Hollywood’s Marriage to the Mob : This fall’s crime wave is just the latest round in the movies’ long-running love affair with gangsters and godfathers : BY PATRICK GOLDSTEIN

“My film’s godfather would never double-cross anyone. The real godfathers double-crossed people over and over. But remember, ‘The Godfather’ wasn’t a documentary about Mafia chief Vito Genovese. It was Marlon Brando, with Kleenex in his mouth.”

--Francis Ford Coppola From James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart to Marlon Brando and Robert DeNiro, Hollywood’s most celebrated actors have all shared a common delight--they were at their best playing gangsters.

For more than half a century, American movies have enjoyed a passionate love affair with murder and mayhem, celebrating the stylish psychos, ruthless killers and brooding underworld kingpins who populate our favorite gangster films.

“The most fascinating people in movies are always the bad guys,” says Phil Joanou, director of “State of Grace,” which stars Gary Oldman, Sean Penn and Ed Harris in a tale of violence and retribution among Irish street gangsters in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen.

“That’s what’s great about gangster movies--you get a vicarious thrill out of visiting a world you’d never want to be a part of in real life. That’s why it’s so weird to see a gangster movie in New York. When you’re in this safe movie theater, you get completely caught up in the craziness of the world.

“But when you leave the theater, you can be right in one of the neighborhoods where the movie actually happened. You look around and you go, ‘Geez, I gotta get outta here!’ ”

That’s part of the romance of movies--we can see cutthroats and thieves from a safe distance, marveling at their larger-than-life antics and outrageous thuggery. For an actor, it’s an irresistible opportunity.

“Gangster parts are incredibly theatrical,” says Jon Polito, a noted Broadway stage actor who plays hot-headed gang chief Johnny Caspar in “Miller’s Crossing.” “I felt like I was this fallen King--like Nero. I blustered and grunted so much that I was worried I might be going over the top. But everyone said, ‘Play him as big as you want to go.’ ”

Hollywood is certainly playing gangsters big this fall. A trio of flamboyant mobster films are just hitting the theaters, led by “State of Grace” and “GoodFellas.” Starring Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, “GoodFellas” is Martin Scorsese’s vivid portrait of cut-rate Brooklyn mobster Henry Hill and his wise-guy pals. It will be followed Oct. 5 by the Coen Brothers’ “Miller’s Crossing,” which stars Albert Finney, Gabriel Byrne and Polito in a stylized look at late-1920s gang warfare.

Later in October, you can see the seamy exploits of “The Krays,” a pair of identical-twin British gangsters played by British popsters Gary and Martin Kemp. On Nov. 2, John Turturro, who also has a juicy part in “Miller’s Crossing,” stars in “Men of Respect” as a small-time hood who takes over a crime family. And even though Francis Coppola was shooting additional scenes as recently as last week, Paramount still insists that it will release its long-awaited Mafia epic, “The Godfather, Part III,” on Christmas Day.

Expect more mayhem in 1991. Barry Levinson is already in pre-production on “Bugsy,” with Warren Beatty as Bugsy Siegel. Robert Benton, who co-wrote “Bonnie and Clyde,” is preparing a film version of E. L. Doctorow’s “Billy Bathgate,” which stars Dustin Hoffman as Dutch Shultz. Sly Stallone is filming “Oscar,” a John Landis-directed comedy about a mobster trying to go straight. And producer Steve Roth is doing “Mobsters,” about the youthful exploits of Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel.

Call it Gangster Chic or The Mafia Goes to the Movies. But with thugs and hoods hitting the screen like gangbusters, Hollywood is still married to the mob.

“The gangster cycle arises out of a period like the 1920s or the 1980s where capitalism gets caught up in its own excesses,” explains industry analyst Mike Mahern, who wrote the script for “Mobsters.” “Most gangster films are both a portrait of greed and excess--and a protest against it.

“You also saw a lot of highly publicized violent crime in both the 1920s and the late ‘80s. In fact, there are more gangsters in L.A. and New York than ever before. They’re just from a new ethnic group at the bottom of the heap. If ‘Mobsters’ is popular with minority youth, it’ll be because they recognize Luciano and Lansky as soul brothers.”

Still, some critics find it ironic that Hollywood has spent so much firepower giving mythic status to such brutal hoodlums. “The hard truth is that these guys were pieces of (garbage),” says tough-guy novelist James Ellroy, who has placed mobsters Mickey Cohen and Johnny Stompanato as characters in such books as “The Big Nowhere” and “L.A. Confidential.”

