Across cultures and languages, gangster movies are usually about the gangsters. While this can often be seen as glorifying criminals who steal, cheat and murder—especially in a society too literal for all but the least subtle of satire—it still makes for good cinema. Crime is kinetic and propulsive. Even if the focus is on the cops or the investigators, crime remains the basis of the plot and action. A gangster film without law-breaking does not really work. Mob Town is a good illustration of the challenges posed by a gangster film that doesn’t feature any crime.
Mob Town tells the story of a meeting of most of the leading Italian Mafia heads in the United States held in Apalachin, New York in 1957. The meeting is a secret, except for one dogged police officer, Ed Croswell (David Arquette) who just knows that something big is about to go down in little-bitty Apalachin. Croswell, not the gangsters, is the focus of the film. He suspects one of his neighbors, Joe Barbara (Danny A. Abeckaser, who also directed the film) has close ties with the New York mob. So he begins tracking the planning of a massive party that Barbara is hosting in hopes that a few crime bosses show up. Little could Croswell or anyone else imagine the magnitude of the party; nearly 100 of the most powerful crime lords in the United States were making their way to Apalachin.
Though Mob Town makes Croswell out to be some kind of prescient hero taking on organized crime, his dogged determination to investigate Barbara is born of a personal grudge from years before and the film shows him consistently overstepping the boundaries of due process and his mandate as a cop. Croswell is not a good cop; he is a vigilante with a vendetta who abuses his position to annoy his neighbor. He stalks Barbara, surveils him for no reason and makes huge leaps of logic based on racist prejudice. Even on the day of the party, when Croswell leads a raid of the property and arrests many of the party-goers, he had no reason to take such action. No one at the party was committing a crime—they were grilling steak and drinking wine—and those arrested were hastily pardoned or let off without even a charge. A quick title card at the end of the film claims that Croswell’s extrajudicial acts helped propel the FBI to begin investigating the mob, but nothing in the film serves as evidence of that.
The issues with Mob Town go beyond the misguided plot endeavoring to lionize an abusive cop. The dialogue is cliché-filled. The tone of the film is impossible to sort out, ranging from poorly comedic to super-serious, often within the same scene. The film is set almost entirely indoors, with generic, uninteresting interior design to cover the period setting on a shoestring budget. Even with all its fidelity to period design, the film can do nothing about the green leaf-filled trees in what is supposedly November, so a viewer wonders why it tries so hard. Nothing about Mob Town has much energy or merit.
A gangster film does not have to be saturated with violence or criminal acts—the best scene in The Godfather, after all, is a tutorial on how to make pasta—nor does it have to focus on the mobsters. But wooden dialogue telling a story about a cop with no respect for civil liberties pursuing mobsters for having a picnic is definitely not a formula for a worthwhile gangster film.
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