than John Ford's center-framing in The Long Gray Line.

I mean, this film isn't bad. It's just kind of bleh. It's thin, decently acted, but goes nowhere particularly interesting. It functions well enough to survive on screen for 80 minutes as part of a double bill in the late 50s, but that's about it.

If you are a fan of his, then you wont be deceived, no way. It also proves that Roger Corman was a very good director, not only the film maker of cheap crap flicks, in horror genre. He also could give westerns and film noirsas this one. Remember ST VALENTINES DAY MASSACRE, THE INTRUDER or VON RICHTOFFEN AND BROWN, not grade B movies but excellent major ones. This film, that I comment now, offers the usual and predictable rise and fall of a gangster, his loves, his fights and the rest.... Nothing special but splendidly done and pulled by the best actor for this kind of stuff. Enjoy.

I Mobster (1958)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Joe Sante (Steve Cochran) grew up poor as a child due to his immigrant parents but he plans on much bigger things. He ends up working for a gangster as a young age and quickly rises to the top but once on the top he realizes that there's only one place left to go. This Corman production will never be confused with the greatest gangster pictures out there but there are enough nice touches to make it worth viewing. What I enjoyed most was the style of the film, which might cause some to think of Martin Scorsese's GOODFELLAS because both films start off with a young kid and we see him through the ups and downs of the business. I thought this film did a very good job at showing how some of these lower-level thugs worked and Corman certainly handled the material with ease. Some of the best moments happens towards the start of the picture as Joe starts to get more and more money, which doesn't sit well with his father because he knows what has to be going on in order to get this type of money. This continues with a very good sequence of Joe getting out of prison and being made an official member but first he must commit a crime to prove his loyalty. Corman gives the film a very fast and easy feel and some of this is due to the terrific score by Edward L. Alperson, Jr. and Gerald Fried. The Jazz music really adds a lot of heat and this is especially true during an extremely sexual striptease. Cochran makes for a good lead as he has no trouble making you believe he's this tough guy who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. Lita Milan steals the film as the woman he loves. She has a wide range of emotions to go through and she nails them perfectly. Also good are Robert Strauss as the man who brings Joe in and Celia Lovsky is good as his mother. Lili St. Cyr appears as herself and bombshell Yvette Vickers (ATTACK OF THE 50FT WOMAN) has a brief role. At 81-minutes the film has a pretty good pace from start to finish and as you can see the cast are in fine form. The biggest problem is that the screenplay really isn't doing anything we haven't seen countless times before and if you've at least seen one gangster flick in your life then you should see all the trappings here. With that said, I MOBSTER is a decent little "B" picture that fans of Corman will want to check out.