The End of Rico

THE HOLLYWOOD TOUGH GUY IS DEAD!

//£ WAS KILLED BY

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS—

me GLORIFICATION of

PALLID PRETTY BOYS

A MEMORIAL

AND A TOUR OF THE COLDEM ACE

OF GRIT

remember what a guy I knew told me after his first prison stretch. "I used to believe in tough guys," he said. "Then they put me in that place, and all them tough guys cried for their mamas in the middle of the night just like me." There are no tough guys, not really. There are only pretenders, posers and role players. As the limey said, "All the world's a stage," and anybody who can't see through a tough-guy act simply hasn't been around.

I've always found it interesting that Lucky Luciano, one of the most romanticized fig­ures of the American underworld, was a habitual moviegoer, a somewhat sentimen­tal trait that elicits the question: To what

extent did the so-called tough guys of real life emulate the tough-guy mythology of the moving pictures?

Gangster movies had been around for years before the world ever heard of Lucky Luciano, Al Capone and other tabloid fash­ion plates who were more celebrated but less effectual and cunning than the likes of the more important but less celebrated racket guys Johnny Torrio, Arnold Rothstein and Frank Costello.

D.W. Griffith had made his silent gang­ster picture, The Musketeers of Pig Alley, in 1912, and the first all-talking picture, Bryan Foy's Lights of New York, was a gang­ster picture. Released in 1928, the year

of Luciano's ascent, its gift to tough-guy mythology was the line, stiltedly uttered by Wheeler Oakman in the role of the cop-killer gang boss Hawk Miller, "Take him for a ride."

Luciano, for all his notoriety, was a cafone in a fancy suit. For him, Oli­ver Twist was a movie, but he seems to have been unaware that it was a book first. We'll never really know how much the words and ways of the moving-picture tough guys influenced the words and ways of real-life gang­sters. But it's easy to see the appeal the moving-picture tough guys held for every common boy and man.

What adolescent didn't long to be free of fear, intimidation and every­day strictures by becoming a tough guy? What working stiff didn't long to blow away his boss, smack the streel-ish bitch of his discontent, break out of his mundane petty life, walk into a bar with a pocketful of $1,000 bills (well, they stopped making those in 1934, so let's just say a thick folded sheaf of hundreds), claim the freedom

to be his own man and wave away the world with a violent fuck you?

The intrinsic hypocrisy of the trans­planted schmatte racket known as Hollywood dictated that morality and the law win out in the end over amorality and lawlessness. But the make-believe movie tough guys, before that inevitable schmatte justice struck them down in schmatte righteousness, not only laid the lie to those shams called moral­ity and the law—embodying Rimbaud's greatest words, "Morality is a weakness of the brain"—but above all gave every common boy and man something to aspire to, even if that aspiration would never be truly pursued, and they armed them with words and lines, scripted bullets, that could be parroted when the going got rough.

These movies were the church ser­vices for all who knew that society and government were but dirty spittoons but who lacked the nerve to spit down into them or kick them aside.

The actors who played the tough guys in these movies were what made

it all work. They were so good, they con­vinced. Up there, on that screen, they were tough guys.

It was in Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar, based on W.R. Burnett's novel of the same name and released in early 1931, that Edward G. Robinson brought inchoate definition to the tough-guy archetype.

In real life, organized crime in Amer­ica was a Judeo-Christian consortium, but to the Jews from New York who ruled Hollywood there were and could be no bad Jews. So it was, through the great velvet-curtained synagogue of the mov­ing pictures, that organized crime came to be popularly seen as an exclusively Ital­ian affair with no connection to the devout and davening. And so it was that a Jew named Manny Goldenberg—Edward G. Robinson—became the ruthless wop Rico Bandello in the lead role of Little Caesar.

The actor had already been in several gangster pictures, but this role, in which he gave fuller force to his fictionalized portrayal of Al Capone in the 1927 Broadway play The Racket, brought him fame and brought America the (continued on page 100)

END OF RICO

(continued from page 58) first tough guy it would never forget. Rob­inson states the credo out of the side of his mouth at the outset of the movie: "Be somebody. Look hard at a bunch of guys and know they'll do anything ya tell 'em. Have your own way or nothin'. Be some­body." As for affairs of the heart: "Love! Soft stuff." As for friendship: "This is what I get for likin' a guy too much," muttered when, in a rare moment of weakness, he backs off from shooting his closest, oldest friend, Joe. There were no such trepida­tions when it comes to killing the crime commissioner and others, one of whom he guns down on the steps of a church. But, of course, like all the tough guys who were to follow, he must fall in the end. When he does, it is with the unfor­gettable line, the last words of his last, bullet-ridden breath, "Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?"

