The Purple Gang

Low budget "exposee" style film paints a somewhat accurate picture of Detroit's Purple Gang from the 20s. Worth seeing for Robert Blake's performance, which transcends the movie.

The Purple Gang was a mob of bootleggers and hijackers with predominantly Jewish members operating in Detroit, Michigan, during the 1920s. They came to be Detroit's dominant criminal gang, but ultimately excessive violence and infighting caused the gang to self-destruct in the 1930s. This Allied Artists production, leveraged by a goodly amount of footage lifted from earlier films, plays fast and loose with what was an interesting history in a production weighted by two excellent leads, Sullivan and Blake, and which contains two or three memorably violent scenes while Blake's screaming claustrophobia offers other choice moments. Ultimately not one of the genre stand outs (for that one needs to seek out such titles as AL CAPONE or the RISE AND FALL OF LEGS DIAMOND etc) it is never the less a entertaining enough time waster even if it ends up feeling rather perfunctory. Sullivan's best gangster film, imho, is the appropriately named THE GANGSTER.

Cheapo production. This is supposed to be the 1920s, but there is no attempt to use costumes or hair styles of that era. The men all wear 1950s hats. Robert Blake plays tough as the juvenile gang leader. Barry Sullivan walks through his part as the detective as though he wanted to be somewhere else. His wife,of course, wants him to quit. The gang looks like a Central Casting call for B-list juveniles. As clean and nice looking a bunch of hoodlums as can be imagined. If they could dance they would be ready for West Side Story. The sets are unadorned and look like they were assembled in somebody's garage. There is a lot of unconvincing gunplay and actors falling to the floor, but no blood.

"The Purple Gang" is a film that is enjoyable to watch--much like an episode of "The Untouchables". However, like that television show, it's not much of a history lesson and the actions of the real Purple Gang in Detroit were very, very different than what you see in the film. In fact, you'd hardly recognize much of the gang in this one.

In real life, the Purple Gang was a tough organization in Detroit consisting mostly of Jewish gangsters. The gang was run by several brothers as well. And, the end of the gang was nothing like in the film. Yet, in the film they are run by one guy alone (Robert Blake) and the actors all seem like typical antisocial Gentiles.

So why, despite being mostly wrong, do I score this one a 6? Well, it's exciting and as long as you accept that it's mostly fiction, you'll have a nice time watching the film. It never is dull!

Most of my 7/10 goes to two things - Robert Blake's effective portrayal of completely amoral, calculating, and mentally unbalanced baby-faced mobster Honeyboy Willard and to the rather detached documentary feel of this film as it is narrated by the cop that has vowed to put the Purple Gang away, Barry Sullivan as Lt. William P. Harley of the Detroit Police. It really has the look and feel of "The Untouchables" except with poverty row roots.

There really was a Purple Gang in Detroit in the 20's and 30's, although the character of Honeyboy is a fictional one - the actual power in the real gang was in the hands of four Jewish brothers. The cleaner and dyers war was a real one, except in real life the Purple Gang was allied with the union against non-union independents. There was no rather clean ending to the story of the Purples in real life. Like so many other gangs, Prohibition gave them money and power they could have only dreamed about, and its end sent them on a slow decline with the primary source of their wealth literally dried up.

This film is unusual in that there are no female leads or even substantial female supporting roles here. Women are just the subjects of particularly savage crimes by the Purples, and very little more, meant to underscore the violence of the Purple Gang.

If this film had been in wider release by a bigger studio, maybe Robert Blake wouldn't have had to wait until 1967 and "In Cold Blood" to catapult to stardom. Here he steals the show, kills everyone else, and gives a truly riveting performance of a guy who really loves his work for reasons that seem to have more to do with a need for power and a desire to be feared than just pure greed. Don't believe the low rating on this one - give it a try realizing it is a B feature from a small studio made just as the production code was losing its grip.