The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967)

Director: Roger Corman
Writer: Howard Browne
Stars: Jason Robards, George Segal, Ralph Meeker and Jean Hale

Index: The First Thirty.

I’m not going to be able to review this Roger Corman picture from my usual perspective of the part Jack Nicholson plays in it, because he has very little to do at all.

Let’s just say that it’s a docudrama about the real massacre of the title, in which men hired by Al Capone gunned down seven members of his rival Bugs Moran’s North Side Gang on the famous day in 1929 and Nicholson plays one of that crew, a gangster named Gino. He’s not one of the killers, but he’s there as it happens, waiting outside the S. M. C. Cartage Company as their getaway driver.

We first see him after Heitler buys the car, because he backs it into a garage and unloads it. He also delivers a line as the killers prepare, pointing out in a rather rough voice that one of them coats his bullets with garlic because, if a victim survives, he’ll get blood poisoning.

And that’s it. He’s not even credited, though Corman wanted him to play a bigger role. The problem was that it’s a 20th Century Fox film and they wanted actors under their contract. At least, he got Nicholson and Bruce Dern into minor roles and they were both paid for the entire seven week shoot.

I’ve seen this film before, albeit not for two decades, but remembered it more fondly than I saw it this time. It’s still an excellent look at a Chicago dominated by gangsters and it may be the best of the fifty that Corman directed, but it’s dry and complex with only some agreeable overacting by Jason Robards to intersperse the neverending streams of bullets.

There’s one scene featuring Jean Hale and it seems almost out of place in this testosterone fuelled world because it has a woman not only speak but direct the action, even if she ends up in a hallway in her lingerie. It’s telling that it doesn’t show up for fifty minutes.

The film begins and ends with the massacre of the title. At the beginning, we hear it, along with a bunch of extras on Clark Street, one of whom musters up the courage to walk into the garage and scream when she sees the dead. At the end, we see the whole thing unfold with a careful attention to detail, right down to how the victims fell so that they look just like their characters did in crime scene photographs.

What we get in between is the build up to it, which boils down to a turf war between a pair of rival gangs. Capone’s South Side Gang owns the south and the west of Chicago. Moran has the north and he’s encroaching onto Capone’s territory, which prompts escalating violence.

Everything is accompanied by copious detail delivered in good old “just the facts, ma’am” style by Paul Frees, who was the other “man of a thousand voices”. Here, he puts on the voice we might expect from someone reading movie trailers or news headlines, but without any of the sensationalism. After all, the film is “based on truth”, as it claims at the beginning, and it takes that far more seriously than we ought to expect from an exploitation movie director of Corman’s stature and history.

Then again, he was working with what must have felt like more money than ever, with the film budgeted at two and a half million dollars and Corman coming in $400,000 under it. He’s said that it really only cost a million but studio overheads ate up the rest. If so, this does look like a million bucks, which his films rarely did.

That’s because there’s so much on show, in every way that counts. I can’t remember any Corman film that featured this many actors or this many sets. While it was primarily made on the 20th Century Fox lot, with a few scenes at MGM and Desilu, it looks like Corman had the whole city of Chicago and all its people at his beck and call.

While the opening scene may not show the massacre, for instance, it does feature a street that’s spacious enough to allow sweeping dolly shots, long enough to enable footage from lots of angles and deep enough to take us inside an array of buildings. It’s populated by a plethora of extras and plenty of vintage cars. It doesn’t feel like something that fits in the filmography of a director who would often wrap early and shoot a second film in the same locations just to cut down on expense. Even the snow works.

It also features a host of major actors.

Sure, there are many recognisable faces that we surely know from other Corman films: Jack Nicholson, Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze, all of which had prominent parts in The Little Shop of Horrors seven years earlier, and Leo Gordon, who appeared in and wrote Nicholson’s debut, The Cry Baby Killer.

However, there’s also Jason Robards acting up a storm as Al Capone and Ralph Meeker as a less overt Bugs Moran. There’s George Segal, Joseph Campanella, Jo Turkel, even John Agar and Celia Lovsky, who was so powerful as the Exchange head in Soylent Green. She doesn’t get as much screen time here but she shows just as much power. This is a deep cast.

I’d talk about the story but it’s such a web of intrigue that I wouldn’t be able to do it justice in the space I have for this review. The focus is always on the build up to the massacre, which is a quick escalation. It only takes a few scenes of Moran’s enforcers pressuring proprietors of speakeasies in Capone’s territory into taking a new deal with them for Capone to take a hit out on Moran. At the same time, it isn’t long at all before Moran takes out a hit on Capone, as his most obvious competitor and obstacle.

However, this state of affairs didn’t just fall out of the sky and Corman takes us back when appropriate to show flashbacks of the hits that came before, like Moran’s predecessors as the head of the North Side Gang, Dean O’Banion and Hymie Weiss, the latter of whom had tried to take out Capone in another flashback.

And, at the end of the day, what all this does is to get across to us just how omnipresent the gangs were in Chicago in the twenties. Even if we’ve seen all the gangster movies that came out during the precode era and survived on to the Golden Age of Hollywood, they often felt apart from the public, and the same often goes for later films from Scorsese and Coppola and their New Hollywood peers. Here, if you blink you’ll miss a hail of gunfire and a subtle shift in an unending power struggle.

It’s this that makes the final shot of the film all the more ironic. After the massacre is over, Paul Frees explains what happened to the key players, ending with Al Capone, who got away with this but was locked up for tax evasion. It ends with a shot of his tombstone, which says “Rest in peace”. Chicago finally could.