I Mobster

Roger Corman directed this 1958 story of the rise and fall of a hoodlum, on what was for him a generous budget. There's an exploitation feeling to this one, which was one of many inexpensive, somewhat backward looking crime films of the late fifties. Steve Cochran, in the title role, is a little too old but still holds the screen with his unique brand of sleazy charisma, showing once again that with the right vehicle he might have become a major star. His performance is sympathetic, and helps make the movie more interesting than it might have been with a cooler actor (Ralph Meeker, say). The script isn't much, and the other actors are no more than adequate. If one has a taste for lowbrow crime films, this one's pretty good, as it evokes its paperback and men's magazine era nicely, and has about it the whiff of an old-time barbershop.

"I Mobster" was directed and co-produced by Roger Corman. This means that the production was done very economically and it made money...and would probably be very entertaining!

Steve Cochran plays Joe Sante, a thug who's worked his way up from a kid running numbers to a leader of the mob. The film shows his life from start to finish and shows both the good (just a bit) and the bad (there's a whole lotta bad). The acting, direction and script are all very good...though nothing so outstanding that it will leave a long and lasting impression. Just a decent gangster film.

If you are a fan of his, then you wont be deceived, no way. It also proves that Roger Corman was a very good director, not only the film maker of cheap crap flicks, in horror genre. He also could give westerns and film noirsas this one. Remember ST VALENTINES DAY MASSACRE, THE INTRUDER or VON RICHTOFFEN AND BROWN, not grade B movies but excellent major ones. This film, that I comment now, offers the usual and predictable rise and fall of a gangster, his loves, his fights and the rest.... Nothing special but splendidly done and pulled by the best actor for this kind of stuff. Enjoy.

This is the first time I've felt genuine disappointment in Roger Corman's work. I've liked others of his movies less (some a lot less), but this was Corman's first movie with a real budget. Brought in by his brother, Gene, to 20th Century Fox with a $500,000 budget to adapt an anonymous mobster novel for the big screen. And, it looks and feels like something Corman would have made for $50,000. I know that my knowledge of the star system of the late 50s is incomplete, but it's hard to differentiate Steve Cochran from some random actor that Corman pulled off the streets more than 60 years later. He wasn't big, is what I'm saying. And the script is the same kind of rushed affair, trying to get through the action with the bare minimum as fast as possible to be filmed as fast as possible. With nearly ten times Corman's usual budget, he really should have taken more time.

Joe Sante (Cochran) is brought before a Senate committee on organized crime and pleads the Fifth to every question. He then reflects back on his life and the rise he saw in the New York crime scene from his time as a boy to muscling his way to complete control. Along for the ride is his friend, Black Frankie (Robert Strauss), a couple of years older than Joe. They work in the organization run by Paul Moran (Grant Withers). Joe's chosen profession rubs his parents the wrong way, his mother (Celia Lovsky) lying to herself about what he's doing while his father (John Mylong) can see right through the thin lies.

This film is, at best, a generic mobster movie. Joe works hard, gets in with the boss, has a great idea and implements it, has a girl who doesn't like his work but sticks with him through and through. There are some little variations that provide some interest, mostly around the girl, Teresa (Lita Milan), a girl from the neighborhood that Joe has a dance with the night he gets arrested and put in jail for a year. She's faithful to him despite hating his line of work, keeping by his side despite not being his girl for years. Her eventual fall into his arms is the best part of the film and is owed entirely to Milan's performance. She's dedicated, and Corman gives her space.

My problems with the film can centrally be placed on Joe's effort to make himself into a big player in the mob. He decides that he's going to enter the labor/management dispute as an outside labor negotiator, pitting both sides against the middle, he says. The problem is that this is the kind of thing in a dramatic narrative that needs particular attention, filled with specific details about what made him successful. All we get is two meetings with managers in different places, one that works and another that doesn't, that relies on just a bit of dialogue. There's no work on his part. Instead of seeing that, we get stock footage montage with Joe's face double exposed over it. That's it. We actually spend more time watching Lili St. Cyr's striptease (in tight closeup of her face) than this important plot and dramatic point of Joe becoming important to the mob.

And that's where my disappointment comes from. Corman, given a real budget of half a million dollars and access to Fox's resources couldn't do more than what seems like quickly filming a first draft script from Steve Fisher. Corman's production processes, for the first time, feel like an active impediment to him as a filmmaker. It's not that his production processes were great in the tiny budget world of things like Not of This Earth, he could always have used a rewrite, but, with a real budget, he couldn't have funded another week of writing to get some more meat on the script's bones?

And so the final product, a real movie with real money at a real studio and he treats it like something he needs to make in five days before his money runs out. It's at this point where it feels like Corman might have shorn any effort at being an artist, at least implicitly. His production process was more important than the end product. He could hide that when working on tiny budgets, but with a real one, and his efforts are the same? That's a real disappointment.

I will say, though, that the film does look good. I mean, this was his first film done in scope, but I couldn't find a copy in scope. Everything was Academy online (apparently the DVD is in scope, but I didn't have the impulse to buy it). So, it's awkwardly Panned and Scanned, but it really does feel like Corman effectively used the whole frame, reminding more of Kurosawa's first attempt at widescreen images in The Hidden Fortress than John Ford's center-framing in The Long Gray Line.

I mean, this film isn't bad. It's just kind of bleh. It's thin, decently acted, but goes nowhere particularly interesting. It functions well enough to survive on screen for 80 minutes as part of a double bill in the late 50s, but that's about it.

This is the second Roger Corman gangster flick I have seen, the other being MACHINE GUN KELLY and I got what I expected. A well made, involving, well acted gangster picture. Here we get the life and times of Joe Sante (Steve Cochran in a real good performance) starting with being a youngster, his promotion from Black Frankie Udino (Robert Strauss), meeting and falling in love with Teresa Porter (Lita Milan) and his promise to himself that he would not go back to the slammer.

Personally, I can see similarities to the big boys on the block THE GODFATHER and GOODFELLAS. Just don't expect it to be that great. Supposedly this was Corman biggest film to date with a budget of $500,000, which for Corman was astronomical and distributed by 20th Century Fox.