As refined and gentle as he was in life, Robinson was, as Rico, the first of the great mythic tough guys. Not much to look at as far as glamour-boy movie stars went, but then again he wasn't one of those at all. He was the real thing, in a world where nothing was real. And from the corpse of Rico a greater evil rose, and the tough guys just got tougher.

Later in 1931 came James Cagney in William A. Wellman's The Public Enemy. Though Cagney could speak Yiddish, having grown up in a predominantly Jew­ish neighborhood in New York, he was of Irish and Norwegian descent, and the tough guy he brought to life in The Pub­lic Enemy wasn't Italian, though he wasn't a Yid, either. His name, Tom Powers, was nondescript, but he was far from that. As Jean Harlow says to him, "You don't give. You take. Oh, Tommy, I could love you to death." He is a killer not only of men but of a racehorse to boot. This is the film in which he famously grimaces and smashes a grapefruit into his girlfriend Kitty's face. Like Robinson before, in the end he falls, meanly reflecting "I ain't so tough" while going down with a bullet in the back.

In Howard Hawks's Scarface of 1932, with a script by Ben Hecht based on a novel by Armitage Trail, we return to Jews playing Italians. Here the tough guy, Tony Camonte, is played by the former Yid­dish stage actor Paul Muni. Even Tony's mother says of him "He's-a no good." Whether lighting a match off a cop's badge or pronouncing singular tough-guy wisdom during police questioning—"I don't know nothin', I don't see nothin', I don't hear nothin'. And when I do, I don't tell a cop"—Muni is the star here. But the really tough guy, the character in the background, is Tony's henchman, the deadly, taciturn, unsmiling, compulsively coin-flipping Guino Rinaldo, portrayed by a bit player, George Raft, whose per­formance in Scarface brought fame and fortune. Inevitably, Tony goes down. The picture has two endings: In the original,

he falls to a barrage of lawmen's bullets; in the alternate, he is sentenced to death by the ostensibly more civilized judicial process—but not before murdering his right-arm man, Guino.

Born and raised in Hell's Kitchen by a father of German descent and a mother from Little Italy, Raft was the first Italian-blooded movie tough guy. I le was also the first tough guy whose looks and bearing attracted women. Above all, he was the only tough guy who was actually mobbed up, with friends who included Bugsy Siegel, Al Capone, Frank Costello, Vito Genovese and other shadowland characters. The FBI maintained a file on Raft for more than 20 years. He was one of a kind.

From Scarface and Raft 15 years pass, to 1947, before we encounter the next tough-guy breakthrough: Burt Lancaster in Brute Force, directed by Jules Dassin and produced by Mark Hellinger, who had also, the year before, produced The Killers, in which, as the Swede, Lancaster is tough in his fatalism but doomed to be undone by a "double-crossing dame." Except for a series of brief scenes played out in the memories of Lancaster and his cell mates, Brute Force is set wholly within the walls of a prison whose corrupt, oppressive government so brilliantly and subtly reflects that of the outside world that the movie illuminates everything the tough guy is against by his very nature. And through the ruthless will of Lan­caster, as Joe Collins, we experience the caged-animal desire to escape from the evils of the cage to the evils of society. As he says after emerging from solitary and being asked if he's okay, "Nothin's okay. It never was and never will be—not till we're out. Get that? Out." Collins never makes it, but he does manage to kill the warden before he himself is killed. As the prison croaker, Dr. Walters, observes in the movie's last spoken words, "Nobody escapes. Nobody ever really escapes."

No other picture comes closer to vin­dicating the tough guy and indicting the world, to which he is anathema and which is anathema to him. And no one could've asserted and embodied the vicious hatred at the heart of the tough guy better than Lancaster.

Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death, with a screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, appeared within months. Though Victor Mature was the star here, as tough guy turned rat Nick Bianco, it was a newcomer to the pictures, Richard Widmark, as meaner-than-mean Tommy Udo, who stole the show in a wider-than-wide-brimmed fedora and dark shirt and pale tie, adapted from the bold sarto­rial brushstroke of George Raft, who is reputed to have been the first guy without a Seeing Eye dog to wear a black shirt and white tie. Whether killing an old lady— "ya lyin' old hag"—by shoving her down the stairs in her wheelchair or countering every threat with the smarmiest, most sin­ister snicker ever heard, Tommy Udo was the first tough guy without any hint of a

soft spot for anyone or anything, the first tough guy who neither folded nor allowed the slightest intimation of redemption to desecrate his life or his death.

Within another few months came Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, starring Robert Mitchum. Like Lancaster as the Swede in The Killers, Mitchum, as JefTBailey, is tough enough, but—"Flow big a chump can you get to be? I was finding out"—he falls for the "soft stuff" in the form of Jane Greer as Kathie, who is tougher than he and every other hard guy in the picture and who in the end shoots him dead.

