It seems like a big penance for a small sin, bragging on your lover’s prowess, but all Kitty did in The Public Enemy was tell Tommy he might not want to drink before breakfast. Gangsters don’t like to be told what to do, and it’s only a small taste of what he might unleash. “Public Enemy was the movie that started my love affair with the gangster movie,” Chase told the New York Times in 2001. “It really scared me. Especially at the end when Cagney falls through the door all wrapped up like a mummy.”
Chase is no stranger to memorable endings. His own ending to The Sopranos is most frightening in how it’s been challenged and rebuffed. The mystery and suspense of the scene is almost linoleum Gothic, and the abrupt cut to black remains the most jarring series finales in television history. Similarly, the ending of The Public Enemy was so unexpected and graphic, it could fit in Christopher Moltisanti’s “Cleaver,” the fictitious horror gore fest all the families produced.
“Oh, it’s fantastic, I mean, it scared the shit out of me,” Chase told THR. “Cagney played a guy named Tommy Powers who becomes a gangster, but he is very close to his mother, and his brother is like the hero of the family. And Tommy goes through a lot of things. But the ending, yeah: Tommy gets shot and he is in the hospital and he is bandaged like a mummy; you can see his face, but the rest of him is all bandaged. His mother and brother go home—they’ve been told Tom will be coming home in three days. His mother is fluffing up his pillows for him, singing along with a record, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,’ she’s all happy, a few pillow feathers are going around. His brother’s downstairs. There’s a knock on the door, and the brother opens it, and there’s a low shot of the door from the floor, as the door opens, and he’s standing there, Tommy, all wrapped in these bandages and a blanket. But then he falls forward into the lens—he’s dead. Oh, it was really a shock. And his mother is still singing up there.”
Chase actually brings out two very important takeaways The Sopranos glommed from The Public Enemy: the first is the playing of the popular tune, “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” It is heard during the most brutal scene in the film. This was true on the streets when mob hits happened in night clubs or took collection money while car radio blasted, or when an enforcer might want to cover up the sounds of a beating. This was most memorably caught in Jimmy Breslin’s book, which became the film The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight, where a mug feeds quarters into a jukebox and winds up putting on a soft Beatles song which is not loud enough to cover up the business at hand. Chase infused The Sopranos and The Many Saints of Newark with music, as did Martin Scorsese in his many crime pictures. They use hits to define the period, just like Wellman does in The Public Enemy.
The other point he makes is about the mother. Cagney’s gangsters had very interesting relationships with their mothers. In Angels with Dirty Faces, which also starred Bogart and Pat O’Brien, Cagney’s character cries for his momma on his way to the electric chair. In Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949), Cagney’s Cody Jarrett is the toughest mama’s boy you’d never want to run into. Whether he’s tearing up a prison cafeteria in her memory or shouting “Top of the world ma” in the gangster genre’s most incendiary ending, he remembers mama.
Tony is almost dismembered by his mama, Livia, who manipulates Junior into ordering a hit on his nephew which takes off a piece of Tony’s ear. ”I thought about Public Enemy because I remembered how the mother in that movie had been sweet to her son, just the opposite of Livia,” Chase told The Times. ”I thought about how that might affect Tony, and also how the gangster dies at the end and how he might be thinking about how a gangster’s life often ends in death.”
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