The Guilty Generation

Guilty Generation, The (1931)

*** (out of 4)

Warner had The Public Enemy, Universal had Scarface and Columbia had this little gem from director Rowland V. Lee. A young couple (Robert Young & Constance Cummings) fall in love even though their fathers (Leo Carrillo & Boris Karloff) are rivals of opposite gangs. There's no doubt this lifts the story of Romeo and Juliet and while it starts off a bit shaky there's no denying the final twenty minutes are extremely good as the girl's father finally finds out who the boy's father is. Everyone gives a very good performance but Cummings is the real standout with her delightful charm. Karloff is also very good in his few moments at the start of the film. It's really great that TCM is showing all these rare Columbia films and I can't wait to see what else they have from this period.

This is the closest the 1930s got to making THE SOPRANOS. It's a realistic, intelligent and grown-up character driven drama about a gangland boss' journey into the heart of darkness.

Compared with 'the big three' gangster movies of the early thirties, this is closest in character to SCARFACE. It's a dark subject and a dark film. Like me, you might prefer Warner Brothers' less subtle, slightly more 'fun' approach to making these types of film. This is definitely not fun and the main protagonist is, like Paul Muni's Tony (but unlike James Gandolfini's Tony) is not in any way likeable. When you can't like the person you're watching it's usually difficult to engage with the story but here, because of engaging writing, a believable script and good acting, you're immediately transfixed.

Unlike many films of this era, here we have a deep, multi-dimensional character driven drama. The Romeo and Juliet love story is secondary to that of Leo Carillo's psychological descent into megalomania. 'Power corrupts' it is said and Carillo certainly displays this trope as his actions and thoughts begin to lose all grounding in the world around him. This shows how, as the revenge killings escalate, murder becomes normalised and these gangland mobsters' concept of society has slipped out of synchronisation with reality.

The actual plot which runs alongside this fascinating fly on the wall observation of Carillo is the love affair between his daughter and the son of his gangland rival. Constance Cummings and Robert Young (even with comedy moustache) are excellent as the hapless but naively optimistic love-struck pawns in this symphony of hate. They meet at one of Carillo's house parties where Carillo is trying to push his glamorous daughter into high society. He sees his millions and his gaudy, tastelessly opulent mansion as a way in to respectability but to normal folk he's just something to experience like a thrilling fairground ride.

So who is THE GUILTY GENERATION? Like most of the early thirties gangster movies, there's the inevitable preaching. It might seem crass and pointless to have scenes where, in this case journalists are telling us how terrible gangsters are but it's the audience who are, or rather were the guilty generation. Attitudes to law, to the government and to the police were different then. The underworld was seen as sexy, exciting and something even to admire. This film certainly does not glamorise crime and the preachiness is just at the right level.

Overall it's a well made if somewhat somber and sober picture which reflects the mood of the time. If you like SCARFACE, you should like this.

While it is true that this interesting crime drama has a few significant "holes" in it -- like casting Boris Karloff with his crisp enunciations as an Italian-immigrant mobster -- the film stands as a persuasive cultural document indicting the whole Prohibition Era. For those who do not know anything about our true American history, there was about fifty-two years of social agitation behind what was known as The Temperance Movement, culminating in a Constitutional amendment and "the Volstead Act." In a curious tandem movement, the long-running "Suffrage" movement for women to have the vote became intertwined and then interlocked with "Temperance." What began as a local issue, restricting or banning the sale of alcoholic beverages at a time when nearly all adult men drank beer, whiskey or gin, eventually morphed into statewide legislation. The problem was complex, however, as "dry counties" competed with "wet counties" inside of states, and then across state boundaries, as dry states conflicted with wet states.

When Congress proposed the "Prohibition" amendment in December of 1917, the country had been involved in the Declared War that T. Woodrow Wilson campaigned against in his 1916 re-election bid, since April of '17. As tens of thousands of U.S. troops were training for and shipping out for the battlefields of France, where they would learn to enjoy French wines, cognac and champagnes, their Congress was moving to provide Prohibition of drinking alcohol from sea to shining sea. The amendment as proposed achieved ratification on January 29th of 1919 and its provisions took effect one year later.

Thirteen years and twenty-one days later, Congress moved to repeal the Prohibition Amendment and this counter-amendment was ratified by December of 1933, or nine months into the new administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In those thirteen years and nine months, the structure and integrity of American society was wholly changed and radicalized. Minor criminal gangs in the major cities blossomed into full-fledged crime syndicates, as the taste for liquor and beer among the people wholly overwhelmed the legal reality of Prohibition.