Nineteen forty-nine offered Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross, in which Burt Lancaster, as Steve Thompson, delivers his interior monologue on love: "A man eats an apple, gets a piece of the core stuck between his teeth, ya know? He tries to work it out, some cellophane off a cigarette pack. What happens? The cel­lophane gets stuck in there too. Ah, what was the use?" The real tough guy here is Dan Duryea as Slim Dundee, who kills both Steve and the stuff stuck between his teeth, the ever duplicitous Anna, played by Yvonne De Carlo.

Then straightaway came Cagney again, taking it all a step further as Cody Jarrett in Raoul Walsh's White Heat. This is the one everyone knows—or should know. Previous tough-guy movies included the presence of a loving mother or mater­nal figure, or that of a Good Woman, or both. (The avaricious old Italian lady Ma Magdalena, who provides a hideout, at a price, in the back of her fruit store for Rico in Little Caesar, is the rare exception.) Here, in White Heat, Ma is every bit as evil as her son, who is the sort of guy who, when a hostage in his car trunk begs for air, riddles the trunk with lethal gunfire, saying, "Stuffy, huh? I'll give ya a little air." To clarify things for the moviegoer, a cop comments on Cody's "psychopathic devotion" to his mother. Equaling Ma in evil is Cody's unfaithful wife, Verna— whom he kicks off a stool for making a crack about his mother—who disposes of Ma by shooting her in the back while Cody is doing a stretch. (It's interesting that this picture was based on a story by a woman, Virginia Kellogg.) After Ma is in the ground, Cody asks the under­cover rat who will bring him down if the rat's mother is still alive, saying, "I was just walkin' around out there talkin' to mine," then asking threateningly, "That sound funny to you?" Then, reflecting on this unholy communion with his dead Ma, he muses calmly, "Maybe I am nuts." But Ma is with him until the end, when, atop a refinery oil tank, he blows it and himself to hell with the cry "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"

Cagney followed in 1950 with Gordon Douglas's Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, based on Horace McCoy's novel. As Ralph Cotter he more than lives up to a prosecutor's description of him as "the most evil man of all," scheming his way through a world of corrupt lawmen and a murderous

broad—whom he whips with a wet towel and who in the end shoots him dead.

The Big Heat of 1953 is certainly not to be remembered for its star, Glenn Ford, who plays a fucking cop, or for the char­acter of the crime boss Mike Lagana, who dwells beneath a portrait of his mom, but for Lee Marvin as henchman Vince Stone, who, like Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, blows everybody else away by bringing new dimension to the figure of the tough guy, assaulting his dame—"You lyin' pig!"—and disfiguring her with scald­ing coffee. But, alas, as ever, that lie called justice triumphs in the end.

Almost nine years later, in early 1962, the culmination of it all: J. Lee Thomp­son's Cape Fear, based on and bettering John D. MacDonald's 1958 novel The Exe­cutioners. It is here that Robert Mitchum, as Max Cady, recently released from prison after eight years, four months and 13 days, comes to wreak retribution on the lawyer, played by Gregory Peck, whose testimony robbed his life of those years, months and

days. Mitchum (who, like Raft, had served time in the real world) is Cady, evil incar­nate, and he can express it through his eyes and tone of voice like no other actor who ever lived. The only light moment in this picture is when Mitchum, being strip-searched, stands there in his boxer shorts and panama hat advising a cop, "Hey, you better check that shirt. I got a couple jolts of horse stashed under the collar." It's light only because all else is so relentlessly dark. His terrorizing of Peck and his family includes intimations of the rape of Peck's wife and adolescent daughter, and of things even more unspeakable and unimaginable. When Peck tries to buy him off, the words Mitchum delivers on the meaning of just value constitute the alpha and omega of what the tough guy represents. It could go no further than this, and it would not.

Some of the earliest tough-guy movies had been framed in cheap hypocrisy. Little Caesar opens with a title card quoting that Jesus jive from Matthew 26:52: "For all that take up the sword shall perish by it." Scarface

presents itself as an "indictment of gang rule" and "of the callous indifference of the government," going on to remind us—the big imposture—that we, the people, are the government. The only thing that renders Cape Fear imperfect as the last and ultimate tough-guy movie, aside from the ending, in which Peck kills Mitchum rather than the other way round, is that there is no antitheti­cal framing to give voice to its true message, such as the removal of the word false from the Ninth Commandment, revising it sim­ply to "Thou shalt not bear witness against thy neighbor." Or more meaningfully, "He that bears witness is a rat." But then again, we're talking about the movies.

