THE RISE AND FALL OF LEGS DIAMOND (Warner Bros, 1960)

D: Budd Boetticher. P: Milton Sperling. W: Joseph Landon. Ph: Lucien Ballard. M: Leonard Rosenman. St: Ray Danton (Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond), Karen Steele (Alice), Elaine Stewart (Monica), Jesse White (Leo ‘Butcher’ Bremer), Simon Oakland (Lt Moody)

“The bullet hasn’t been made that can kill me”

Fuelled by Boetticher’s fascination for roguery and patterned on the gangster pictures of the golden age, this is a classic study of criminal hubris. The protagonist’s faith in his invulnerability propels him to a position of power in the underworld, but is also his Achilles’ heel. Antagonising his competitors and alienating his allies, he authors his own downfall like so many other Prohibition-era big shots.

Landon’s linear script promises, “This is the way it happened.” Inevitably there are embellishments and digressions, particularly towards the end, but it traces the outlines of the real Diamond’s criminal career, in course of which he courts the attention of mob boss Arnold Rothstein, seduces a string of dames, survives sundry assassination attempts (Diamond was dubbed ‘clay pigeon’ by rivals), extorts protection money from fellow hoods and takes over a speakeasy. (The ascription of Diamond’s nickname, Legs, to Rothstein is not verified; it may have been a reference to his dancing abilities – faithfully reproduced here – or his habit of running out on his friends.)

Granted a rare lead by a major studio, Danton grasped the nettle with vigour, imbuing Legs with a rudimentary charm not unlike the villains in Boetticher’s westerns. As he artfully manoeuvres his way to the top, one can grudgingly admire his wit and his wiles, at least in the early stages, when he is more scoundrel than thug. Even Rothstein, played with imperious detachment by Robert Lowery, appreciates the gall of this spruce upstart, who follows him to Miami and charges all manner of expensive goods to his account, merely to get close enough to Rothstein to ask him for a job.

Of course, there is more to this chancer than chutzpah, and neither Danton nor Boetticher fight shy of the character’s ruthlessness. There are no apologies issued on his behalf, no excuses offered. Judged by his actions, he loses the lustre that initially sets him above the mobster milieu. There is little to admire, even superficially, about his manipulation of women. He beds Rothstein’s mistress, and that of his successor ‘Butcher’ Bremer, as part of a power play, discarding them after use. (This will cost him dearly at the end.) 

More reprehensible still is his readiness to sever emotional ties, the better to forestall enemy attacks. He abandons his sickly kid brother, a fresh-faced Warren Oates, to the mercy of his adversaries rather than bargain for his life, and is particularly cruel towards Alice, the dance teacher he meets soon after arriving in New York. He uses their first date as cover for a jewellery heist, exploits her affections throughout, and later marries her purely, it seems, so she cannot be forced to testify against him. Not uncoincidentally, she turns to drink.

Considerably broader in scope than his exquisitely compact Fifties westerns, Legs Diamond nevertheless finds Boetticher as economical as ever, with nary a shot wasted. Given the Warners backlot to play with, he and Lucien Ballard consciously mimicked the shooting style of the Twenties, with relatively little camera movement, although the combination of Boetticher’s finely balanced frames and deep staging with Ballard’s precise black and white shading testifies to their sophisticated filmmaking sensibilities.

Legs Diamond is arguably the finest film from the second wave of Hollywood gangster movies. The genre had lain largely dormant since the late Thirties, but gained impetus in the Fifties from the much-publicised Kefauver hearings into organised crime and then, at the end of the decade, the success of The Untouchables on television. Alongside fictionalised accounts of racket-busting escapades, a spate of pseudo-biopics appeared, spat out in a Tommy-gun spray: Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, The Bonnie Parker Story, Pretty Boy Floyd, Al Capone, the Dutch Schultz vehicle Portrait of a Mobster (in which Danton reprised the role of Diamond). Legs’s mentor, Arnold Rothstein, was the subject of King of the Roaring Twenties, and in The George Raft Story, Danton portrayed the actor who grew up among gangsters before famously playing them on screen.

Boetticher talked disparagingly of his protagonist – “Probably the worst man who ever lived.” Nevertheless, Legs’s brand of die-hard individualism seems to have struck a chord with the director, who was something of a maverick himself. Self-reliant to a fault, Legs has nobody to turn to when the newly instigated Syndicate, gathered around a conference table, declares his form of brash gangsterism obsolete. Legs Diamond thus successfully merges the form of Little Caesar and Scarface with the concerns of the Force of Evil/Big Combo school of corporate crime film.
Kevin Grant