Thus, the "Roaring '20s" was a time when stock market speculations and easy money rode the same horses as did "bootlegging" or the illegal importation or illegal manufacture of beer and hard liquors ... in every part of the country. Thousands of men -- and some women and children -- were killed in the revolving battles between bootlegging gangs in the major cities, and the violence only got worse as the profits from "speakeasy" saloons and "rum-running" grew larger and larger. Municipalities and county governments were suborned. Governors were bribed, and Customs officials bought or intimidated into silence.

The background of this movie is that history: the two gangs, seeming to be from Chicago although not specifically mentioned as such, are the Ricca and the Palmero, whose leaders were formerly partners and whose families were formerly friends.

As the movie unfolds, the violence between the gangs escalates into killing each others' operatives, each others' cousins, and then each man's sons. And against this hideous background, even if played at a lower key, the daughter of Palmero meets and falls in love with the second son of Ricca, who has been raised abroad and who has changed his name to "Smith." No, it's not "Romeo & Juliet" at all but there are some similarities.

Others have commented on how this fledgling romance comes across as being "sappy" or syrupy. That's right. But that's what movie going audiences wanted in the middle of the early years of the Depression. The violence described in this film is not shown specifically, but it lurks in the shadows like a Kabuki puppet.

Leo Carrillo and Boris Karloff do very well in their roles, and the absence of any background music makes this film more intensely visual, although there are scenes where music is played in a club or for a party. The lavish life style of the Palmero family, in their Florida mansion, is another element in the fictional "testament" of just how warped the social order of the United States had become under Prohibition, and under the tyranny of these petit-princes of the Prohibition Era.

...no, not really, but the British Boris is playing the head of one of two feuding (Italian??)-American crime families. Boris plays the head of the Ricca clan, Tony Ricca. Leo Carrillo, who is actually Spanish in descent - in fact a member of an old California Spanish land grant family - plays Mike, the head of the rival Palmerro clan.

This is a late Prohibition Era film in which the public is said to be on to the Mafia and beginning to demand action - there were several of these made in the early 30's - as the bloodshed has begun to spill onto the streets and takes the lives of innocent children. Meanwhile the warring clans have taken to killing off each other's family members in a last ditch grab for sole control of "the rackets".

The central theme of the film is the romance between young Marco Ricca and Maria Palmerro, both straight kids caught in a gangster world. Marco was taken away from his father's life of crime by his mother at the age of ten, but he has returned to America an architect who has changed his name to John Smith. Maria Palmerro is the only daughter of Mike Palmerro, the enemy of Marco/John's father. John thinks there is no danger in this association since he has long been estranged from his father, is truly legitimate, and nobody knows of his true family ties. Marco has a brother who is working in his dad's criminal enterprise, and likewise Maria has a brother who is working in her father's criminal enterprise.

This is mainly Carillo's film, as his character gradually lets the desire for revenge get the best of his common sense at the expense of his entire family. He's a brutish man, such as in a scene where he threatens his daughter that if she doesn't change out of her black dress into a white party dress he'll cut the black dress right off her body with a pair of scissors. He has raised an equally brutish man in the person of his grown son, who decides if his speakeasy flapper girlfriends are not welcome at his sister's party he'll just shove the actual party guests into the pool.

You can tell something dreadful is coming, but you're not just sure how or when or to who it is coming. I'll let you watch and find out.

The movie pulls some punches as it never actually comes out and says Prohibition is the source of the problem, instead everyone keeps talking about "the rackets". Likewise no one ever mentions the nationality of the warring families specifically. Ruth Warren is terrific as a gum-chewing gun moll-like publicist that Palmerro has hired. Although Phil Tead plays the news reporter who is writing stories on the warring clans, Mr. Tead is a dead ringer for Walter Brennan. Emma Dunn, who plays Mike Palmerro's mother, is the only member of the cast who convinces me she is Italian (although she is actually British) as she desperately tries to perform CPR on Mike's conscience.

I'd recommend this one - it certainly is rather unique among early 30's gangster films.

The performances by Leo Carrillo, Constance Cummings, Robert Young and Leslie Fenton make compelling entertainment out of this rather routinely mounted drama about the social hardships faced by the grown children of successful Italian-American gangsters. While they live in the splendor of their parents' ill-gotten gains they remain social pariahs and must go to great lengths to achieve respectable lives.

Cummings and Young are a sort of Romeo and Juliet, offspring of rival criminal kingpins Carrillo and Karloff, respectively, who fall in love. Carrillo is quite scary as a cold-blooded hoodlum, but Karloff can't get the accent right and sounds awkwardly British, and bearing no resemblance of any kind to Robert Young doesn't help. Leslie Fenton as Carrillo's dissolute son does a good job playing nasty, particularly in a well-shot scene that has him rampaging through a garden party and knocking guest after fully clothed guest into the pool.