“You always see Bugsy Siegel portrayed in movies as this capitalist visionary--the guy who invented Las Vegas. In reality, he was a rapopsychopath. If you did the real story of gangsters, it would be a stupid, fatuous tale of greed and corruption. But Hollywood only shows the sensuality of seeking pure power. It doesn’t show the scum that comes with it.”

Still, it’s this very sensuality that makes mobsters so compelling. Perhaps Hollywood adores gangsters because they’re such dedicated hedonists--they live out our every guilty pleasure. At home, they keep a mistress in every closet. At the office, they’re the ultimate free-market entrepreneurs.

And for once, when it comes to violence, Hollywood doesn’t need to exaggerate. “When I read up on the Westies (the Irish hoods in “State of Grace”), I was amazed to see what an inept, fly-by-night operation it was,” said Joanou. “They were the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. But when they did, they shot everything in sight.”

It’s no wonder that the outlaw energy of this world--the unbridled lust for power, the complicated, shifting loyalties, the savage explosions of violence and the playful rat-pack camaraderie--packs such a seductive cinematic punch.

“You could say Scorsese has glamorized these guys, but that doesn’t mean he’s made them heroes,” says writer-director Paul Schrader. “In fact, ‘GoodFellas’ reminded me a lot of ‘The Wild Bunch.’ It romanticizes violence, but it doesn’t endorse it. You figure Marty has the same feeling for his wise guys as Peckinpah had for his outlaws. They’re thinking, ‘These people all deserve to die, but God help me--I love them so!’ ”

“A s far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. To me, it was better than being President of the United States. It meant being somebody in a neighborhood full of nobodies.”

Henry Hill in “GoodFellas.”

Even though Joseph von Sternberg shot “Underworld” in 1927, Hollywood’s official gangster movie era kicked off in November, 1930, with the premiere of “Doorway to Hell,” a clunky, now-forgotten picture based on the career of Johnny Torrio, the mobster who organized Chicago’s South Side and willed it to Al Capone before his 1925 retirement.

“Doorway” was a big hit, despite its drab star--Lew Ayres--and its wooden dialogue. (When a cop corners a hood, he intones: “You’re going to treat yourself to a handful of clouds, I mean the kind that come from the end of a .38 automatic.”)

Primed by garish newspaper accounts of gangland warfare, audiences flocked to see the film, where they were rewarded by the presence of James Cagney, who played Ayres’ chum and henchman. By year’s end, “Little Caesar,” with a Romanian emigre named Edward G. Robinson in the title role, had opened and “Public Enemy,” with Cagney elevated to a starring role, had been rushed into production.

Each gangster-movie era spawned stars in its own image. So it was appropriate that Cagney, Robinson and George Raft were the genre’s first matinee idols, reflecting the Depression Era’s fondness for gritty, working-class pugs. A dapper man with a dancer’s grace, Cagney created a new movie idol: boyish but violent; vulgar yet endearing; cold-blooded but irresistibly likable. When his “Public Enemy” moll sassed him at the breakfast table, he shoved a grapefruit in her face.

Hollywood soon took aim on the biggest celebrity of the day--Al Capone, who bragged that he got more fan mail than Herbert Hoover. Eager to immortalize the colorful Chicago gang lord, aspiring movie mogul Howard Hughes assigned Ben Hecht (a former Chicago newspaperman who had written “Underworld”) to put his legend on celluloid. Writing the script in 11 days (at $1,000 a day, delivered to Hecht each afternoon at 6) Hecht created “Scarface,” director Howard Hawks’ violent, inside look at the Capone saga.

The movie had more immediacy than even Hecht could have imagined. Capone obtained a copy of the script and sent a pair of henchmen to make sure Hecht didn’t tarnish the mobster’s legend.

The screenwriter insisted that the film was about other hoods he’d known in his Chicago days. “If this stuff ain’t about Al, why are you callin’ it ‘Scarface?’ ” one of the thugs retorted. “Everybody’ll think it’s him.”

“That’s the reason,” Hecht explained. “Al is one of the most famous and fascinating men of our time. If we call the movie ‘Scarface,’ everybody will want to see it, figuring it’s about Al. That’s part of the racket we call showmanship.”

