St. Valentine's Day Massacre

Befitting a tale about pitiless gangsters, "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre" is a pitiless film. This would be a bleak gangster movie by contemporary standards - in a pre-"Bonnie and Clyde" '67, it must have left audiences in an overwhelmed daze. It watches with cold detachment as the gangs of "Bugs" Moran and Al Capone go to war over the speakeasy business in Chicago. A voiceover tells the story over their meetings, interrupting to provide details on each criminal's sordid biography. ("He was married to two women simultaneously, but lives with his mother.") The narrator even reports on their upcoming times-of-death, while they prattle on underneath the voiceover about future strategies. Men make plans, and the narrator laughs.

The film is directed by Roger Corman, the legendary producer of B-movies and exploitation films. Here he worked with a major studio, and had a sizeable budget - and the luxury he was afforded is on the screen. The impressive cast is comprised of Corman regulars - Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson show up for cameos - and veterans, including Jason Robards, who stars as Capone. (He plays each scene with an irritated smirk, as if he can't decide whether to bluff his enemies into liking him or to just blow them away.) But the most striking element is the ambitious production design. Corman replicates the city-streets-by-way-of-studio-backlots look of 30s gangster films. This is a period peace - but it recalls another period of movies, not one of history.

Twilight Time's limited edition Blu-ray release of the film brings with it the best visual transfer this movie's ever going to get: Check out the grainy texture of the images, and the fine detail of the fake snowfall on the day of the massacre, or the densely rendered qualities of Capone's famous scar. The disc also features an essay by Julie Kirgo in the liner notes (she provides context regarding the film's status as an outlier among more prestigious studio fare,) and a short interview with Corman himself. There's also a newsreel sourced from the era of the massacre. Seeing just how greatly the event startled the national conscioussness is key: It helps to show how Corman was able to elevate an ostensibly maudlin melodrama into an existential tragedy.

So why is the film so fun, in spite of that funeral dirge tone? Corman doesn't make folk heroes of his gangsters in the way that the 30s films did, but he still films shoot-outs and drive-bys with the same devil-may-care attitude of movies like "The Roaring Twenties." His camera rushes along assailants and then whip-pans to watch their enemies crashing down like bowling pins. legend has it that the real Al Capone adored the matter-of-fact depiction of criminal amorality in "Scarface" to such a degree that he bought a print of the film. He'd want a copy of this one, too.

"The St. Valentine's Day Massacre"
Blu-ray
Screenarchives.com
$29.95