The Purple Gang

As I have already told many many times in my reviews, the early sixties in Hollywood was the era where gangsters period crime biopics were gallore, more or less inspired from actual facts though: PORTRAIT OF A MOBSTER, PAY OR DIE, MURDER INC, RISE AND FALL OF LEGS DIAMOND, KING OF THE ROARING 20'S, BABY FACE NELSON, YOUNG DILLIGER, AL CAPONE, MAD DOG CALL. Only "mature" Dillinger's character was missing between a 1945 and 1973 movie !!!! This one is not the least in terms of quality, yes, 1961 was the year of this kind of gangster tales, maybe the TV series THE UNTOUCHABLES influenced this period. I am dead sure of it. Robert Blake as here as John Davis Chandler was in MAD DOG CALL; purely terrific as a cold blooded killer. It begins like a DEAD END KIDS flick but the pace rapidly changes. Frank Mac Donald's best film for me, because he was rather a lousy director. Mostly B westerns for B companies.

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.

During this period of the late Eisenhower and Kennedy years many studios started making films of the notorious Prohibition and post Prohibition years. No coincidence that these were the years The Untouchables found a TV audience.

In 1959 Allied Artists put out the Purple Gang who were as rough a bunch in real life as any. When Al Capone tried to take over their Detroit territory the Purples sent Capone back limping to Chicago.

Allied Artists was the former Monogram Pictures so you knew it was going to be cheap. It certainly is a B product.

But it boasts an eletrifying performance by Robert Blake as the leader of the Purples. For that alone you should not miss this film.

But it ain't the real story of The Purple Gang.

Policeman Barry Sullivan fights Detroit's Purple Gang led by Robert Blake in the 1920s and 1930s in this Allied Artists programmer directed by Frank MacDonald. Quite obviously shot on studio lots and underdecorated sets, with a lot of stock footage edited into montages, it also features a high-speed narrative voice-over narrative by Sullivan.

The Purple Gang was a real Detroit mob, perhaps best remembered for being predominantly Jewish. The movie makes no indication of this.

Suzanne Ridgeway has a small part in this movie. She had entered the movies in 1937. Ultimately, she appeared in 233 feature films, 12 shorts and 13 television appearances. In that time, she was received on-screen credit four times, including the infamous FROM HELL IT CAME. This was her last movie appearance. She died in 1996, 78 years old, another of the forgotten horde of players whose presence helped make two Oscar winners and a multitude of other movies.

Robert Blake's portrayal of Honeyboy is chillingly charismatic. Honeyboy leads his gang of teenage hoodlums to success in the big leagues of organized crime. The key to Honeyboy's success and his dedication as a "leader" lies in the fact that he is a sociopathic killer and a psychopathic egomaniac. Robert Blake plays it all to the hilt and still manages to make Honeyboy cute and sympathetic.