Murder Inc – The Magnificent 60s

Lepke (1975) ***

Gangsters are just the same as you and I. They want to be loved, they want a family, they want the kind of respect that isn’t achieved by just pointing a gun at someone. The Godfather (1972) led the way in subtly reminding us that gangsters were human beings even if it was more seductive in making us believe we should excuse their criminal tendencies. Lepke spends as long on romance and trying to win the approval of the bride’s father as it does on the character’s perfidy. The idea that marriage cannot so much absolve you of your sins but provide an oasis of calm inside a murderous world is one only a true romantic would consider pursuing. As is the notion that a wife would forgive you your sins because her love would outweigh your actions, in the same way as the wife-beaten wife (as shown in Love Lies Bleeding) still loves her husband no matter how brutal the treatment meted out.

Lepke has got reason to be sore with the world. He was left out of the gangster chronicles. An important part of the Murder Inc operation, he was ignored when Hollywood passed judgement on such criminal enterprises. And you get the sneaky feeling his life story was only revived because after the Coppola epic his was one of the few tales untold in the gangster chronicles.

“If there’s any good in him, that’s the part I’ve got,” says wife Berenice (Anjanette Comer), “If I was a whore I could leave him.” And you can see the part she adores, not only respectful to the point of being obsequious to her upstanding father Mr Meyer (Milton Berle), but charming and romantic with her and he’s clearly able to separate business from romance, turning into an exemplary family man (but then so, too, did Don Corleone).

Which is just as well because Lepke (Tony Curtis) is a dreaded Mafia enforcer, forming a murder syndicate with Dutch Schulz (John Durren) and Lucky Luciano (Vic Tayback) that takes responsibility for knocking off anyone who steps out of line away from the big bosses. There’s some standard gangster stuff, machine guns in violin cases, bombs in the spaghetti, but also some interesting touches, a shoot-out on a carousel, and of course the last person a gangster can trust is the one he places his truth with. Double-dealing is the order of the day.

Like all the top gangsters, Lepke is an entrepreneur, expanding out of the killing racket into dope, extortion and trade unions. New York D.A. Thomas E. Dewey is on the Murder Inc case and his assassination is only prevented by the intercession of Lepke. But he’s tackled as much by Robert Kane (Michael Callan), friend to Berenice who works in narcotics along with Dewey.

Dewey’s not the only real-life character making an entrance. Legendary journalist Walter Winchell (Vaughn Meader) plays a significant role. Most of the picture involves Lepke being nefarious by day and loving at night and the gang are only tripped up when witnesses need to be eliminated and as the cops work a similar kind of dodge to the one that snared Al Capone. Instead of tax evasion it’s anti-trust issues.

Covering the period from 1923, Lepke’s emergence as a ruthless street rat, and his development of the narcotics business by sourcing product direct for the Far East, to his execution in 1944, it pays only cursory attention to the period. Most of the time, Lepke is fighting for his life one way or other, suspicious of colleagues, walking a knife-edge between actions that could inavertently lead to his demise, and trying to remain the best part of himself that remains appealing to his wife.

That any of this works other than being a standard depiction of the rise and fall of a gangster is down to Tony Curtis (The Boston Strangler, 1968) who delivers one of his best later performances while maintaining a difficult balancing act, clearly believing that he can separate the two sides of his personality, and that the murderous part is really just a performance. The documentary-style rendition helps as this can be complicated stuff, especially with so many disparate traitors.

Anjanette Comer (Guns for San Sebastian, 1968) is always watchable. Menahem Golan, of Golan-Globus and Cannon fame, perhaps taking a cue from The Godfather, takes considerable care with the family elements and is rewarded with a better picture than the elements might suggest.

This pretty much rounds out my Hollywood History of the Gangster.

Lansky (2021) ****

Murder Inc. gangster Meyer Lansky has featured in over a dozen Hollywood movies and television series from Lee Strasberg in The Godfather (1972) to Ben Kingsley in Bugsy (1991) and Dustin Hoffman in The Lost City (2015) so you could be asking why do we need another one? And it’s a good question because this part docu-drama, while recounting the well-known aspects of the mobster’s career, also examines less obvious areas as well as bringing the story up-to-date in a duel of wits between Lansky (Harvey Keitel) and the F.B.I. still chasing him for $300 million it presumes he has hidden away.

The movie is framed by journalist David Stone (Sam Worthington) interviewing Lansky about his life. This turns out to be far more interesting than previously portrayed. Sure, there’s plenty of executions, but Lansky was also the most financially acute of gangsters, taking the business legitimate in the fashion of Michael Corleone in The Godfather, realising that rather than killing businessmen who could not pay their debts it was more sensible to take over their businesses and improve them, and in order to keep everything above board when contracted to oversee all the casinos in Cuba refusing to rig machines in the house’s favour.

