ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)

By: Alex Brook Lynn
July 27, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite sympathetic villains. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

TOM POWERS

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. It probably started with Disney’s Robin Hood, in which a cartoon fox preaches wealth redistribution and presents an alternative lifestyle in an unjust economic system. Then, when I was a bit older, I saw Tom Powers in 1931’s The Public Enemy, played by James Cagney. There are a handful of experiences that changed the trajectory of my life spiritually, and being tucked into bed watching Saturday Night Cinema on PBS, seeing Tom Powers glare another man down from a foot beneath him, is one.

The Public Enemy came out after the crash of ’29, during Prohibition, and before The New Deal. Cinema was new and somewhat unregulated, and the likes of Wild Bill Wellman could make movies like this one with sympathetic criminals and explicit scenes of violence without hindrance. It was one of the first films to examine poverty as a root cause of criminality, and dared to compare the life of a gangster to that of a soldier, as those were two of the most popular occupations at the time that could provide the boot straps by which one could pull themselves “up.”

Our introduction to Tom comes after a series of shots of Chicago, of its railways and working slums. We watch the filling of beer buckets carried by a laborer, walking past the crowded corners of men nursing their libation, and the shot ends on Tom and his friend Matt, a smaller, meeker kid. The kids engage in petty theft and sell their spoils to a local hustler named Putty Nose, who eventually betrays them in a heist gone bad. As an adult, Tom is faced with the choice of whether or not to head off to The Great War, but with his older brother Michael already going, it’s decided that the younger of the two should stay home and care for their mother. Prohibition leaves the city inhabitants without the chemical escape that they had become so dependent on. Tom starts bootlegging with his best friend Matt, becoming part of a larger organization and bringing money and means to his family.

The trajectory of Tom’s criminal career isn’t really what hooked me, though. It was the carefully written and beautifully depicted story of the id and anger that makes a man tough enough to do horrible things. Tom’s girlfriend questions why he needs a drink in the morning, and he smashes a grapefruit in her face. She became, for an instant, a mirror to him. Both Tom and his brother engage in killing, but only one of them is respected for it. When Michael comes home an honored veteran, he confronts Tom about his occupation and new life as a thug. He rejects the money Tom offers their mother, and by rejecting that money, Michael has smashed the illusion that there is a greater purpose to Tom’s lifestyle. But Tom can’t beat his brother like he could the girlfriend. He can only attempt to square his life with his brother’s, saying “your hands ain’t so clean. You killed and liked it. You didn’t get them medals for holding hands with them Germans.” The main difference is that Michael was able to come home, and Tom will never come home from the life he has chosen. Wars end and men come home but bootleggers were locked in for life. The luckiest of both sets were, in many cases, the dead.

After a series of back and forth hits — resulting in the murder of his best friend — Tom, full of so much vim, walks into almost certain death to gun down a rival gang. He’s outnumbered a million to one. He walks toward the camera, the heavy rain pouring down, and his form growing larger and out of focus as the spirit of vengeance takes over. After the shoot-out and loud gunfire, he stumbles, falls to his knees and says. “I ain’t so tough.” Tom does not die but ends up in a hospital, coddled in the arms of his family. Suddenly the rival gang kidnaps him, kills him, and stands him up at his family’s door for his brother to see upon answering the knock. Michael glares at the camera and moves toward it, his form growing bigger and out of focus. Violence continues.

Tom Powers was loosely based on Hymie Weiss (a not-Jewish, Polish gangster/rival of Al Capone). The Public Enemy was originally written as a book called Beer and Blood but Hollywood got ahold of it and the writers turned it into a script. The authors, a journalist named John Bright and a pharmacist named Kubec Glasmon, had both observed Chicago gangland for a few years and collaborated presumably while they worked together at the same drug store. When William Wellman, who before directing, had been a juvenile delinquent, a laborer, and then joined the French Foreign Legion as a fighter pilot. He penned a book about his time in France called Go, Get ’Em! and was uniquely qualified to spearhead the rise of the anti-hero in American cinema: a layered type of villainy that develops in the body and soul of a young tough and the inevitable realization of fallibility.

This was the first major success for the writers and an early masterpiece for Wellman. A year later, soldiers turned into criminals for the crime of marching for their promised pay. John Bright eventually fled the McCarthy trials as an American Communist to Mexico. Wellman and Cagney kept making films, and Cagney kept playing out the many iterations and possibilities for the villains that made up gangland America.

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ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)

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