Machine-Gun Kelly

Rafael "Mister Movie" Jovine3.5

Action!-The March of the (3) Rogers: B Is For CormanWith this picture on the life of the renowned Machine Gun Kelly, Roger Corman tries his hand not only in the crime genre, but also in biopics.There are a number of performers that may have stepped into the shoes of this real-life individual, and I believe Charles Bronson is one of them. As expected, the actor immediately impresses in his first major part, bringing the character to life in a way that always feels compelling to watch his tale evolve, not only because of the situations he was involved in, but also because of the actor's inherent magnetism. Cabot excels once more in her role as the beleaguered girlfriend, especially in the way she quietly elevates her persona to that of a femme fatale.Corman called this as "a major turning point in his career," and I have to agree. One aspect of the film that I particularly enjoyed was the way it had nothing to envy about the big studio films of the era, particularly when it came to its genre counterparts. There can be considerable debate over its quality, but in my opinion, it is his most professional film up to that moment.All in all, regardless of the fact that the narrative has indeed been told so many times and there is nothing new here, if you love gangster films and learning about history, this one is worth seeing.TODAY SCHEDULEMachine-Gun KellyWar of the SatellitesMorning GloryAir America

WestyMovieCrypt3.5

“Tell your old lady to keep her wise cracks behind her teeth or she’s gonna be wearing false ones!”George Kelly is angry at the world and scared to death of dying. A career bank robber, Kelly gets his confidence from his Thompson SMG and his girl, Flo. After a botched robbery, Flo, Kelly and his gang try their hand at a more lucrative job: kidnapping.I know I’m bouncing around all over the place during this deep-dive of Charles Bronson, I think that’s the best way. One film I’m in the early ‘70s, then mid ‘80s and now in the late ‘50s, it’s certainly keeping things interesting.Roger Corman and Charles Bronson would both go on to have wonderful careers and become household names, but at this point in 1958 Corman was still very early in his directorial career and Bronson had only been a bit-part actor. This was the period where Corman was directing anywhere up to eight low-budget features a year, this was an important one in his filmography. Corman called the film “a major turning point in my career,” because it was the first for which he had received serious critical attention.It was equally important to a then still relatively young Charles Bronson, Machine Gun Kelly gave him his first lead role and whilst I wouldn’t go as far as to say he excels, he puts in a very good performance and you can absolutely see the genesis here of the Bronson we all know and love.It’s a simple story told in a breezy 80 minutes, a bank robber and his crew botch a job and Kelly decides to take their operation into a different direction. There’s nothing too shocking (after all it was 1958), no real surprises, it’s all pretty safe and formulaic, it’s also well acted, beautifully shot and always holds the viewers attention.What made Machine Gun Kelly stand out was the main character himself, I expected an early role from Bronson where he’s slapping people about, gunning people down and is deadly serious, there is a lot of that. He’s also really quite amusing in several scenes, laughs his head off in others (which shocked me to my core) and is actually quite the coward. I’m really not familiar at all with the supporting cast, you can just tell they were great character actors of the time from their performances and faces that tell a thousand stories. I was really impressed with some of the smaller parts.Roger Corman said he had been attracted to Kelly’s story because of how the gangster had meekly surrendered. Corman hired Robert Wright Campbell as screenwriter and said that Campbell “wrote a very good script with strong, well-sketched characters,” based a great deal on the facts.George Kelly was placed on the #1 spot on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list in 1933, when he and his gang kidnapped Oklahoma millionaire Charles F. Urschel. They demanded a $200,000 ransom, which was paid, and resulted in Kelly’s eventual capture. This movie is loosely based on that incident.Charles Bronson was 36 when he appeared in this movie.The Los Angeles Times called Machine-Gun Kelly a “sleeper” with “a very good screenplay” in which Bronson makes Kelly “a full, three dimensional human being.” The film was reasonably successful in the U.S. but fared well in Europe, and Corman’s work was examined in journals such as Cahiers du Cinéma.Watched on Plex.Bronson is very good here, it wasn’t too long after this that he appeared in The Magnificent Seven and the legend began to grow. It would still be a good decade from the iconic moustache that everyone associates with him, but this is a fascinating look at Bronson in his first starring role and one I’m really happy to have seen. Nowhere near as classy or suspenseful as what a master like Hitchcock was producing at the time, but a really solid low-budget feature that helped Corman and Bronson become what they did.

RanchoTuVu3.5

Machine Gun Kelly was a gangster from the 1930s resurrected by Roger Corman and played by Charles Bronson. The tough gangster flick you'd expect is really more of a film about Kelly's fear of anything that symbolizes death and how the people in his gang, including his girlfriend, tease him about it. Susan Cabot plays Kelly's gun moll Flo Becker in some surprisingly cold and calculating displays that really grab your attention. Also features Jack Lambert as one of the gang members, and he's always scary. Plus Morey Amsterdam plays Mike Fandango, a pickup man for the money they rob from banks, so the cast is strange but pretty solid. It's the inner workings and dialog that make it hard to stop watching more than the action scenes, but they all kind of come together with one scene where Bronson spits a mouthful of soda at a mountain lion that's in a cage only because he knows the cat can't get out to rip him to shreds so he's free to taunt the animal. It's pretty unpleasant but also really strange.