Scorcese’s favorite gangster movies

This is interesting:

Before his epic new HBO series Boardwalk Empire premieres, director Martin Scorsese revisits the gangster films most influential on his career. Watch classic scenes from his picks.

Scorcese intros it this way:

Here are 15 gangster pictures that had a profound effect on me and the way I thought about crime and how to portray it on film. They excited me, provoked me, and in one way or another, they had the ring of truth.

I stopped before the ’70s because we’re talking about influence here, and I was looking at movies in a different way after I started making my own pictures. There are many gangster films I’ve admired in the last 40 years — Performance, the Godfather saga, Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, The Long Good Friday, Sexy Beast, John Woo’s Hong Kong films.

The films below I saw when I was young, open, impressionable.

Scorcese’s 15 favorite gangster movies before 1970 are:

The Public Enemy (1931)

Scarface (1932)

Blood Money (1933)

The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Force of Evil (1948)

White Heat (1949)

Night and the City (1950)

Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954)

The Phenix City Story (1955)

Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955)

Murder by Contract (1958)

Al Capone (1959)

Le Doulos (1962)

Mafioso (1962)

Point Blank (1967)

There are some titles I’ve never seen before. Definitely have some catching up to do. But of that group, I’m especially interested in Point Blank. Here’s some background from writer Walter Hill about that script:

Alex Jacob’s script of Point Blank (1967) was a revelation. He was a friend (wonderful guy, looked like a pirate, funny and crazy). This revelation came about despite a character flaw of mine. I have always had difficulty being complimentary to people whose work I admire, when face-to-face with them. This is not the norm in Hollywood where effusiveness is generally a given. Anyway, a mutual friend told Alex how much I admired Point Blank and John Boorman. Alex then very graciously gave me a copy of the script. This was about the time he was doing The Seven-Ups (1973).

Anyway, by now I’d been making a living as a screenwriter for maybe two or three years and had gotten to the point where I was dissatisfied with the standard form scripts were written in — they just all seemed to be a kind of subliterary blueprint for shooting a picture and generally had no personal voice. Mine were tighter and terser than the average, but I was still working with the industry template and not too happy about it. Alex’s script just knocked me out (not easy to do); it was both playable and literary. Written in a whole different way than standard format (laconic, elliptical, suggestive rather than explicit, bold in the implied editorial style), I thought Alex’s script was a perfect compliment to the material, hard, tough, and smart — my absolute ideals then. So much of the writing that was generally praised inside the business seemed to me soft and vastly overrated — vastly oversentimental. Then and now, I haven’t changed my opinions about that. But I have changed them about the presentational style.

In other words, the screenplay for Point Blank is apparently where the so-called ‘haiku-style’ of screenwriting originated, emulated by Walter Hill, then recently used by Andrew Stanton in the screenplay for Wall-E (for more on that, go here).

There are a few of us who have been searching for a copy of the script for Point Blank for some time now. If anybody has any information re this script, I would so appreciate hearing from you.

Back on point, “Boardwalk Empire” looks excellent. It debuts on HBO September 19th. The series creator and exec producer is Terence Winter. Here is a trailer for the series:

The series website is here.