The St. Valentine's Day Massacre
 
 

Director: Roger Corman
Year:  1967
Rating: 7.0


Nostalgic gangster films based on true life characters made a comeback of sorts in the late 1950's/1960's - perhaps due to the success of the TV show The Untouchables. Murder Inc., Mad Dog Coll and Bonnie and Clyde are a few of the others. Roger Corman, who had made Machine-Gun Kelly in 1958 starring Charles Bronson, pitched the idea of depicting the events leading up to the St. Valentine's Massacre to 20th Century Fox. They gave him a budget $2.5 million which was enough for Corman to make 5 films - so he made the film for $400,000. And that shows a bit - the sets never really look authentic - but still this is an enjoyable rat-a-tat-tat film with the gangs of Capone and Bugs Moran going after one another in 1929. It is narrated in The Untouchable's style and as far as I know, all the actions and characters were based on what really happened.


For his $400,000 budget Corman got a pretty good cast - Jason Robards as Capone, Ralph Meeker as Moran, George Segal as one of Moran's hired killers (but it is hard for me to take Segal seriously as a cold-blooded killer and the fight with his moll felt like it was out of The Owl and the Pussycat), Bruce Dern as a mechanic (professional killer) and other familiar faces that always seem to show up in Italian gangster films. Of course where this film leaves off, Some Like It Hot begins.