So where have all the tough guys gone? Mitchum and Lancaster sang beautiful swan songs to them: the former in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Peter Yates's 1973 adaptation of George V. Higgins's great novel of that name; and the latter in Louis Malle's Atlantic Cityof 1981. Brian De Palma and Al Pacino looked back in anger at what had been lost in their Scarface of 1983. Malcolm McDow­ell paid lovely tribute from across the sea in Paul McGuigan's Gangster No. 1 of 2000. But it was true: It was the end of Rico.

The Godfather appeared 10 years after Cape Fear. I remember laughing with Mario Puzo over the far-fetched fabulist nature of his novel—everything from his reinvention of the word godfather as an underworld term to the ridiculous codes of ethics by which his make-believe tough guys abided. Yet this grand entertainment became the new paradigm of the yuppie tough-guy manque. Fifteen years later, Vito Corleone had been replaced by Gordon Gekko.

Most tough guys smoked and drank. Many who saw Casino Royale of 2006 may have noticed that, while Ian Fleming's James Bond smoked 60 cigarettes a day, the James Bond portrayed otherwise quite well by Daniel Craig did not smoke at all.

What had happened? Gangsters who lived by Sunday-school codes of morality? Toffarbitrageur swindlers as enemies of the establishment, when in fact they were the establishment? Rogue secret agents with licenses to kill but careful not to inflict the dangers of secondary smoke? These guys embodied the lie of morality as embraced by the world, not its sworn enemies. A politically correct tough guy is no tough guy at all.

Adolescents—the ADHD (no such thing until 1987), multicolor-medicated blob brat children of the yuppie damned— now aspired to be Gekkos or worse, and older working stiffs pretended to be Gek­kos while clinging in pitiable desperation to the enslavement they despised and lis­tening every once in a while to the love theme from The Godfather performed by a balding bar mitzvah band at a catering-hall wedding reception.

And from there it just got worse. While characters like George Raft and Robert Mitchum caused their share of moviegoing panties to be laundered, they did so with an element of primal danger that excited as much as their looks. Their kind has been replaced by pretty boys. Who could believe Leonardo DiCaprio as a tough guy in Gangs of New York? Even a blow across the face by a two-by-four would have left him seeming

more the victim of a homosexual-bias attack than a gang leader. And all the other tough guys, unless they're the fall guys in some dumb-ass good-versus-evil nonsense, are cartoon pinup boys who work for, rather than against, government authority. Could Matt Damon scare you? How about—stand back—Tom Cruise? What can one say about these squirts (to pluralize one of Tommy Udo's favorite words)? That they're oh so cute when they're butch?

Characters such as these wouldn't even be seriously considered as rough trade for leather boys. The girls in the old tough-guy movies were tougher than they are. As I've heard it said of George Clooney: He's not half the man his aunt Rosemary was. Where's Ma Jarrett when we need her? Who is there to throw steaming coffee into Ange­lina Jolie's haughty face? Come on, Brad, quit sucking up to politicians; shoot a few of them instead, and get that non-fair-trade coffee brewing. Your morning facial can wait. I mean, like, until the mortician comes.

"Pity the country that needs heroes," wrote Bertolt Brecht. And now cops— fucking cops—are "heroes." The tough guys tried to set us straight, but we didn't listen. Their inspiration, their call to amorality and individuality, lasted only as long as the popcorn. These "tough guys" today—these do-good sissy-boy "heroes"—are they any example to set before our youth? These punks would be more convincing in pin­afores than in pinstripes. They all look and act as though they bench-press 200 pounds, curl 50 pounds, then go out and drink half a pint of semen.

What can we expect in an age in which

people want to excel in, rather than escape from, their pathetic lives? An age in which "going green" is taken as anything but a cheap commercial carny con? An age in which politicians are believed and laws are slavishly followed? An age that strokes itself with humbug such as "self-empowerment" and a belief in change and a better world? Is Spider-Man the Scarface of today?

Yes, the end of Rico has come to pass, and our own ends will be more ignoble by far than the end of Eddie Coyle.

If it's any consolation, in case you haven't noticed, the lie of your life has outlived the lie of this gone-dead, collapsing world. So fuck it. There's still time. Spit, swear, smoke, drink, smash your cell phone on the pavement, disrespect all laws as much as politicians, lawmakers and lawmen do, and be cool. I would advise you to dust off a cop or two also, but, like me, you prob­ably lack the balls. However, you can at least be as disrespectful as possible to them, and always bear in mind the sound of how Tommy Udo would have said the word hero. And, gals, you can, and should, do this stuff too. Live it up, like the tough gals did. If they could kill off Cagney's Ralph Cotter and Lancaster's Swede, just imagine what you could do to these pussies.

Subversion is all we've got left. And remember: It wasn't Jesus or any of them other hocus-pocus assholes who died for your sins. It was Rico and Cody and Cady and the rest who died for your transgressions against sin, your very freedom to perceive transgres­sion as something other than sin.