Martin Scorsese is renowned for his gangster movies, with some of the standouts including Mean Streets and Goodfellas, to name but a few. It was another gangster flick, though, that eventually won the talented director his currently one and only Oscar, after repeated rejections.
He eventually bagged the Oscar he so deserved for his film The Departed (2006), starring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon in the lead roles. Scorsese’s turn towards the genre was inspired by another filmmaker, perhaps not so well known. Rowland Brown was a writer and director who made a number of gritty and subversive crime dramas.
Among them were Quick Millions, Hell’s Highway and The Devil is a Sissy, which helped portray the underworld in a light rarely seen before.
But it was another crime film by Brown that had a transformative effect on the US director.
Blood Money was released in November 1933 and follows the story of George Bancroft’s bail bondsman.
Bancroft’s character, Bill Bailey, moves among both the rich and famous political circles and the hidden criminal underworld of Los Angeles.
He lives in a world of total, casual corruption, where all he has to do is pick up the phone to get the charges against a client dismissed.
His woes begin when he falls in love with a slumming socialite who bluntly and startlingly declares her sexual preferences with the immortal line: “If I could find a man who would be my master and give me a good thrashing, I’d follow him around like a dog on a leash.”
The anti-hero is drawn into a dangerous web of betrayal through his liaison with Ruby Darling.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, Scorsese underlined just how much he was influenced by the film and the director.
“Rowland Brown, a largely forgotten figure, made three tough, sardonic movies in the early ‘30s, each one very knowledgeable about city politics, corruption, the coziness between cops and criminals.
“This is my favourite. The ending is unforgettable.”
Brown was rumoured to be an ex-prizefighter, an ex-bootlegger, an alcoholic, a friend to well-known gangsters, and a communist.