Guns, Not Roses: Revisiting The St.Valentine’s Day Massacre

Among the more ‘interesting’ things to have happened on February 14 was the infamous 1929 gangland massacre in a Chicago garage, where seven men of the ‘Bugs’ Moran gang were allegedly gunned down by Al Capone’s men, posing as policemen.

The crime has since been cemented in American urban lore as the ‘St. Valentine’s Massacre.’ It did more than any other single event to awaken a hitherto passive public to the ferocity of Prohibition-era gangland wars.

It also helped fix the gangster as a central figure in America’s cultural imagination, at a time when newspapers, pulp fiction and the infant sound cinema were all beginning to feed off the same brutal material.

Hollywood had, in fact, responded to the rise of organised crime almost in real time. The early 1930s produced a raw cycle of gangster films which were great showcases for legends like James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni and Humphrey Bogart.

Classics like ‘Little Caesar’ (1931) with Robinson as an Al Capone-like gangster, ‘The Public Enemy’ (1931), and the Howard Hawks-directed original version of ‘Scarface’ (1932) – also based on Capone with Paul Muni in a seminal performance - had portrayed bootleggers as violent social climbers, volatile and crudely materialistic, reflecting an America unsettled by economic collapse and the sudden visibility of criminal wealth.

It was in the long interregnum between the raw vitality of the early 1930s gangster films and before the operatic and myth-making rehabilitation of the gangster in the 1970s that cult director Roger Corman released ‘The St. Valentine's Day Massacre’ in 1967.

Known by several memorable sobriquets, Corman, called the ‘The Pope of Pop Cinema’ was known for his shoestring shockers which he helmed with consummate skill and dynamism.

Notable among these were the now-classic, ultra-low-budget horror films of the early 1960s based on Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of macabre like ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and ‘The House of Usher’ - all starring the legendary Vincent Price. These baroque and lurid films established Corman as a director who could conjure atmosphere and ideas far in excess of his budgets.

Corman was given his biggest financial backing yet for ‘The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,’ and he famously wanted Orson Welles for the part of Al Capone, with the great Jason Robards – one of America’s finest stage actors - cast as Capone’s deadly rival, George ‘Bugs’ Moran.

The studio shot down the proposition, instead miscasting Robards as Capone. The affable and highly talented George Segal, then at his peak, was also wasted as one of the Gusenberg brothers, Moran’s allies.

As a result, Robards hams it up as ‘old Scarface,’ utterly lacking the intimidating ferocity of Rod Steiger’s Al Capone before him, or Robert De Niro’s over-the-top flamboyance in Brian De Palma’s ‘The Untouchables’ (1987).

More than Robards or Segal, it is Ralph Meeker as Moran who does the better acting job. Oh yes, amid the wry commentary and bursts of intense Tommy-gun fire, there is also a walk-on part by a then-unknown Jack Nicholson.

Despite all its flaws, the film quite brilliantly captures Prohibition-era gangland Chicago. Its clipped, semi-documentary style, its refusal to romanticise its characters, and its emphasis on systems rather than psychology make it feel oddly modern. Corman treats organised crime less as melodrama than as a business model, complete with hierarchies, redundancies and ruthless efficiency.

It is Corman who is the real star of the picture, hammering home a distinctly pre-Godfather message about a naïve America in which the power structures of the executive suite and the corporation are eerily similar to those of a mob syndicate.

When people think of American organised crime on screen today, the monumental gangster epics that immediately spring to mind are Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’ trilogy (1972-90) with its operatic grandeur; Sergio Leone’s mournful, autumnal ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ (1984) or Brian De Palma’s flamboyantly excessive and over-the-top ‘Scarface’ remake (1983) and ‘The Untouchables.’ These films have come to define the mythology of American organised crime globally.

Buried somewhere beneath these monuments lies Corman’s ‘The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.’ It lacks their grandeur and emotional pull, but in its bluntness and scepticism it reveals an earlier, harsher truth about the genre: that long before gangsters became tragic anti-heroes, they were simply men with guns, operating in a country only beginning to recognise what unchecked power really looked like.