There aren’t that many films called The Gangster, which is odd considering how many gangster movies there are. But here he is, this singular malefactor, in a film noir from 1947, a strange one with a weird, distorting-mirror quality.
Too arty for its own good seems to have been the general consensus at the time. I have no idea what any of those complaints are about. The odd art deco clock and building frontage to one side, there’s not much artiness going on here at all – director Gordon Wiles isn’t messing about overly with the narrative. DP Paul Ivano gives it to us fairly straight in terms of lenses and lighting. Dalton Trumbo had an uncredited hand in the screenplay, and he’s more your punchy, direct sort of writer.
And yet. There is something very unsettling about it all. Mood. Tone. If those are “arty”, I’ll concede defeat.
It’s a Monogram Studios production and stars the excellent Barry Sullivan as Shubunka, a racketeer whose small time operation is about to be taken over by the big boys. But not if he can help it etc.
Really, the plot is a pretext for a series of exquisite mini-portraits, of Shubunka and the people he swims along with, most of them neither racketeers nor sociopaths, as he is.
There’s Nancy (Belita), the showgirl who is probably just stringing Shubunka along. Jammey (Akim Tamiroff), the very Jewish owner of an ice cream parlour Shubunka is “protecting” with his racket. Shorty (Harry Morgan), a soda jerk full of made-up stories about his success with the ladies. Karty (John Ireland), the hopeless gambler who has stolen money from his wife’s brothers. Dorothy (Joan Lorring), the mouse who works the cash register, sees all, fears all, keeps her mouth shut. And Olga Ostroleng (Fifi D’Orsay), a woman of a certain age tilting herself towards big-cojones (in his own estimation) Shorty. And, though she doesn’t get much to do but does it well, Virginia Christine, as Karty’s desperate wife.
By the end, all of these people will have had their situations changed, none of them for the better, some of them in a rather permanent way. This is “the day it all went wrong” for everyone involved.
Sullivan’s eccentric and compelling performance is central to it all. Shubunka is giving off a powerful vibe – disturbed at first, shifting to violent later, and finally desperate, here is a man who is aware there is something wrong with him but cannot help himself.
There are quite a few noir names here. Sullivan, of course, Tamiroff, Ireland and Morgan, plus Elisha Cook Jr doing another of his psycho whites-of-the-eyes turns in a bit part. But it’s a great cast all round, with the possible exception of Belita, a Monogram star and British former ice skater. The studio wanted to make an Esther Williams out of her but it never really happened. The problem is Belita is not much of an actor. She does have great legs, though, as a beach scene thrown in to show them off demonstrates.
Fate hovers. In this film only the birds and the waves (Wiles cuts to both occasionally – arty, huh?) are free. All the people in it are trapped. Towards the end a big storm arrives to scatter crowds and cause mayhem. The paranoid atmosphere generated by Sullivan’s performance and Wiles’s excellent direction is stoked even further and there is a fateful sense of nature showing its hand by wiping all the bad stuff off the face of the Earth. It’s almost biblical.
Noir gave small studios a chance to compete on almost equal terms with the big studios, who were more interested in prestige projects. The Gangster is a textbook case of that, and of Monogram scoring a big win for the small guys.
The Gangster – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
