4/29/23
Newsletter #321
The Crack of Dawn
To say that movies, TV and video games don’t affect us is ridiculous. Any stimuli that enters our brains through our eyes and ears becomes permanently a part of us. How we react to any given stimulus is based on the accumulation of information we have stored in our brains: information that we actually lived, as well as everything we have ever seen or heard – no matter where it comes from. To honestly believe that spending hours a day shooting and killing things (humans, aliens, cops, whatever), or watching dramatic depictions of people gunning down other people, doesn’t have an effect on us is patently absurd. Most people are able to process this information and store it somewhere safe, but not everybody. Nor is this a new phenomenon.
The very first movie with a story is The Great Train Robbery (1903). It’s the tale of a gang of outlaws in the old west (which was only a couple of years earlier) who unsurprisingly rob a train. In the really terrific film, The Grey Fox (1982), based on a true story, an old stagecoach robber, Bill Miner (Richard Farnsworth), is released from prison in the early 1900s, and while he was incarcerated they stopped using stagecoaches. After working several odd jobs, Miner sees a screening of The Great Train Robbery (which is a brilliant scene) and gets the idea of robbing trains. That’s what really happened. In 1903 Bill Miner saw a violent movie depicting a specific crime, then went and committed that crime. The cause and effect of violent entertainment translating into actual violence has been understood and accepted since the beginning.
The first time (that we know of) that violent movies specifically triggered an American kid to become a psychopathic killer was Francis “Two-Gun” Crowley. [Not that it’s germane to this story, but I wrote a treatment for Two-Gun Crowley back in the 1990s]. Born in 1912, Francis Crowley grew up in the shittiest, most-violent, slum in NYC, and saw his brother gunned down by the police when he was 12. By the time he was 16 he had a long rap sheet of petty crimes, a terrible attitude, and worse still, didn’t know what he wanted to do for a living when he grew up.
So, just like Bill Miner, Francis discovered his occupation at the movies. In 1927 Hollywood released Underworld, the prototype for every gangster movie that followed, and the first film to glamorize a gangster as the anti-hero lead. George Bancroft, a big, charismatic guy, plays the gangster, Bull Weed. It inevitably (although for the first time) leads to Bull Weed trapped in an apartment building in NYC, surrounded by and shooting it out with the coppers. It’s really great. The weapon-of-choice at that time was the .45 caliber Thompson sub-machinegun, or Tommy Gun. In 1927 the way Hollywood did the effect of Tommy guns firing and .45 slugs hitting anything was to hire marksmen to fire real Tommy guns with real .45 bullets. The cops keep firing at the window of the apartment in which Bull Weed is holed up. Just seeing what real .45 slugs ripping across the brick façade looks like is horrifying, but cool.
Underworld is not only an important movie, it’s a beautiful work of art created by a number of great artists at the beginning of their respective careers. Directed by Josef von Sternberg at the start of one of the greatest runs of movies in Hollywood history [I’ll get back to “Two-Gun” Crowley in a second]. And in the hope that maybe somebody somewhere actually goes to the trouble of watching these movies, as I did (except that I got to see them all in 35mm in a movie theater), but just listen to this run of films: Underworld (1927, winner of the first Oscar for Best Story written by Ben Hecht), The Last Command (1928, winner of the first Oscar for Best Actor, Emil Jannings), The Docks of New York (1928, one of my favorite movies), Thunderbolt (1929, another good gangster/prison movie starring George Bancroft, see), The Blue Angel (1929 for the German release, 1930 in America, and of course, the debut of Marlene Dietrich), Morocco (1930, starring Gary Cooper at his young best — referred to in the movie as “that long drink of water” — and Marlene Dietrich’s astounding U.S. debut), An American Tragedy (1931, the first version of A Place in the Sun), both Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus in 1932, both classics, The Scarlett Empress (1934, one of the great, wacky, weird movies, starring Marlene Dietrich), and then von Sternberg’s streak ended. Over. Kaput. Done. Never to return. Still, nine great pictures in seven years. That’s a record.
Alas, 16-year-old juvenile delinquent Francis Crowley saw all the gangster movies over and over again (in 35mm). Sound arrived in 1928-29, which worked out great for gangster movies because now you could hear the Tommy guns firing real bullets, ripping across billboards, mirrors, shelves of liquor bottles, and of course, people. Then Warner Brothers got into genre, and back to back made two of the best gangster movies which created two improbable new movie stars: Little Caesar (1930) with Edward G. Robinson, and Public Enemy (1931) with James Cagney. A chubby, short Jew, and a little Irish hoofer.
Stupid, awful, despicable, and dreadfully unimaginative — but a real movie lover — Francis Crowley went to a pawn shop in 1931, brought two .45 automatic pistols (and shoulder holsters), and with his dimwit buddy, Rudolph “Fats” Durringer, kidnapped a showgirl, took her to an apartment, then got into the same shootout with the cops as Bull Weed in Underworld. Guess what? The cops won, took them both alive, and saved the showgirl.
Both Crowley and Durringer got the chair. Durringer squealed under pressure, resorting to the bullet-proof excuse of, “He made me do it.” At Sing-Sing Durringer fried first. When they brought the arrogant and defiant “Two-Gun” Crowley to the electric chair he said, “Gimme a rag. I want to wipe off the chair after that rat sat in it.”
It was January 21, 1932. Francis “Two-Gun” Crowley was 19 years old.
In both cases, Bill Miner and Francis Crowley, movies directly inspired them to take up their criminal occupations. So, do movies, TV shows, and video games have a direct influence on the viewer? Absolutely.
“Absolutely” equaled exactly 1,000 words. I like shit like that. Have a great day.