Rampart (2011)

Directed by Oren Moverman
Written by James Ellroy, Oren Moverman
Starring Woody Harrelson, Robin Wright, Anne Heche, Ned Beatty, Ice Cube


I've been sloppy, yes.  I've not been keeping this blog going.  The reasons... oh, you don't want to know the reasons (there aren't any, but if there were, you wouldn't want to know; this is a film blog, after all).  Anyway, I've not updated it in ages, not since The Artist.  In the interim, The Artist has been hailed almost universally - aside from the inevitable backlash which comes with the universal hailing of anything - and won a sackful of awards, perhaps heralding in these troubled times a fondness for warm, cosy, lovely, utterly charming pictures.  Simple pictures that set out to warm the cockles of our hearts, and achieve that aim marvellously.

Rampart didn't win any awards.  The reception has been mixed, to say the least.  It doesn't warm the cockles of anyone's heart.  It's not a feelgood picture, it's not charming, it's not lovely, it's not cosy or delightful.  It's not a movie to ease a few hours of the difficult days in which we live.  Unremittingly bleak, cruel, vicious and despairing, without a real beginning and no end to speak of, Rampart spends its hundred minutes showing us the darkness as a constant theme - in a similar sense to the (admittedly superior) No Country for Old Men, cruelty and violence are with us throughout, they're not some abberation that springs up at the beginning of a movie and disappears in a burst of good-will-outing two hours later.

And if you can stand the constant, crushing negativity, there is a very fine film here.  In the right role, Woody Harrelson can be a very intense, engaging actor (indeed, he was in No Country for Old Men), and with barely a moment in the film when he's not on screen, this is a towering and powerful performance.  It's also a very interestingly put-together picture - only Moverman's second as a director* - and laudably well-paced and trim.  Rampart is not at all perfect - the relationship between the central character and his increasingly estranged family is rather hackneyed - but as a character study of unpleasantness in the line of duty, and one that leaves open the question of whether duty is an acceptable excuse, it's certainly worth watching.



*He has, however, had a longer career as a screenwriter - including the execrable I'm Not There, which couldn't be more different to Rampart.

The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Men really knew how to dress in gangster pictures.

Directed by Raoul Walsh

Written by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay, Robert Rossen, Mark Hellinger (story)

Starring James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, Jeffrey Lynn

Whatever else Prohibition might have been responsible for, it certainly did the cinema a world of good. I rambled on last time about the three genres with exclusively American roots: the musical, the western, the gangster flick. Musicals come from the stage, of course, from the Vaudeville traditions that gave us so many early screen greats. Westerns come from, well, the west, that grand American foundation myth of brave heroes taming the wilderness.

But the gangster flick wouldn't exist without Prohibition; not merely because of the wealth of stories the era offered up, but also – crucially – because of the glamorisation of crime it engendered. The Eighteenth Amendment was hugely unpopular across much of the United States – especially in the major cities – and fighting it grew into a popular crusade. In the westerns, the bandits were there to be defeated by the dashing, maverick hero; in the gangster flick, the leaden-footed enforcers of a hated law were the villains, the bootleggers the stars of the show.

And the violence? Nobody, wherever they live, wants violence in their lives. But most Americans were never affected by the Tommy guns and the beatings; these existed in newspaper reports, on the radio, on the screen, not on their street. Just as war when seen from a distance has heroism without the brutality, nobility without the squalor, so the rise of the bloodthirsty gangster and the millionaire who took his money from the hands of the dead and dying couldn't possibly be so grim and repellent when projected onto the silver screen.

Time provides even more distance than geography. When Prohibition sank unmourned in 1933, the bootlegging era was cut adrift*, and its heroes and villains became ever more distant, and ever easier to build into tales of adventure and dynamism. After all, that period was half-over by the time sound – another essential ingredient of the gangster flick – made its way into the movies, and nostalgia never struggled to find a way into the stories and legends that were already growing apace.

The Roaring Twenties is a very nostalgic gangster film. Cagney may be playing a criminal, he may be playing a man of violence, but there's never any question that his heart is in the right place: here is a man who just wanted his job back when he returned from the Great War, and when that was denied him, he had no other choice but to pursue a life of crime. He devotes himself to helping a young girl who wrote to him during the war, and when she goes off with a fellow more her own age, he's disappointed but never vengeful. Even in a genre that relished nostalgia, the rosiness of Raoul Walsh's view back to the 20s is strikingly simplistic and uncritical.

Yet, for all that, it's in no way a bad film. Suspend your disbelief for a moment – just as you would for all those westerns which aren't filthy and ridden with disease, malnutrition, poverty and gore; just as you would for all those musicals where bursting into co-ordinated song in an instant seems a perfectly normal thing to do – suspend your disbelief, and the charm of the lost world and the deep-down-goodness of Cagney's gangster-hero is as engaging as it is delightfully crafted. The Roaring Twenties is as much a nostalgic homage to the genre as it is to the era it glorifies, and a thoroughly enjoyable one at that. Forget realism, this is just very good cinema storytelling

*of course, in reality, most of those involved simply moved on to other things – criminal organisations of that size were never likely to just disappear overnight. But it makes a better movie for their kingpins to end the story dead or defeated, particularly for gangster films in the 30s and 40s, before the world had entirely moved on, before a more critical and impartial eye could be cast on events of the time. Later gangster pictures – notably Leone's Once Upon A Time In America – tend more to reflect the continuation of organised crime into other areas once alcohol became legal again.