Noir & dear: THE MOB (1951)
Thrills & laughs up front, existential contemplation in back
In director Robert Parrish’s 1951 waterfront noir The Mob, Broderick Crawford plays police officer Johnny Damico, who is himself playing itinerant outlaw longshoreman Tim Flynn. One of the vital settings in the picture is a seedy, dingy flophouse hotel saloon (called the ‘Royal Bar,’ because it, too, is pretending to be something else), and in every scene played there, Johnny-Tim drinks glasses of white wine and beer simultaneously. The bizarre combination is part of his elaborate undercover story; though Johnny Damico is a local, Tim Flynn is from New Orleans, where (according to The Mob, anyway) white wine and beer are drunk in tandem as local custom. Early into his assignment, on a surreptitious pay phone call to his lieutenant, Johnny roars, “Why’d you have to pick New Orleans — I hate white wine and beer!”
Seeing the two drinks side by side in scene after scene, the tall frothy beer and the short dainty wine glass, we’re reminded that no one in The Mob is who they say they are and nothing is what it seems to be. The film is halfway between Martin Scorcese’s The Departed (and its source material, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs), where cover goes so deep that moral orders are turned inside-out, and G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, where every anarchist being surveilled turns out to be a cop doing the surveillance. The subterfuges, fakes, forgeries, and subversions pile up from the first seconds of the film. When we first meet Damico, he appears to be a crooked policeman, trying to use his position to get a cut rate on jewels — but he’s actually buying an engagement ring from an old pal of his girlfriend’s. Stepping in to the rain-drenched street, he witnesses a killing, but makes no arrest when the shooter presents a police badge — which turns out to have been stolen from an officer murdered hours before by the same killer. Before he goes undercover to catch the murderer, presumed to be the underworld king of the waterfront rackets, he’ll be falsely suspended from the force for his screw-up; the suspension is announced as front-page news in the paper, with an accompanying photograph of a man who looks like Damico, but isn’t him.
Before the movie’s through, we’ll see a union collection fund for an injured worker that’s actually a mob shakedown of labourers for kickbacks; a gunsel pretending to buy beer while he’s out killing somebody (but still coming back with some brews); and a special agent posing as a longshoreman pretending to go on a date with a woman who is actually his sister. Besides Scorcese and Chesterton, there’s a Kafkaesque quality to The Mob too, but Kafkaesque in the way alluded to by Rivka Galchen when she wrote: “[i]t has been said of Kafka’s work many times that the thing to remember is that it is funny.”
The Mob is hard-boiled; the stakes of the story are high and the jeopardy is not played for laughs, but the picture crackles with comic wit and madcap narrative inventiveness from start to finish. This is the double identity that encapsulates all of the film’s other beer/wine paradoxes and contradictions: a gritty mid-century crime thriller of waterfront corruption in the vein of Edge of the City or On the Waterfront, and, at the same time, a comedy.
All of it hangs on Crawford, oozing unreconstructed macho charisma as a bearish old school man’s man, Damico, relishing his own performance as the toxic tough guy Flynn. Built like a prototype for James Gandolfini, Crawford is huge and hulking, balding and fleshy, with a voice like a stick of dry-cured pepperoni in a pencil sharpener.
As Damico acting as Flynn, Crawford luxuriates in his excesses and bad behaviour, his cynicism and street smarts, in a way that burlesques the same vicarious, morally-ambiguous thrill we get from crime films, perhaps best captured in the Steve Earle lyrics, “some of you would live through me, then lock me up and throw away the key.” But of course, that’s what noir knew better than any other genre: there’s nobody in this town or any other, sweetheart, whose moral rap sheet isn’t marked by contradiction, hypocrisy, or paradox. We all have a little beer in with our wine.