The St Valentine's Day Massacre

One of Corman's best films, far superior to Richard Wilson's Al Capone as a study of Capone's Chicago. The film revels in the mythology of the genre, both paying homage to it and reinterpreting. It was one of the few films up to that time, for example, to stress the purely Sicilian nature of the Mafia and its relations with non-Sicilians like Capone. The elaborate intrigue of the gang warfare is treated in a hard, almost documentary style, with newsreel-type commentary. It also remains unmarred by spurious moralising: morality, in fact, is suspended in favour of mythology.