Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Mercy! Is this the end of Rico?” These are Rico’s final words which, years later, would be
in close consonance with his counterpart Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) in White Heat
(1949), one of the film noir’s most deranged and unsettled protagonists. The film also
concludes with Cody, mortally wounded, climbing to the top of a huge tank of explosive
gas and, while shooting it out, and before it blows up, shouts out to his dead mother and
the world: “Made, Ma! Top of the world!”
The second film is called The Public Enemy (1931), directed by William A.
Wellman, and which charts the rise and fall of a gangster Tom Powers (James Cagney),
and his friend Matt Doyle (Edward Woods). They are in fact very good friends and
juvenile criminals, from early shoplifting days in 1909, then following the same paths to
their robbery of a factory in 1915, and ending up working for dandy gangster Nails Nathan
(Leslie Fenton) around 1920 at the start of Prohibition. One can see that the film is
structured just like a chronicle of the birth of gangsterism in North America, with the
action being developed in four distinctive story moments corresponding to 1909, World
War I, the Prohibition Era, and the economic Depression. This concern by the writer, John
Bright, and director William A. Wellman to make the dates clear to the spectator
constitutes a narrative technique to tell us, once again, about the processes of rise and fall
of the main protagonist. 16
At home, Tom’s brother, Mike (Donald Cook), is quite the opposite: he is an
upright, hard-working boy during the day and goes to school at night. He will eventually
enrol in the Marines to fight in World War I. Tom is the son of a policeman, Officer
Powers (Purnell Pratt) who has always proven to be a severe and abusive father. The
scenes of harsh discipline imposed by the father are either implicit or exemplified, like the
one in which he uses a wide leather razor strop. Tom resists shedding tears and always
keeps a tough guy attitude, which will be the one he will harden into throughout his life.
Later, Tom and Matt become the leaders of Nails’s gang, strong-arming bar owners into
selling their beer.
The film opens with a disclaimer from Warner Bros. Pictures: “It is the ambition of
the authors of The Public Enemy to honestly depict an environment that exists today in a
certain strata of American life, rather than glorify the hoodlum or the criminal. While the
16 Only a decade later The Roaring Twenties (1939) would incorporate, yet in a more reflexive manner, this
kind of historical register in its narrative structure, at the same time that it presented a metalinguistic
discourse about gangster cinema.
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