The Public Enemy

(1931)

Posing as an anti-crime morality tale during an era of strict censorship conversely permits a gratuity of violence, vice, and sadism which otherwise would be impossible. The title and end cards of THE PUBLIC ENEMY offer the officially sanctioned interpretation of the film’s events, but everything in between suggests a vicarious celebration of a life lived outside the legal, social, and economic constraints of post-World War One America. The cult figure of the gangster is only given more mythos and attraction from a heroic character arc performed by a breakout movie star. Even within William Wellman’s glorifications of the lifestyle, it comes to a crashing end in the manner of gothic horror, which offers a rise and fall narrative template for all future fictions about organized crime. While many Hollywood gangster films of the early sound era feel like a stunted mess of staggered and static conversations dedicated more to patter than patterning, the director achieves a visual and verbal balance of expression that reads as elegantly cinematic now as it must have then. One of the pictorial technicians of silent film, Wellman’s penchant for the self-standing visual tableau endures but is punctuated by the sharp and cutting dialogue that itself now symbolic of the genre. That the iconography is some of the most quoted in the medium speaks not only to the exquisite craft of individual moments but also a clarity of meaning and incisive humor that never dates. It is a place where social responsibility meets salacious fascination.