Sunday will be the 100th anniversary of the birth of filmmaker Roger Corman. I decided to mark this occasion by viewing a movie directed by Corman that I had never seen before--I, MOBSTER, a gangland tale from 1958.
It would have been much easier to discuss one of Corman's more famous horror or science fiction features, but I've always thought obscurity is the better part of valor. Some might be surprised that Corman made a movie like I, MOBSTER, but the low-budget maven directed a number of gangster tales. Corman did screen biopics of such real-life hoods as Machine Gun Kelly, Al Capone, and Ma Barker (albeit in a very fictional manner). I, MOBSTER isn't based on any real person, but it is much more straightforward and low-key than most "authentic" gangland sagas.
The main character of I, MOBSTER is Joe Sante (Steve Cochran), the son of Italian immigrants. The movie begins with Joe testifying before a Senate committee in Washington investigating organized crime, bringing to mind the Kefauver hearings. As Joe takes the fifth over and over again, he starts to reminisce about his life, from when he was an 11 year old working for a numbers runner through his rise in the gangster hierarchy.
The main characters in gangster pictures are usually brash and larger than life, but Steve Cochran's Joe Sante is cool and calculating. Sante rarely shows emotion, and he doesn't go off the rails. Some might say this is due to Cochran's tight-lipped matter of fact acting style (a style some may call boring), but I think Roger Corman wanted to get away from the James Cagney--Edward G. Robinson tough guy type. Joe Sante is embarrassed by his working-class upbringing, and he certainly doesn't want to be poor, but even when he finds success as a gangster he doesn't have an extravagant lifestyle. He's more like a hard-edged businessman than a hood kingpin. There's very little actual violence in I, MOBSTER.
Joe Sante's true love is a nice girl from his neighborhood named Teresa (Lita Milan). Teresa is attracted to Joe, but not to his choice of profession. Because of this she doesn't enter into a relationship with him, until ironically Joe kills her loser brother in self-defense (Joe had given the kid a start in the rackets). It's after this incident that Joe and Teresa become an actual couple. This is another plot element that makes I, MOBSTER stand apart.
The supporting cast includes Robert Strauss as Joe's gangster mentor, Celia Lovsky as Joe's mother and conscience, and Yvette Vickers as a dame who tries to seduce Joe in order for him to forget about her drug debt. (Vickers is in only one small sequence, but she all but steals the picture). Burlesque performer Lili St. Cyr gets a chance to strut around during a nightclub scene, but this just seems to have been a way to pad the running time.
I, MOBSTER may not be on the same level as GOODFELLAS, but it's still a proficient and well-moving story. (Actually I, MOBSTER and GOODFELLAS have a lot more in common than you would think.) I've always felt that Roger Corman may not have been a great director, but he was certainly an efficient and inventive one who at times showed a quite creative bent. He was in some way responsible for hundreds of films that still entertain audiences to this day. Like Terence Fisher, Corman gets either too much or not enough credit from film geeks, but no matter how you may personally feel about his cinematic talents, there's no doubt that Roger Corman left a major mark in film history.
