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Genre Spotlight: Real Life Criminals on Film |
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... Telling the truth can be a dirty business. |
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On August 22nd, 1972, John Wojtowicz walked into the Brooklyn branch of the Chase Manhattan bank in New York with a pre-operative transsexual accomplice, and commenced a 14 hour siege that led to him becoming a media celebrity.
His story was later used as the basis for the Al Pacino classic Dog Day Afternoon, though the names of those involved – along with many facts – were altered significantly.
Fast forward to 2010 and the landscape of the true crime genre has also altered somewhat. As evidenced by the recent Underbelly phenomena, today’s audiences want more fact than fiction in their entertainment.
Newspaper articles have even criticised Channel 9’s TV drama for being ‘unauthentic’ in its depiction of King’s Cross’s recent underworld past.
Such is our fixation with criminals that last month, author Tara Moss spoke out against Australia’s recent cult of criminal celebrity.
Just a few weeks earlier, underworld figure Mick Gatto had appeared in The Melbourne Review bemoaning the price of his recent fame and notoriety – which includes having to sign autographs in the street.
But this insatiable public interest for all things criminal is nothing new. We’ve been watching the exploits of real life criminals on cinema screens for decades. It was 10 years ago that a film based on the life of Mark ‘Chopper’ Read placed Eric Bana on the acting map. Like the first series of Underbelly, the film was shot in Melbourne, and like that TV series, it was lapped up by the general public.
In the US, films like Dog Day Afternoon are almost endemic. The list of American criminals variously glorified or demonised in celluloid would take up more column space than this article allows.
Fortunately with this volume of work, comes a good deal of quality. Ridley Scott’s 2007 offering American Gangster gave a compelling insight into heroin kingpin Frank Lucas’s life. With Denzel Washington playing Lucas brilliantly and Russell Crowe playing his nemesis, detective Richie Roberts, the film offered the complete true-crime experience.
Similarly 2006’s Alpha Dog, directed by Nick Cassavetes, brought minutiae to the forefront of its account of drug dealer Jesse James Hollywood’s 1999 murder of a youth in California – a crime that made Hollywood the youngest man to make the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
Emile Hirsch and Justin Timberlake give eerily good performances in lead roles, and the film remains a daunting proposition for viewers – something reflected in its box office take of just US$15 million.
While Hollywood was demonised rather than canonised in Alpha Dog, 2009’s Public Enemies wrote another chapter in the cultural sainthood of 1930s bank robber John Dillinger.
With Johnny Depp playing Dillinger, the film brought a new dimension of cool to a legend that’s continued to thrive some 80 years after the fact.
Similarly, the outlaw legend of Jesse James has grown on the back of film productions like 2007s The Assassination Of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and 1939’s Jesse James, which starred both Henry Fonda and Tyrone Power as Frank and Jesse James.
The crimes of Billy the Kid were given the Emilio Estevez/Charlie Sheen big screen treatment in Young Guns (1988) and Young Guns II (1990), with the sons of Martin Sheen painting a hip, late ‘80s portrait of America’s favourite gunslinger.
Little about these films could be viewed as being unsympathetic towards Kid’s legend, and the public lapped them up to a combined tune of $88 million, a sizeable amount for the era.
The brutal Al Capone, on the other hand, got his just deserts in the factual retelling of his life’s story in the 1959 release that bore his name. Other films to have touched on Capone’s prohibition era Chicago legend include Brian De Palma’s brilliant The Untouchables and The St. Valentines Day Massacre.
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