Crime Old and New
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION Crime Old and New By David Boroff One of the favorite myths of intellectuals has to do with the purity of the early detective story as against its later corruptions -the Cagney...
...In The Untouchables, the good brother gets his no-goodnik younger brother a job as a motorman, and the entrepreneurial little punk immediately runs his staff conferences on the streetcar (at the desolate end of the line, to be sure) and stashes away guns in a locker in the vehicle...
...Eliot Ness, the unstoppable, takes for granted that rackets will flourish...
...Where The Untouchables is almost pornographically violent, with submachine guns chattering like magpies and thugs getting knocked off by the carload, Naked City's violence is a sometime thing-nastily eruptive, graceless, tormented...
...Eliot Ness, too, is straight from the '30s, uncontaminated by psychoanalysis or sociological theory...
...The one television program which is unscarred by time is The Untouchables (ABC...
...A casual killer for nickels and dimes, he goes on a homicidal rampage until he is gunned down on the burnished floor of a midtown bank...
...but they have intensity...
...There is a melancholy proletarian sentimentality about Naked City...
...It has the new sociology, a smidgin of psychoanalysis, social work do-goodism and some of the proletarian sentimentality of recent years...
...It is a curious moral universe into which viewers of The Untouchables are invited...
...the football player was played with stunning fidelity by big, burly, hard-bitten Aldo Ray...
...And the mystagogues of the pure form notwithstanding, it is a far better piece of work-and rings much truer-than The Untouchables...
...Bugs Moran, the dethroned potentate of crime, is in hiding, and the would-be Big Man, who had formerly betrayed him, moves in as his lieutenant...
...What is it that Naked City is saying...
...David Boroff, Associate Professor of English at New York University, writes for Harper's and Esquire...
...Remember the good brother, the street car conductor whom Jimmy Cagney cavalierly dismisses as a cheap nickel-robber...
...Still another recent episode had to do with a kind of Jewish King Lear, a proud and aging father put away in a nursing home by an unfeeling son...
...The Untouchables is the type of program that makes PTA chairmen fret, and for a change they are right...
...At the end of each program, the tense rasp of Walter Winchell's voice announces that the Syndicate-or the Syndicate deviationists-have been smashed by Eliot Ness and the Untouchables...
...To carry the Elizabethan motif a little further, a kind of carefully organized disorder prevails...
...Let's take a look at it and compare it with Naked City (ABC), as impure a version of the detective story as you can find...
...In the case of the old crime movies, just show an old film at the Museum of Modern Art, and that in itself is a form of canonization...
...For crime buffs, there are some nostalgic elements in this episode...
...It is brutal and morally wrong-headed...
...He is a nice, clean-cut type who broods about life in the bleak, harsh city...
...The casting was superb...
...Its members are not the new merchant princes of crime, with connections in Wall Street, and kids at Bryn Mawr and Williams...
...The old man sets a trap for the blackmailer but intervenes before the man can be apprehended...
...They represent the working clich?©s of the '30s a chastened quarter-of-a-century later...
...A few weeks ago, for example, the program dealt with a young thug who returns to Chicago after the St...
...The malefactors are perambulating case histories, their psychic lesions plainly showing...
...His cue for action is when a racketeer steps out of line and disturbs the uneasy equilibrium...
...But they succeed-at a time when working-class life has been put away in the deep freeze by TV-in making the dry-cleaning store, the newsstand, the grimy stoop seem more than props...
...It is always winter in Naked City, pitilessly gray days, the very buildings oozing a kind of clammy cold, while people shuffle about in heavy coats...
...they talk too much and with stubborn irrelevancy...
...Maybe they have a point...
...The protagonists are all, rather, the misbegotten, the psychologically disheveled who drift into crime as an act of desperation or protest...
...A fellow-inmate of the nursing home-an ex-policeman buttressed by the anti-morality he had learned as a Chicago copbegins to shake him down...
...The whole business is like one of those childhood dreams in which the bogeyman, no sooner eluded, starts chasing you all over again...
...He shoves witnesses around, handles a gun with erotic grace, and is marvelously indestructible...
...I suspect that this sentimentalization, like most backward looks, has more to do with our yearning for a lost simplicity than with actual realities...
...It is this which gives the series its disturbing quality and its strength...
...Then, there is the third officer in this sensitive triad-another bleeder, an Italian-American, overage but unmarried, even vaguely epicene...
...The people sitting on the stoops, the man who runs the dry-cleaning store, the guy at the newsstand have a kind of beleaguered vitality...
