The very first gangster movie.

Among D.W. Griffith’s many accomplishments as a filmmaker is the invention of the gangster genre. The Musketeers of Pig Alley contains many of the classic elements of what would later be called the gangster picture. Set in the slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side its youthful hero is a musician (Walter Miller). There is also a girl (Lillian Gish) and her ailing mother (Clara T. Bracy). Griffith regulars and future stars Lionel Barrymore, Donald Crisp and Gish sister Dorothy all have small roles.

The crowded, teeming streets are evocative of lower Manhattan. The sets include a tenement building apartment and stairway, an exterior and interior saloon and of course the titular alley. In one scene there is a lively party taking place in Pig Alley. Although this was made eight years before the start of the roaring twenties the gangsters are all familiar types.

One day the musician joyfully returns from a gig with his pocketbook full of cash, only to be mugged by several neighborhood tuffs, led by Snapper Kid, Chief of the Musketeers. Elmer Booth suggests a young James Cagney as he moves through the neighborhood with a cocky swagger. Cagney would have been a youth of thirteen when this movie came out, a product of these same mean streets.

The plot moves fast and furious in this seventeen minute movie. One day while the daughter is out the ailing mother has a heart attack and dies. The musician sets out to recover his stolen money and the grieving girl goes with a female friend to a party that is referred to in the subtitles as a Gangster’s Ball.

At the dance the girl gets caught in the middle between the Musketeers and a rival gang. They decide to take their beef outside. The movies’ most famous shot is when Griffith has his characters walk towards the camera as they slink along a wall in the alley, until they are in close-up, before passing by. Snapper Kid lingers for a brief moment sneering into the lens. The climax is a shootout between the two gangs in Pig Alley.

The Musketeers of Pig Alley is a great example of how innovative Griffith was. Notice how he uses the actions of his characters to suggest camera movement. He also understood that an audience could follow a storyline without needing every detail to be spelled out. This remains one of the seminal director’s best known shorts before he achieved immortality with The Birth of a Nation.
 

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