The rise of an American crime-fighting institution through the eyes of a new recruit - sorry, Bob, it's been done before
You'd be hard pressed to find a more telling example of the shift in filmmaking over the past 70years than to put Warner Bros' 1935 hit G-Men up against the current Robert DeNiro success, The Good Shepherd.
Fundamentally, they are the same movie, each chronicling the messy rise of a dedicated civil servant out to imprint American-style justice on a complicated world.
But if DeNiro's film, with its dark, low-key tone, is akin to a conspiratorial whisper, Warners' G-Men is a loud, loutish scream.
G-Men deals not with the formation of the CIA but of its domestic predecessor. As the introductory add-on, produced for the 1949 re-release and included in the current DVD version, boasts, this is "the daddy of all FBI pictures."
The impetus for the film was the machine gun-like flak Warners was taking for romanticizing the gangster, through such box office blockbusters as Little Caesar and The Public Enemy.
Warners, looking to dodge these bullets, turned its penchant for heroic elevation on to the good guys. What better way to appease concerned citizens than to play into the hands of their appointed overseer, the government, and what more effective vehicle by which to show the depth of the studio's commitment to change than to by turning the Public Enemy himself, James Cagney, inside out?
Turning street rat Cagney into a mousy civil servant, however, should have proven no easy feat -but screenwriter Seton I. Miller found a way. Let Cagney hold on to his trademark persona, said Miller; make him a tough guy who, through the sponsorship of a dirty nightclub owner with a heart of gold, manages to come of age with his nose clean, clean enough to become one of the first of a new breed of people's hero, the G-Man.
No doubt Warners, worried about the defection of Cagney's traditional audience, instantly recognized this as a way by which they could appease social critics while giving dedicated Cagney-ites the gun play, car chases and punch-happy wise guys they loved to spend their hard earned Depression-era dollars on.
Cagney is Brick Davis, an honest, small-time lawyer - albeit the kind not averse to punching out his clientele. When a police acquaintance goes down, Brick rolls an FBI application form into his Underwood and ends up at the newly established bureau, where he feuds with his blowhard of a boss (Robert Armstrong of King Kong fame) and pursues a big-time baddie who's into fresh gardenias and bowler hats.
As a look into the workings of the FBI, G-Men is, predictably, a sham. It would take the incorporation of documentary technique, not acquired by Hollywood's filmmakers until the war years, for mainstream cinema to be able to provide this kind of realism. This FBI is pure '30s Warners, with its newspaper-style offices, art deco nightclubs, and its galley of flat-voiced gangsters.
If this, as my thesis maintains, sounds miles away from the supposed realism of DeNiro's Shepherd, the two films become brothers in arms again when it comes to theme.
For all of its scale, DeNiro's film is really no more than yet anotherstatement on the "burden of brotherhood," an idea DeNiro has been presenting since he became a staple of gangster movies early on in his career.
But if DeNiro's final pronouncement is that there is a quiet, if sad, honor in playing foot soldier, G-Men's variation on the theme is, of course, much more brash: that the honor of being "a swell guy," as Cagney's superior comes to call him after Brick finally proves himself, is a cause not for tears, but for a final, fadeout-cuing grin.
G-Men is widely available on its own, or as part of Warner Bros.' Tough Guys box set.
-
