10 Mob Movie Actors Who Were Actually There
8. George Raft - Scarface
While the definitive image of the mob and crime movie today has been largely painted by the American New Wave of the 1970s - more specifically in the films of Scorsese, Coppola, and Brian De Palma - that doesn't make the genre's formative works from the 1930s and forties any less iconic.
The likes of Howard Hawks' Scarface, Raoul Walsh's White Heat, and William Wellman's pre-code The Public Enemy are just three of the many mob films from the era that exacted a heady influence on the genre and medium more generally, taking direct inspiration from the stories of contemporary criminals like John Dillinger, Al Capone, and Baby Face Nelson, and enshrining the gangster in modern mythology.
Like their New Hollywood descendants, these films were closely entwined with the history of the day. The Great Depression saw plenty of infamous criminals attain folk hero or celebrity status, the aforementioned trio among them, and then post-war with the likes of Mickey Cohen and Cohen's bodyguard, Johnny Stompanato, who were both fixtures of the Los Angeles nightlife and naturally interacted with many Hollywood figures of the day.
One such actor who controversially crossed paths with Cohen and the mob was George Raft, a genre star who started his performing career as a dancer in New York City before coming to Hollywood in the late 1920s. Raft starred in a number of gangster pictures, but none more famous than Scarface and Some Like it Hot, the former a biographical picture inspired by the rise of Capone, and the latter a legendary Billy Wilder-directed romantic comedy about two musicians who witness the St Valentine's Day massacre and disguise themselves as women to avoid reprisals from the Chicago outfit.
Raft, who acquitted himself brilliantly in both of those roles, is said to have pursued his Hollywood career on the advice of Owney "The Killer" Madden, a mob figure who Raft also chauffeured. He maintained these mob connections during his Hollywood peak, allegedly intervening to stop a hit placed on then-Screen Actor's Guild president James Cagney, who was actively combatting mafia activity in the industry.
Raft's ties to the mob ran incredibly deep, being personally involved with the likes of Cohen, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, who was a childhood friend. Talk about connections.