I Mobster

I, MOBSTER may have some historical significance, of a sort. This may be the first film based on a paperback original. When I say "paperback original" I'm referring to the flood of two-bit (literally, they sold for a quarter) paperback books that were NOT reprints: these books, published by Dell, Gold Medal (Fawcett) Lion and others had a boom after World war II, taking over the newsstands, drug store racks, etc. and hastening the demise of the pulp magazines. Writers like Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Jim Thompson and Charles Williams got their start in the paperback originals, and established writers like David Goodis and Cornell Woolrich turned to them for quick money.

Many of these books have now been filmed by the likes of Truffaut (SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER from Goodis' DOWN THERE) Cornfield (THE 3RD VOICE from Williams' ALL THE WAY) and others -- Jim Thompson most frequently --but as far as I can tell, Roger Corman's I, MOBSTER was the first, from an "anonymous" Gold Medal Original, I, MOBSTER, published in 1951.

Can anyone find an earlier?

Growing up around the mob, Joe turns to the syndicate early in life & quickly gains respect, jobs, & a great deal of money. And despite his mother's & his girlfriend's attempts to persuade him to stay out of organized crime, he works his way up the ladder to the top. But there's bound to be some competition to head the syndicate. Who can you trust?

This is a great early mob film with very good acting, a great story with a beautiful love story built in featuring the stunning Lita Milan. Not terribly suspenseful, but overall a good flick.

Roger Corman directed this 1958 story of the rise and fall of a hoodlum, on what was for him a generous budget. There's an exploitation feeling to this one, which was one of many inexpensive, somewhat backward looking crime films of the late fifties. Steve Cochran, in the title role, is a little too old but still holds the screen with his unique brand of sleazy charisma, showing once again that with the right vehicle he might have become a major star. His performance is sympathetic, and helps make the movie more interesting than it might have been with a cooler actor (Ralph Meeker, say). The script isn't much, and the other actors are no more than adequate. If one has a taste for lowbrow crime films, this one's pretty good, as it evokes its paperback and men's magazine era nicely, and has about it the whiff of an old-time barbershop.

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.