He’s also got a crippled son whose illness he perceives as a mathematical equation and is convinced he can beat the odds. In the course of his interviews, Stone falls for a honey trap and is blackmailed/bribed by the F.B.I. So tension is raised by the government agency hovering in the background, the mystery of the missing millions, and Stone’s fears that Lansky will find out he is being betrayed.

Biopics succeed or failed based on what aspects of the subjects life they choose to cover. All the big names are here – Al Capone (Robert Walker Branchaud), Lucky Luciano (Shane McRae), Salvatore Maranzano (Jay Giannone), Bugsy Siegel (David Cole) – but we also delve into territory almost foreign to the gangster genre with Lansky’s patriotism leading him to root out Nazi spies and sympathizers during world War Two, in return for which he secures the release from prison of Lucky Luciano. His return to Israel is scuppered by U.S.-Israel relations. And, no matter his courtesy and manners, he’s also a scumbag of the first order, committing wife Anne (AnnaSophia Robb) to a psychiatric hospital because she has the audacity to blame him for his crimes.

Adding some depth is the “currency” of traded favours, that the U.S. government had little compunction in utilising his services at a time when it was trying to crack down on organised crime. Even the ageing Lansky is clever enough to outwit his pursuers.

But, of course, movie length works against the film. It would have been better as a limited series, exploring the man’s entire career. Even so, it certainly provides new insight into the mind of a gangster who was a businessman, in the correct term of the word, first and foremost. In another world, he might have been acclaimed as the man who pioneered a gambling industry now worth $250 billion annually to the U.S. economy.

Harvey Keitel (The Irishman, 2019) shows no sign of calling time on a career over half a century old and his bemused take on the gangster is solid work. Sam Worthington (Fractured, 2019) is excellent as the compromised journalist trying to keep family and finances together. Look out for David Cade (Into the Ashes, 2019) as Lansky’s lifelong buddy, Minka Kelly (She’s in Portland, 2020) as the deceitful girlfriend and AnnaSophia Robb (Words on Bathroom Walls, 2020) as the showgirl who realises marriage is not all it’s cracked up to be.

This was something of a personal project for writer-director Eytan Rockaway (The Abandoned, 2015) since his father was the journalist in the film. Rockaway’s approach is an interesting twist on the gangster film and he elicits strong performances all round. The final scene you won’t see coming.

Coming Soon: 60 Years Ago

NEW YORK JULY 1960: Although summer six decades ago did not have the same hype as summers now it was still a prime time to launch new movies. The big cinemas also were more attractive than smaller ones because they tended to have air conditioning so if it was hot outside audiences did not swelter inside.

But Disney did not yet have a stranglehold on the summer – although the studio had given note of its intentions by launching Pollyanna at the gigantic Radio City Music Hall – so the range on offer was wide. Psycho had just taken New York by storm so newcomers had their work cut out.

The expected big hitters were Richard Brooks’ Elmer Gantry starring Burt Lancaster and Jean Simmons in a murky tale of evangelism and the under-rated Richard Quine’s steamy drama Strangers When We Meet with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak. (Douglas and Simmons would be seen later in the year in Spartacus).

Paul Newman was hoping for a commercial breakthrough with From the Terrace, based on the John O’Hara bestseller, co-starring his wife Joanne Woodward and directed by Mark Robson. At this point Newman’s career had yet to spark, the success of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) in which he was relegated to leading man status behind undoubted star Elizabeth Taylor had been followed by misfires Rally Round the Flag, Boys (1958) and The Young Philadelphians (1959). Plus, Robson with two Oscar nominations and Woodward a winner for The Three Faces of Eve (1957) were more highly-regarded than the star who had but one nomination.

Also hoping for a career uplift was Richard Burton in Ice Palace, adapted from the Edna Ferber bestseller set in Alaska, co-starring Robert Ryan and Martha Hyer and directed by Austrian veteran Vincent Sherman. Targeting a different market entirely were Murder Inc, The Lost World and Battle in Outer Space.

Although Stuart Whitman was the star of the low-budget Murder Inc. set against the background of 1930s gangster Lepke, Peter Falk stole the show with an Oscar-nominated turn. The Lost World had British actor Michael Rennie and Jill St. John in the cast and was more notable for being one of the few directorial outings of Irwin Allen, later the inventor of the 1970s disaster mini-genre. Sci-fi Battle in Outer Space was a dubbed import from Japan.

Three arthouse pictures also made their debuts. The pick of these should have been The Trials of Oscar Wilde with Peter Finch as the eponymous playwright but some of its potential had been sapped by the release a short time before of Oscar Wilde starring Robert Morley. The other two were British comedy School for Scoundrels starring Ian Carmichael and Terry Thomas and the Russian adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.

Sources: Variety – Jul 6, July 13, Jul 20, Jul 27, 1960.