2023-08-05 21:02:00
Lewis Teague’s film, reissued on Blu-ray, admirably retraces the adventurous epic of Polly Franklin, a fictional character with a traumatic past, who falls in love with John Dillinger, a very real gangster in the United States in the 1930s.
1930, Polly Franklin leaves the parental farm, bundled up like a three-seater tent, driving a van not sure of holding up to the horizon line – she goes to town to sell eggs. But, barely landed, finds herself taken hostage by bank robbers, clinging to the door of a car driven at full speed, chased by cops who will end up with their heads exploded. Left by the side of the road, she finds her life of misery, but rather than take her head in her hands and curl up like a lettuce leaf, decides that it’s the right time to drop everything and trace towards Chicago. , where she will experience exploitation, crime and violence by becoming the girlfriend of legendary gangster John Dillinger.
Red for a Mobster is exactly what it sounds like: an ultra-condensed crossover (1h30) between Bonnie and Clyde (for the violence and frenetic pace) and Once Upon a Time in America (for the amplitude of the narrative ). All the advantages of a pure Roger Corman product (the film, released in 1979, bears the seal of his company New World Pictures) linked to the ingenuity of a ferociously desalinated duo – Lewis Teague in the production, never unforgettable but always incisive, and John Sayles on the screenplay, who signed his second script here, after Joe Dante’s Piranhas. If Teague will admirably go beyond the limits of an impossible budget and an express shooting of twenty days to deliver a particularly credible and vibrant reconstruction of Prohibition America, it is to Sayles that the real tour de force of the film: tackling the downfall of American criminal history figure John Dillinger through Polly Franklin, a largely fictional female character – though named after the real girlfriend of public enemy number 1.
bloody irruptions
A role that Sayles portrays without sacrificing action – the story is quite pitiless on this side – but without ever betraying or abandoning it either. To Dillinger’s multiple crimes, Du rouge pour un truand indeed prefers the multiple misadventures of its heroine, abused by a journalist taking advantage of her naivety, exploited in a factory, abused in prison by a sadistic matron, before gaining the intimacy of John Dillinger and his life punctuated with bloody irruptions. A figure infinitely more dense, complex and fascinating than that of Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha, an analog Corman production released a few years earlier, interpreted by the scandalously underemployed Pamela Sue Martin, which makes her a character far from the usual clichés of the genre. . A gutter Alice, childlike manners and washed-out eyes, tumbling down a rabbit hole infested with screaming whores, sweaty crooks and slicked-back gangsters. Peak of a career that will be done for the most part on television (Dynasty; Fantasy Island; The Fun Cruise) and momentarily transcended by this scenario which Quentin Tarantino said, slightly exaggerating, that it was ” the best ever written for an exploitation film”. One would be tempted to acquiesce.
Red for a mobster by Lewis Teague (1979), on Blu-ray (Carlotta).
#Red #gangster #centerpiece #Liberation