Though the film was a hit, it marked the end of Hollywood’s first gangster film cycle. As early as May, 1931, Jack Warner, weary of attacks from civic groups, announced that his studio would stop making gangster pictures. By 1933, the newly re-organized Hays Office was riding herd on the studios, ardently attacking any films promoting sex or amorality.

As the Depression wore on, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and the Barker Gang--the urban gangsters’ country cousins--had become national folk heroes. The movies kept their distance from these rural hot rods, though not by choice. After John Dillinger was ambushed by the FBI outside Chicago’s Biograph Theatre, Will Hays notified studio heads that “no motion picture on the life or exploits of John Dillinger will be produced, distributed or exhibited by any member of the MPAA.”

The studios soon found ways around the ban. By the late 1930s, gangster films had made a comeback, launching the career of Humphrey Bogart, who played a series of moody loners in such films as “The Petrified Forest” and “High Sierra.” During the 1940s, gangsters largely disappeared, replaced by spies, private eyes and war heroes. Even after the war, crime films focused on film noir tales of heist jobs and documentary-style detective stories.

Then came the 1950 Kefauver Hearings, which put underworld boss Frank Costello and his cronies on nationwide TV. The next year, Warner Brothers released “The Enforcer,” with Bogart playing a tough district attorney investigating gangland mayhem. Fritz Lang followed in 1953 with “The Big Heat,” an anti-mob revenge drama written by Sid Boehm, another old crime reporter.

By the late 1950s, newspaper exposes had made audiences more familiar with underworld figures. Thanks to the relaxation of an MPAA ban on the use of historical characters, filmmakers unveiled a flood of Tommy-gun bio-dramas, including “Baby Face Nelson” (starring Mickey Rooney!), “Machine Gun Kelly, “Pretty Boy Floyd” and “The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond.” By 1962, gangsters moved to TV, thanks to “The Untouchables,” a series of blunt, morality plays whose two-part pilot was released as a feature called “The Scarface Mob.”

It’s a testimony to the turbulent tide of the ‘60s that Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” a vivid, blood-drenched piece of pop art, was released just five years after “The Untouchables” hit TV. With the help of its glamorous stars, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, it transformed its bumbling gangsters into counter-culture icons. By giving their killing sprees an irreverent amateur spin, it replaced the gangster film’s cautionary morals into a new hipster ethic--live fast, die young and leave a beautiful (if bullet-riddled) corpse.

This attitude resurfaces in the Coen Brothers’ “Miller’s Crossing,” which, like “Bonnie and Clyde,” is a witty, enigmatic reworking of ‘30s gangster lore. “The way Joel and Ethan described it, they always wanted to make a movie where men wear hats and long coats, so a gangster film was perfect for them,” says Barry Sonnenfeld, the film’s director of photography. “We all love gangster films. It’s fun to have bullets ripping into people wearing neat clothing.

“When we shot our big machine-gun scene, after each take either Ethan or Joel would say, ‘More blood?’ And the other one would nod his head and say, ‘Uh, yeh!’ ”

“N obody wants to die the way the gangsters die. We just want to live the way they live.”

--Joe Pesci Today “The Godfather” is acknowledged as Hollywood’s ultimate gangster epic. However it was an unexpected hit. “There had been a few mob films out before us, like ‘The Brotherhood,’ which hadn’t done well at all,” said Fred Roos, who has produced all three “Godfather” films. “But we were the first film to do over $100 million, which was well beyond what any movie grossed in those days.”

Somber and ceremonial, shot in dark, old-masterly light, Coppola’s 1972 film offered an operatic vision of the mob, portraying its mythic godfathers as community pillars, tyrannically opposed to drugs and scornful of boozing and casual sex. The most celebrated killings are intercut with religious ceremonies, as with the christening of Michael Corleone’s first born, giving them the hushed air of biblical sacrament.

Reaching the theaters the year of the Watergate break-in, “The Godfather” was perfectly plugged into a society fascinated by power and corruption, crime and big business. No one blinked when Lee Strasberg, playing Jewish gangster Hyman Roth (patterned after syndicate figure Meyer Lansky) boasted in “Godfather II”: “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.”

By the time Sergio Leone made 1984’s “Once Upon a Time in America,” the gangster genre had completed the cycle. Intense and often brilliant, the gory saga of a pair of Lower East Side gangster pals (played by DeNiro and James Woods) is as much about Leone’s memories of gangster films as about his shady characters.

