The Chicken and the Yegg

I hadn’t realised the new film Public Enemies was based on a book, nor that the book was a straight history of the gangsters of the 1930s. I turned up a copy of it the other day and have not been able to put it down since. The revelation in it is that although I was vaguely familiar with the names and exploits of the prominent do-badders of the period, like Bonnie and Clyde, Baby-Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger, I never realised that they were all operating at the same time... nor that most of them knew one another. The gangs were in each other’s pockets the whole time. The crest of their crimewave took place during just two years, from 1933 to 1934, and the focus of Brian Burrough’s excellent history is how these ‘supervillains’ pushed the formation and development of the FBI. Out of this remarkable period in Depression-hit America come the stereotypes that informed so much of future crime fiction. I have long suspected that the pantheon of super-criminals of this era fuelled the imaginations of the cartoonists of both Dick Tracy and The Batman which emerged in the 1930s - Bob Kane’s Batman making his first outing in May 1939. Most striking was a reference in a contemporary newspaper to John Dillinger treating one of his many arrests ‘as a joke’. An inspiration for The Joker, perhaps? Certainly Two-Face and Baby Face are not a million miles apart. Pretty Boy Floyd must have been named ironically, as he wasn’t very pretty, indeed to my mind he did bear a vague resemblance to the Penguin, although it is also alleged that he served as the model for Chester Gould’s Flattop Jones. Bonnie and Clyde left mocking poems behind them, a little like The Riddler, maybe?
Without a doubt the idea of the supervillain emerges at the time, stoked by J Edgar Hoover, keen to promote a need for his ‘G-Men’ to combat the rising menace. Dick Tracy is much more the corporate detective, perhaps owing a little to Hoover’s star lawman, the effete and immaculate Melvin Purvis.
I was pleasantly surprised to read how much of Arthur Penn’s film Bonnie and Clyde actually seemed to be accurate, but I was disappointed to learn that Ma Barker was really a confused little old lady who lived only for her jigsaw puzzles - not the leader of the Barker-Karpis gang by any stretch of the imagination and nothing like the machine-gun toting Bloody Mama, or Ma Grissom in Roger Corman and Robert Aldritch’s versions of her life.
In the case of this outfit, something that has been forgotten is how much the emphasis was placed on kidnapping rather than bank jobs. The bank-robbers (or ‘yeggs’ as they were then called) made no secret of their Robin Hood ambitions, striking at the bankers who had caused the Depression. No prizes, then, for guessing why Michael Mann should be interested in the theme now that there is another great crisis in the banking system, but what sort of response should we expect? Will there be a new generation of supervillains, reincarnations of John Dillinger and Alvin Karpis? I somehow doubt it.
As noted, Karpis and the Barker brothers specialised in kidnapping the sons of mighty business magnates and holding them for extortionate ransoms. In each case, they paid up, anxious to be reunited with their loved ones. I cannot see that working nowadays. Who or what could anyone take away from, say, Fred Goodwin that he could possibly love more than his money? The supervillains of the 1930s were still dealing with robber-barons who had human emotions. I think that is long gone. The monsters of the old days have been reincarnated, but this time ‘Ugly Boy’ Goodwin and ‘Pruneface’ Paulson were running the banks, not robbing them. It’s now like the old Jack Benny radio sketch where a stick-up man points a gun and yells, ‘Your money or your life!’ There follows a long, long silence. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ shouts the stick-up man. ‘I said, your money or your life!’ After another long pause, Jack Benny replies, ‘I’m thinking about it.’ 1940s audiences thought that hilarious, but who would laugh now? With our new breed of super-banksters, there would be no thinking time necessary. ‘Kill the baby!’ they would scream. ‘Save my money!’