The Gangster (King Brothers Productions, Allied Artists nèe Monogram, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The first movie my husband Charles and I screened on our own once we returned from our week-long vacation in Martinez to see his mother on Sunday, August 3 was a DVD of The Gangster, a 1947 film noir from Allied Artists – which was in the process of changing its name from Monogram to shed its former image as a cheap little studio making cheap little low-quality “B” movies. This was in part a follow-up to a surprise hit Monogram made a year before this, Suspense (1946), which I reviewed for moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/11/suspense-king-brothers.html. Like The Gangster, Suspense was produced by Maurice and Frank King (true name: Kozinski), two brothers who had been bootleggers during Prohibition and decided after Repeal to try their luck in the movie business, and it starred the same leads: Barry Sullivan as the gangster Shubunka (the name deliberately picked to keep the character’s ethnicity uncertain, and if he has a first name we never learn it) and British skating star Belita as his girlfriend, Nancy Starr. Monogram had signed Belita to make skating movies to compete with Sonja Henie at 20th Century-Fox and Vera Hruba Ralston at Republic, but after two plain vehicles for her talents on ice the King brothers actually put her in a film noir. It was still a skating film but Belita’s numbers in Suspense were put in a context that was essentially Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice on ice: Roberta Elba (Belita) is a skating star who’s married to her promoter (Albert Dekker) but falls in love, or at least lust, for a drifter (Barry Sullivan) whom her husband hires to do odd jobs.

The general consensus about The Gangster, written by Daniel Fuchs based on a novel he’d published 10 years earlier called Low Company (which quite frankly would have been a better title for the film, too), is it’s a better film than Suspense, but I entirely disagree. Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” intro and outro, which we watched on YouTube before and after the film even though we saw the movie itself on DVD, hailed the film in general and Shubunka’s death (am I really spoiling anything by telling you he doesn’t make it out of the film alive?) as some sort of quintessential film noir, but it’s just a pretty old-fashioned tale of a burned-out gangster meeting his demise at the hands of a new breed of crooks. Shubunka is an operator who’s welded together a criminal enterprise from his connections with various small-timers running concessions on “Neptune Beach” (read: Coney Island), notably Nick Jammey (Akim Tamiroff), who runs an ice-cream parlor that fronts for criminal enterprises, notably bookmaking and numbers running. One of the film’s weaknesses is we never see Shubunka in any criminal behavior; we just hear him in voice-over tell us that he’s made his pile and wants to retire from the thug life and live a respectable existence for whatever time is available to him. Alas, the independent operations of Shubunka and his fellow small-timers are being taken over by Cornell (Sheldon Leonard), who’s ruthlessly consolidating the city’s criminal operations into one big, beautiful company under his control. I wonder if Fuchs intended this as a critique of really existing “legitimate” American capitalism, which likewise has been a saga of independent operators staking out territory and then falling victim to larger, more impersonal, more unscrupulous enterprises which seek to take them over almost literally by hook or crook.

The Gangster seems like a modern movie in one respect: there’s no one in the dramatis personae we really like and can root for to succeed. One fascinating subplot involves Karty (John Ireland), who hangs out at Nick’s ice-cream parlor and laments that he was once a respected and well-paid accountant until he fell for the horse-racing bug and became a gambling addict. Karty is continually pestering Shubunka for money to pay his gambling debts, and ultimately he’s beaten to death by his three brothers-in-law, who own a garage from which Karty embezzled money with which to gamble. The plot is basically about Shubunka’s increasing alienation as his long-time allies whom he counted on to unite with him against Cornell’s takeover tactics instead, one by one, ally themselves with Cornell. Even his girlfriend Nancy turns against him at the end, lured by Cornell into betraying him with the promise of stardom in a Broadway show. I suspect one reason a lot of critics like The Gangster better than Suspense is Belita doesn’t skate in it; instead we see her in a nightclub sequence just singing one song, the 1932 oldie “Paradise” by Nacio Herb Brown and Gordon Clifford. The imdb.com page on this film says that Belita had a voice double, but it doesn’t say who; I’d like to know because she’s not only a good singer (though she’s forced to sing an altered lyric to make the song more suitable for a woman), her vocal timbre matches Belita’s well enough to suspend disbelief and accept them as the same person. (That’s been a problem in movies far more prestigious and big-budgeted than this one; I’m still irritated that in the 1957 Pal Joey, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak were saddled with singing doubles who sounded nothing like their speaking voices, and even Frank Sinatra’s vocals were recorded in such a different acoustic from his dialogue that if you didn’t already know Sinatra’s voice you’d probably suspect he was being dubbed, too.)

When Charles and I watched Suspense he thought Barry Sullivan’s performance was too boorish, too unsubtle, in the male lead, and I think the actor who should have been in both Suspense and The Gangster was John Garfield. Garfield had the knack for playing both toughness and an underlying vulnerability (as did James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, though by the mid-1940’s both were too old for this role), and in Garfield’s final film, He Ran All the Way (1951), he played a character quite similar to Shubunka – a doomed gangster going about his final days – and played him far better than Sullivan did. The Gangster has some good aspects, including the stylized matte paintings used for the “Neptune Beach” backgrounds (around the time they made this film the King brothers published an article in an industry trade paper blasting other studios for going on location or spending money on elaborate sets to create backgrounds the King brothers could do with just paint on cardboard) and the film’s remarkable ending. Told by Cornell that they will immediately kill Shubunka if Shubunka kills Karty (and, as usual, Fuchs doesn’t bother to explain why Karty is considered so important by Cornell and his organized-crime combine they feel a need to avenge his death), Shubunka is cornered in classic noir fashion and shot to death in the dead of night on a rain-soaked street intersection. We’re then told that the police immediately arrested Cornell and his entire gang (one of whom is played by Elisha Cook, Jr. in a powerful mini-performance flashing back to his great work in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon), an odd ending since we’ve seen no evidence of the police before anywhere in the film – just a brief scene with a political “fixer” who has promised both Shubunka and Cornell that for a fee he can bribe the police on their behalf to let them alone.