...She is very "Methody," a deep type, who plays a motherly role when Adam, incorrigibly innocent, goes into shock over someone's fall from grace...
...The New York of Naked City is not Damon Runyan territory, or if it is, it is with an overlay of Dostoyevsky...
...Fantasying rejection, she shoots him, then publicly exposes the imaginary affair...
...Sadly, never vindictively, the cops get into their squad car like social workers who have failed...
...It is often the program's middle-class people, the polite zombies, who come off the worst...
...But its heroes offer cautionary tales in the dangers of feeling...
...First, there is a direct steal from that old classic, Public Enemy Number One...
...Then there is Adam, the Billy Budd of detectives, who has read some books and probably has a degree from Fordham...
...In The Untouchables, crime is constantly routed, endlessly defeated, but hydra-headed, never crushed...
...Where The Untouchables is all gore and brutality, Naked City quivers with exquisite sensitivity...
...The boy climbs fast and soon becomes a power in the executive suite of Chicago crime...
...Victim and blackmailer are united in a kind of grotesque comradeship, emptiness drawing on emptiness...
...It is the close of Naked City that always defines its tone...
...In the end, she stumbles over her own psychopathy and everything is straightened out...
...Ness is the immortal avenger-forever stern, tough, invincible-but the racketeers have a kind of immortality, too...
...What we have here is neither Corwinesque rhetoric nor Theater of the Absurd reductionism but something in-between...
...Most of the lawbreakers seem to be at the very least heroes of feeling...
...The police close in, and the two friends go off to jail together almost jauntily...
...As much social workers as cops, they bear witness to man's convoluted folly and suffer for what they see...
...He goes with a pretty girl, a young actress who is really much tougher than he...
...The patterning of the three principal detectives is interesting...
...It is psychopathic behavior that engages the writers of this program...
...To avenge his violated dignity, he takes to adjusting the world's wrongs by nocturnal telephone calls to greedy slumlords, faithless children, and crooked merchants...
...Its theme is that old Elizabethan stand-by, the Overreacher...
...But then so are the racketeers...
...In a way, Naked City is The Untouchables with an overlay of everything that has happened since those dear dead days before Repeal...
...There is the lieutenant-basically, a tough cop-whose conscience is constantly quickened by the younger detectives, the softies...
...In another episode, an unloved girl invents, with ingenious circumstantiality, a love affair with a celebrated football pro...
...And who pays attention to it now...
...Eliot Ness learns of the enterprise, and in the end the young hoodlum gets his comeuppance...
...they spill all...
...They are shrill, graceless...
...In addition, The Untouchables is uncompromisingly oldfashioned about the Syndicate...
...ON TELEVISION Crime Old and New By David Boroff One of the favorite myths of intellectuals has to do with the purity of the early detective story as against its later corruptions -the Cagney movie as art form, Sam Spade as archetype...
...It is almost as if he connives in their existence...
...Hardly the granite men of The Untouchables, in Naked City they are gentle creatures -almost disabled for their workwith an infinite capacity for being shocked and pained by crime's multifarious faces...
...The fact is that the "pure form" of the detective story is still with us on television...
...But the most striking difference is in the portrayal of the law enforcement officers...
...He arranges to sell out his boss to the Syndicate, though his plans miscarry...
...Valentine's Day massacre...
...For at that moment police and lawbreaker share a common burden of martyrdom: the lawbreaker for what he has done, the police for what they have seen...
...Naked City leapfrogs into the 1960s...
...The "little people" in tenement and street that Adam and his partner interview react to them as to the psychoanalytic couch...
...they are the old commanding clich?©s of scowling mien and shoulder holster...
...There is hardly an Organization Man of crime in it...
...Naked City is a credit to the medium...
...In one recent installment, there was a hill-billy, played with chilling effectiveness by Rip Torn, who comes to New York with a guitar under one arm and a real five baby doll on the other...
...He is a nut, a psychopath, but as he wanders around New York, the viewer gets a poignant sense of how "outside" he must feel in this big, rich, preening and cruelly indifferent city...
...But come next week, the racketeers are back, fully panoplied, cruising the streets of Chicago...
...Without any of the glamor that age confers on the old movies, The Untouchables betrays its poverty of conception and coarseness...
...Stony-faced, implacable, he plays the racketeers' own game from the other side of the fence...
...And all the crimeshabby, misguided, often pointless -is played out against the most remorselessly squalid settings this side of straight documentary...
...And very decent...
...But double-crossers don't change...
...Naked City specializes in little slices-chips really-of everyday life...
Vol. 45 • December 1962 • No. 26
