Crime pays

As two white-collar crime movies become frontrunners for the Oscars, the aurthor looks at Hollywood's greatest films in the genre

What can you say when a small-time con artist from the Bronx and his ambitious but equally dead-beat girlfriend from Albuquerque masquerading as a titled Englishwoman tie up the mighty Federal Bureau of Investigation (with whom they were supposed to be co-operating) in a smart sting and walk away scot free? Or when a glib scamster who built up a penny stock boiler room brokerage into a billion-dollar operation skimming money from gullible investors ends up being a successful self-improvement guru after serving minimal time by ratting on his erstwhile comrades? Crime pays, and how!

It pays in another sense as well.  American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street, the two Hollywood films spinning these yarns, are currently raking in the moolah at multiplexes all over the world. And having already grabbed a bagful of Golden Globes between them, they are among the leading contenders across many categories for Oscars in two months’ time.

Some may find the latest Martin Scorsese over-the-top three-hour opus heavily laden with profanity and some off-putting acts, depicting the rise and gentle fall of Jordan Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), the eponymous Wolf, a shade disagreeable, as I did. But no such reservations apply to the adventures of Irving Rosenfeld and Sydney Prosser aka Lady Edith Greensly who hustle FBI. That film packs so much wit, intrigue and punch in two-hours-and-a-bit that it actually seems longer! Apart from clever scripting, it has the best ensemble cast acting seen in quite some time. If I were to award the Oscars, the winners for the best actors would be Christian Bale and Amy Adams, and for supporting roles, Bradley Cooper and the immensely talented Jennifer Lawrence, still only 23, from Hustle, with the best film and director statuettes for Gravity.

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Our fascination with these films arises from truth often being more mystifying than fiction. Hustle recreates what had come to be known as the Abdul or Arab scam in the early 1980s, and Wolf is the saga of a real Belfort and his Stratton Oakmont of the late 1980s-early 1990s. These two join a growing list of films about white collar crime, either real-life or fictional but real enough to be convincing. The 2011 Margin Call showed us convincingly how a large Wall Street investment bank in the midst of a restructuring in 2007-08 discovered its portfolio had very large toxic assets of dubious home mortgages, courtesy the subprime scandal, and offloaded them on unsuspecting buyers just one step ahead of bankruptcy.

Catch Me if You Can (2002) is the life of Frank Abagnale (DiCaprio again) who impersonated everyone, including airline pilots, doctors, lawyers, and scammed millions, in the process. He ended up assisting FBI detect bank frauds. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) was fictional, but its main character, Gordon Gecko, a credible composite of numerous stock exchange shysters, and his tag line, “Greed is good” have both passed into screen lore. Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) may have been adapted from a Hong Kong grade B film, but it portrayed the corruption of the Boston police so well that the origin hardly mattered. It does not, however, quite deal with white collar crime — we may call it a blue-grey collar demi-monde. Scorsese had earlier brought to life Henry Hill and the Lucchese mob he belonged to in Goodfellas (1990) which is now regarded a trend-setting classic.

Brian de Palma narrated the riveting chase G-man Eliot Ness and his fearless crew carried relentlessly to catch the notorious Chicago mobster Al Capone in The Untouchables (also 1987), which had the memorable scene of a mother watching helplessly her baby in a pram trundling down a staircase and an FBI agent saving it in the nick of time.  They finally got Capone for, of all the things, tax evasion! And of course, The Godfather remains the granddaddy of all modern crime films, especially parts I and II.

The not-so discrete charm of this class of pictures has attracted to it luminaries with varied and solid earlier reputations. Francis Ford Coppola excelled with The Godfather.  Roman Polanski essayed the noir Chinatown (1974).  Steven Spielberg directed Catch.  Though not among his best, it is still significant.  Sidney Lumet also tried his hand, successfully at that, making Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Scorsese is acknowledged to be the presiding deity, with able acolytes in de Palma and David O Russell of Hustle. Across the Atlantic, Guy Ritchie, the former Mr Madonna, has been plying the trade quite nicely. David Mamet’s scripts are standard-bearers for comparison. Robert De Niro and Al Pacino own the franchise on the Mafiosi (De Niro has a cameo appearance in Hustle).  DiCaprio has put his stamp on scamsters.

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Crime as a genre has always beguiled the reader and the viewer (maybe it panders to our subconscious criminal instincts?), but why do these real-life simulations hold a special place?  We enjoy, say, the Ocean and Beverly Hills Cop series, or Topkapi going back half a century, as flights of pure fancy.  We don’t ask the question, real life mein aisa hota hai kya, because we already know the answer.

But Hustle, Wolf and other films of this genre are not documentaries, and take liberties with some details to enhance the drama (Hustle says at the start, “some of this happened”, meaning that some didn’t).  They lavish attention on period and costume re-creation, leading to a sense of verisimilitude, but the characters enjoy imagined amusing quirks and their looks stand enhanced to add to their allure. In Hustle, not only do Adams and Lawrence look drop-dead gorgeous unlike their real-life counterparts, but their characters play crucial roles in plot development, going against the set template. Such films give some play to our and the director’s imagination without the suspension of disbelief.  That is their USP.

Indian crime films have been largely about dacoits and the underworld. While that has given us classics such as Sholay and Deewar, most of these formulaic works are pedestrian. Some recent thrillers are partially based on reality and Ab Tak Chhappan, A Wednesday, Shanghai, D-Day, and Madras Café, among others, have held audience attention, won acclaim, as well as made money.  To date, however, Special 26 remains our only white-collar crime picture.

We do not lack in scams nor our filmmakers in imagination. Could we then expect home-grown additions to this genre?  Movies on Harshad Mehta and Satyam would make the offers multiplex-goers would find hard to refuse, as they say!
The writer fancies himself as a cineaste