The heroes of this fall’s barrage of gangster films don’t have the courtly, aristocratic air of the “Godfather’s” Mafia don. The hoods who populate “GoodFellas” and “State of Grace” are scruffy, low-rent characters, warily protecting what little turf they still control. Cut off from the rest of society, reduced to betraying each other, they’re relics from another age, a dying breed of street thugs.

“The Westies are really the last generation of Irish mobsters,” said “State of Grace” director Phil Joanou. “After the trial that resulted from the events in our film, they’re almost gone. Drugs have changed everything. Who needs organized crime when you don’t need an organization? Now you can come in with an Uzi and a bag of crack and run your own block.

“So we thought it would be fascinating to depict the demise of a gang, to show them imploding on themselves--brother against brother--ravaged by all these internal betrayals.”

It’s no wonder most films going into production are set in the past. With violence in our big cities hitting record highs, much of the romance has gone out of today’s gangster figures.

“The public is much more aware of the criminal mentality and what it’s done to our society,” says Paul Schrader. “As many people died in New York City this week as Al Capone killed in a year. So we’re very skeptical of glamorizing these characters.

“You see that in ‘GoodFellas.’ They’re not grand figures. They pull a few heists, play cards, go to nightclubs and sometimes kill people. They’re just punks. The difference between ‘GoodFellas’ and ‘Mean Streets’ (an earlier Scorsese film) is that all the redeemable characters died in ‘Mean Streets.’ The guys in ‘GoodFellas’ are the kids from ‘Mean Streets’ who weren’t worth saving.”

Even if they’ve lost much of their romantic sheen, stories about mobsters still make great movies. You’d have to figure that when Sam Fuller, who made “Underworld U.S.A.,” was talking about gangster films when he said that great cinema offers “love, hate, action, violence, death--in one word, emotion.”

For more than half a century, gifted directors--from Howard Hawks and Fritz Lang to Leone, Coppola and Scorsese--have found them an irresistible lure. “They’re fascinating because they’re so much larger than life,” says Oliver Stone, who wrote Brian De Palma’s remake of “Scarface.” “It’s their very excess that shows the huge contrast in our society between good and evil.

“My original idea for Al Pacino’s character was to pattern him on Richard III, to play the story as a tragedy. Because that’s what happens to gangsters in this country. The cops don’t usually get you--your own excess brings you down.”

It’s not always easy for an actor to capture these characters’ tumultuous emotions. To help himself get in character to play an explosive wise guy in Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” Joe Pesci made the movie’s prop department get rid of the normal half-load of blanks for his gun--and put in a full load.

“I wanted to feel that gun--the kick in my hand and the deafening roar--when I shot somebody,” said Pesci, who also played a mobster in “Once Upon a Time in America.” “It can be dangerous, ‘cause there’s no bullet, but there’s still gunpowder. So we were real careful--and we gave everyone ear plugs so they wouldn’t go deaf when I started shooting.

“When I actually shot the gun, it was very scary. When I was done with the killing, it was completely silent on the set. It was as if we were all wondering what would’ve happened if that had been real.”

The look of a film can be just as important as its acting performances. If “Miller’s Crossing” has an eerie, deliberately artificial ambience, it’s because Ethan Coen insisted that cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld give the film the look of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

As production designer on the upcoming “Billy Bathgate,” which depicts Dutch Schultz through a young boy’s eyes, Patrizia Von Brandenstein is aiming for “a sense of freshness and romance” that would capture a child’s worshipful view of a towering gangster chief.

“We went in completely the opposite direction for ‘State of Grace,’ ” explained Von Brandenstein, who also did the production design for the movie “The Untouchables.” “We were always looking for the dark notes. We wanted the grunge and grime to show the bleakness of these characters’ souls.”

Color was a key element in “The Untouchables” too. “Al Capone was a Neapolitan, so we always surrounded him with the heaviest of colors--deep, dark reds, terra cotta and acid greens. But when we shot the poor folk, we gave them a bleached, washed-out look to give you the sense of how badly they’d been bled by these mobster tyrants.”

Meanwhile, our fascination with these tyrants continues undiminished. “I’ve liked gangster movies since I was a kid,” said “Godfather, Part III” co-producer Fred Roos. “I don’t think it’s the violence that makes them so compelling--I think it’s the way these guys take things into their own hands. They’re not victims. They stand up to people.

“We live in an era where it’s easy to feel powerless. So you can identify with someone who can solve your problems. It’s the ultimate fantasy. If you’ve been done wronged, wouldn’t you want to have a Godfather who could fix everything?”