Criminal Minds

July 23, 2010 - August 13, 2010

The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond,
August 13

Criminality has its allure. It’s like a felonious pheromone, offering pure exudations of unfettered will. No wonder then that the guilty exhilaration of watching “real-life” outlaws pursuing base purpose has kept movie audiences collared for decades; they present a kind of feral freedom, a life spent outside of social restraint. The crime film, with its usual subsets—mob movie, police procedural, gumshoe comedy, heist film, serial slasher, prison drama, courtroom conflict, etc—surfaced in the silent period and has never gone into hiding. But it’s the “true-crime” genre that remains most suspect, and which Criminal Minds hauls in for interrogation. Ripped from the headlines, these films look at real-life mobsters, lowlifes, and killers. Like a crime investigation, each work searches for clues to the origins of bad behavior, offering up its era’s own bruised psychology as evidence. In many cases, the social impact of crime, the lawlessness and disorder, is cross-examined as well. Legs Diamond, Caryl Chessman, Boxcar Bertha, Leopold and Loeb, Barbara Graham, Albert DeSalvo, Jack the Ripper, and Al Capone: Criminal Minds presents a line-up of our most wanted.

Steve Seid
Video Curator

Friday, July 23, 2010
7:00 p.m. Cell 2455, Death Row
Fred F. Sears (1955). Welcome to San Quentin’s Death Row: the “Red Light Bandit” is your guest, taking you through his life of crime, in this searing but sympathetic exposé of a delinquent raging against authority, but now seeking redemption. (76 mins)

Friday, July 23, 2010
8:45 p.m. I Want to Live!
Robert Wise (1958). “The queen of the murder mob,” Oakland-born “Bloody Babs” was sentenced to the gas chamber in 1953, and as played by Susan Hayward (in an Oscar-winning performance) she’s “young, attractive, belligerent, immoral…and guilty as hell.” (120 mins)

Friday, July 30, 2010
7:00 p.m. The Lodger
John Brahm (1944). Out of the London fog comes . . . a mysterious lodger by day, and Jack the Ripper by night, in John Brahm’s moody noir, shot by legendary D.P. Lucien Ballard. Laird Cregar and Merle Oberon star. (84 mins)

Friday, July 30, 2010
8:45 p.m. The Boston Strangler
Richard Fleischer (1968). It’s creepy working-man Tony Curtis versus solid Detective George Kennedy and attorney Henry Fonda in Fleischer’s acclaimed late-noir, a portrait of Boston as seen through its seedy underbelly and overwhelmed cops. (116 mins)

Friday, August 6, 2010
7:00 p.m. Compulsion
Richard Fleischer (1959). Two young men of privilege (based on infamous killers Leopold and Loeb) assumed their obvious superiority would help them get away with murder. Ooops. With Dean Stockwell and Orson Welles. (105 mins)

Friday, August 6, 2010
9:10 p.m. Boxcar Bertha
Depression-era outlaw Boxcar Bertha and her anarchist sidekick Big Bill Shelley ruled the Arkansas rails of the ‘30s, robbing trains and menacing moguls countrywide. Scorsese’s first Hollywood film, starring Barbara Hershey and David Carradine.
(92 mins)

Friday, August 13, 2010
7:00 p.m. The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond
Budd Boetticher (U.S., 1960). Watch sociopath Legs Diamond go from two-bit hoofer to mob kingpin in genre master Budd Boetticher’s gangster epic, pistol-whipping its way across New York’s Roaring Twenties with help from ace D.P. Lucien Ballard. (101 mins)

Friday, August 13, 2010
9:00 p.m. Al Capone
Richard Wilson (U.S., 1959). A suitably bulldogged Rod Steiger is the gangster of all gangsters, Al Capone, ready to rub out all comers and take over Chicago, one St. Valentine’s Day Massacre at a time. (104 mins)

Thanks to Stephanie Boris, Juliet Clark, Peter Conheim, Garbiñe Ortega, and Beth Shippey for their advice.