SYNOPSICS
The Purple Gang (1959) is a English movie. Frank McDonald has directed this movie. Barry Sullivan,Robert Blake,Elaine Edwards,Marc Cavell are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1959. The Purple Gang (1959) is considered one of the best Crime,Drama movie in India and around the world.
A teen-age rat pack of the Detroit slums, the Purple Gang, headed by psychotic William Joseph "Honeyboy" Willard, teams with adult hijackers during prohibition and in three years controls the city's underworld. Detective Bill Harley is given a special assignment to break the gang. To intimidate Harley, Honeyboy and his chief henchman, Hank Smith, terrorize his pregnant wife, Gladys, who loses her baby and dies. The gang moves in on the cleaning and dyeing industry, which calls in the Mafia for protection. Hank tries to tip off Harley as to where the Mafia hoods are holed up but Honeyboy, mistaking his intentions, has Killer Burke seal him alive in a coffin and drop him in the Detroit river. Honeyboy locates the Mafia headquarters in an apartment building and goes there with two of his men. They break in and machine-gun the three Mafia leaders, Licovetti, Ricco and Castiglione.
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The Purple Gang (1959) Reviews
A mix of fact and fiction
Most of my 7/10 goes to two things - Robert Blake's effective portrayal of completely amoral, calculating, and mentally unbalanced baby-faced mobster Honeyboy Willard and to the rather detached documentary feel of this film as it is narrated by the cop that has vowed to put the Purple Gang away, Barry Sullivan as Lt. William P. Harley of the Detroit Police. It really has the look and feel of "The Untouchables" except with poverty row roots. There really was a Purple Gang in Detroit in the 20's and 30's, although the character of Honeyboy is a fictional one - the actual power in the real gang was in the hands of four Jewish brothers. The cleaner and dyers war was a real one, except in real life the Purple Gang was allied with the union against non-union independents. There was no rather clean ending to the story of the Purples in real life. Like so many other gangs, Prohibition gave them money and power they could have only dreamed about, and its end sent them on a slow decline with the primary source of their wealth literally dried up. This film is unusual in that there are no female leads or even substantial female supporting roles here. Women are just the subjects of particularly savage crimes by the Purples, and very little more, meant to underscore the violence of the Purple Gang. If this film had been in wider release by a bigger studio, maybe Robert Blake wouldn't have had to wait until 1967 and "In Cold Blood" to catapult to stardom. Here he steals the show, kills everyone else, and gives a truly riveting performance of a guy who really loves his work for reasons that seem to have more to do with a need for power and a desire to be feared than just pure greed. Don't believe the low rating on this one - give it a try realizing it is a B feature from a small studio made just as the production code was losing its grip.
Allied Artists says it all...
Cheapo production. This is supposed to be the 1920s, but there is no attempt to use costumes or hair styles of that era. The men all wear 1950s hats. Robert Blake plays tough as the juvenile gang leader. Barry Sullivan walks through his part as the detective as though he wanted to be somewhere else. His wife,of course, wants him to quit. The gang looks like a Central Casting call for B-list juveniles. As clean and nice looking a bunch of hoodlums as can be imagined. If they could dance they would be ready for West Side Story. The sets are unadorned and look like they were assembled in somebody's garage. There is a lot of unconvincing gunplay and actors falling to the floor, but no blood.
Chillingly charismatic
Robert Blake's portrayal of Honeyboy is chillingly charismatic. Honeyboy leads his gang of teenage hoodlums to success in the big leagues of organized crime. The key to Honeyboy's success and his dedication as a "leader" lies in the fact that he is a sociopathic killer and a psychopathic egomaniac. Robert Blake plays it all to the hilt and still manages to make Honeyboy cute and sympathetic.
Holds your attention!
Despite some dull dialogue padding and other obvious exercises in penny-pinching, this is quite a creditable effort from wrong-side- of-the-street's Allied Artists studio. Of course, Allied makes no mention of the fact that the gang members were actually Jewish and that their names have actually been changed to disguise this fact. Nevertheless, the moody, low-key photography by Ellis Carter, the occasionally stylish direction of Frank McDonald (who worked for just about every studio in Hollywood at one time or another. He started off as a dialogue director but soon graduated to "B" movies) and some excellent acting, particular Robert Blake's compellingly psychotic portrayal, give this film a considerable edge over its stablemates. Incidentally, Lloyd Garnell is actually billed as the "chief set electrician". There were never less than three – and most often at least four – set electricians on even the most humble movie. They were vital. If the director was all ready to shoot, but the set not properly lit
Not a purple patch
The Purple Gang was a mob of bootleggers and hijackers with predominantly Jewish members operating in Detroit, Michigan, during the 1920s. They came to be Detroit's dominant criminal gang, but ultimately excessive violence and infighting caused the gang to self-destruct in the 1930s. This Allied Artists production, leveraged by a goodly amount of footage lifted from earlier films, plays fast and loose with what was an interesting history in a production weighted by two excellent leads, Sullivan and Blake, and which contains two or three memorably violent scenes while Blake's screaming claustrophobia offers other choice moments. Ultimately not one of the genre stand outs (for that one needs to seek out such titles as AL CAPONE or the RISE AND FALL OF LEGS DIAMOND etc) it is never the less a entertaining enough time waster even if it ends up feeling rather perfunctory. Sullivan's best gangster film, imho, is the appropriately named THE GANGSTER.