WHY MOBSTERS ARE CATNIP FOR MOVIEMAKERS
▶ James ‘Whitey’ Bulger is dead but his malevolent spirit lives on thanks to Hollywood’s obsession with gangsters. So why does crime pay for filmmakers? Declan McVeigh investigates
In the 2011 comedy-thriller The Guard, Brendan Gleeson, playing a jaded Irish cop, is drinking on duty, shooting bad guys in a pub video game. An excited junior officer tells him that there’s an FBI agent in town. “Drugs smuggling,” scoffs Gleeson. “Either that or it’s another sighting of Whitey Bulger at a museum.”
Well, no more. Irish-American mobster James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger, 89, was found choked and beaten to death inside Hazelton federal penitentiary in West Virginia last month. Bulger – a marked man for having “snitched” to the FBI and serving two consecutive life sentences – was killed just hours after being transferred to the high-security prison. “He died the way he lived,” a
Boston Herald editorial read, describing Bulger’s death as a “deserved end”.
Bulger was no run-of-the-mill street hoodlum. A hardened Boston mobster with a hand in everything from drugs dealing and money laundering to arms smuggling and extortion – his catch-me-if-you-can career got the Hollywood treatment twice, underscoring the big screen’s love for a bad guy.
In The Departed (2006), Jack Nicholson led an all-star cast, playing a Boston underworld boss based on Bulger. Johnny Depp also portrayed Bulger in 2015’s Black Mass. That Bulger cropped up tangentially in The
Guard – released just weeks after he was finally arrested by the FBI – was doubly ironic, given that Gleeson himself portrayed real-life Dublin gang boss Martin Cahill alongside Jon Voight in 1998’s The General.
Between 2002 and 2011, unconfirmed sightings of Bulger in Ireland – as well as Uruguay, France, Italy, Canada and the United Kingdom – were common. The story of an onthe-run senior citizen with a history of visceral violence was catnip for moviemakers.
America’s love affair with true crime often increases a film’s chances of making a return on studios’ investment. However, many of cinema’s gang lords, real and fictional, are shown to have some sort of redeeming feature or moral core, perhaps to make them more palatable to moviegoers. What’s common in many of them is the “Robin Hood” aspect of their careers. Pablo Escobar, the Kray twins and Al Capone all dispensed favours and supported the downtrodden – unless those communities or members of it stood up to them. In 1992, Nicholson portrayed real-life union baron Jimmy Hoffa. Tainted by associations with the mob and convicted in 1964 of fraud, jury tampering and attempted bribery, Hoffa insisted everything he did was for the “working man”.
In Hoffa, Nicholson tells a roaring crowd: “We have led the Teamsters, and the Teamsters have led the American working man into the middle class, and buddy, we intend to stay here.”
In postwar London, the Krays – Ronnie and Reggie – controlled whole communities with the threat of violence. Their on-screen portrayals, in 1990 by Spandau Ballet’s Gary and Martin Kemp and by Tom Hardy in 2015’s Legend (the movie’s title itself revealing a sneaking regard), also depicted these dangerous men as East End boys who loved their mums.
Many people remember Robert de Niro’s turn as Al Capone in 1987’s The Untouchables. Prowling around a black-tie dinner of subordinates, Capone extols the virtues of “teamwork” to his array of nodding dogs before murdering an underling with a baseball bat. But even Capone, linked to the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre of seven rivals in 1929, opened soup kitchens for hungry Chicagoans during the Great Depression in 1931.
Last year’s Loving Pablo, a biopic of Colombian crime boss Pablo Escobar starring Javier Bardem, was accused of rehashing tropes of the drug trafficker’s life, particularly how he simultaneously ruled the streets of his base in Medellin while also funding football teams, schools and parks in impoverished communities.
The movies give their fictional crime lords some sort of moral compass. Al Pacino’s excruciatingly violent drug trafficker Tony Montana in 1983’s
Scarface balks at detonating a radio-controlled bomb under a journalist’s car because there are women and children inside. Montana was a monster, but his image is plastered over posters and T-shirts across the world, representing someone who took from a world that gave him nothing.
But Bulger was irredeemable. Linked to 19 murders, he lacked this essential charisma for the truly memorable bigscreen crime boss.
Movies are accused of glamorising violence and often they do. But fans of on-screen gangsters have selective memory. De Niro’s Capone bludgeons a man to death. Reggie Kray repeatedly stabs Jack “The Hat” McVitie at a party. Escobar’s hitmen shoot, stab and bomb thousands of Colombians. We know what these men did, but often choose to remember them as something else.
This will not be the last we hear of Whitey Bulger. Just a week after his death, a former Scotland Yard investigator claimed that artworks worth $500 million (Dh1.83 billion) stolen in a Boston heist in 1990 had been smuggled to Ireland, where Bulger had connections.
Someone, somewhere, is already writing that script.
America’s love affair with true crime often increases a film’s chances of making a return on studios’ investment