Vincenzo Coccotti (Christopher Walken) in “True Romance”
Though the character of Vincenzo Coccotti is only in the film for a few minutes, Christopher Walken’s turn as the Sicilian counsel for Blue Lou Boyle, and his exchange with Dennis Hopper as Clifford Worley, is unquestionably one of the great scenes in mobster cinema. Clifford Worley’s newlywed son, Clarence (Christian Slater), has just taken off, and right on his tail are Coccotti and his meaty cohorts, looking for stolen cocaine, Clarence, and his beautiful bride Alabama. In a quotable altercation, Coccotti explains coyly to Worley that he is in fact the antichrist, just before knocking him in the nose — the beginning of Worley’s torture. Indignantly, Worley shoots back a few ignonimous one-liners about Coccotti’s Sicilian heritage, but it’s no matter — after smoking a Chesterfield and calling him a cantaloupe, Coccotti blows Worley away, killing someone for the first time since 1984. Only Quentin Tarantino could write such a bewitchingly bloody scene, and in one short burst, give us the Walken role we’ve always, always wanted to see him play.
Al Capone (Robert De Niro) in “The Untouchables”
Identified more than anyone since Robinson and Cagney with the mobster, Robert De Niro has more often than not played a criminal on the way up who ends up (sometimes just temporarily) running the show — see “Godfather Part II,” “Goodfellas,” “Once Upon A Time In America,” et al. But perhaps his purest mob boss turn, the most in-command and fearsome, if by no means the biggest, is his Al Capone in “The Untouchables.” Brian De Palma’s remorselessly entertaining reboot of the TV series neatly straddles the line between comic-book and realism, and never more so than with De Niro’s depiction of the legendary mob boss. There have been plenty of screen Capones, and to some degree what the star does here isn’t that different from some of his other gangster gigs, but it’s his decision to play Capone as a consummate politician, charming the press and rousing his colleagues before switching on a dime and showing the monstrous violence inside him, that sets it apart. It’s a performance so good that it’s a little disappointing that the baseball-loving bastard lurks in the shadows for most of the movie.
Rico (Edward G Robinson) in “Little Caesar”
Edward G. Robinson might have looked a little like the suavest baby you ever saw, but as “Little Caesar,” his big breakout starring role made clear, he could be entirely fearsome too. Mervyn LeRoy’s 1931 gangster classic sees Robinson’s Rico as a hood on the make in Chicago, soon controlling the whole of the Northside, with Douglas Fairbanks as his old pal Joe, who just wants to dance (!), but whom Rico won’t let out of the criminal life. One of the earliest crime talkies, it proved influential not just on Robinson’s career (he was typecast in similar roles for years to come), but on the genre as a whole — so many mobsters afterwards owe a debt to Robinson’s snarl and distinctive speech patterns. As far as the film itself goes, everything with Fairbanks is kind of a wash, but the movie sings every time Robinson’s on screen, not least in his iconic final moments — “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?” In the film it certainly is, but his legacy lives on long after.
Yoshio Yamamori (Nobuo Kaneko) in “Battles Without Honor And Humanity”
Widely interpreted as influenced by “The Godfather” (which only came out the year before) Kinji Fukasaku‘s “Battles Without Honor And Humanity” (also one of the greatest bombastic titles of all time) is known today as the first “modern” Yakuza picture. Prior to ‘Battles,’ which went on to spawn four sequels in just the next two years, Japanese cinema tended to portray the Yakuza as adhering to fundamentally honorable Samurai-influenced codes of conduct. But Yamamori (Nobuo Kaneko), head of the clan that the film’s hero, Hirono (Bunta Sugawara), joins only to find that loyalty is worthless and betrayal is a way of life, is an unusual kingpin, neither slick nor cool, just a consummate, desperate hypocrite, who has stayed on top by simply being a bigger rat than everyone else. The first sequence in ‘Battles’ depicts the Hiroshima A-bomb; Yamamori represents the embodiment of dishonor and weaselly self-interest because in his violent, garish film (a major influence on Tarantino), Fukasaku suggests that Japan’s honor and humanity were also pulverized in that explosion.
Stringer Bell (Idris Elba)/Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) in “The Wire”
While David Simon’s “The Wire” is ultimately too anthropological to qualify as solely a crime serial, the show’s unflinching depiction of the poverty and drug traffic that plagues Baltimore’s worst neighborhoods still stings after all these years. Two soldiers on Baltimore’s urban battlefield gave Simon’s show both its dark soul and also its rotten, reptilian underside in the form of Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) and Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector). Since the characters hail from different eras of the show’s five-season run, we’re bending our own rules and including both. Elba plays Stringer as a pragmatic hardhead, a drug kingpin with political ambitions who is essential in the ascent of the Barksdale drug organization that dominates seasons 1-3. He’s a man who yearns to legitimize his fundamentally illegitimate business, and he’s also, ultimately, hopelessly naïve about what said business entails. Stanfield, meanwhile, is a snake: heartless and without a single ounce of human feeling. You look into his eyes and see nothing but the blind, unquestioning demand for profit, respect, and the begetting of more and more ruthless violence. As twin portraits of very different kinds of gangsters, Elba and Hector have very different styles, but they’re respectively electrifying.
