#I am gangster cast movie

Columbus swapped the actors’ roles because Ralph Foody, the other, craggier character actor cast in the sequence, had recently undergone knee-replacement surgery and was unable to keel over for the dramatic death scene. Guido was actually cast not as doomed Snakes, but as sleeve-gartered Johnny. It felt good and he must have liked it, because he gave me the part.” “Chris was laughing when I finished the scene and encouraged me to go a little further with it. “I was definitely channeling Cagney,” Guido remembers about his audition with Columbus. “The ideal look was more Ryan Gosling than Brad Pitt. “People back then had different diets,” she told me. He had the speech pattern, comic timing, and, crucially, the look and facial structure of someone from an earlier era. “This seemed like stuff that could deliver a good fright to a kid,” he said, happily.Īccording to casting director Janet Hirshenson, Guido had nailed the audition. Macat is still pleased with the way Snakes dies toward camera and continues to be sprayed with bullets face-down on the floor. Even in the Chicago winter, Macat said, the actors “were sweating up a storm.”Ĭonsistent with the shooting style of Home Alone, much of the scene was shot with low, wide angles that capture the action as if a child were perceiving it. The resulting heat from the lamps was considerable. The lighting was intense: the old-style film stock required four times the amount of light to expose than normal film. There’s even steam rising from an obscured cup of coffee on Johnny’s desk.įor further ambience, artificial mist was pumped into the set.

#I am gangster cast movie

Set decorators Eve Cauley and Dan Clancy fitted the room out with a private investigator’s tools of the trade: an old typewriter, a pair of binoculars at the window, a grabaphone (a style of cradle telephone partly made popular through its appearance in silent films), and a Colt 1921AC Thompson submachine gun-the very Tommy gun that Cagney himself totes in the 1935 mobster movie G Men. HOME ALONE © 1990 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Ralph Foody, who plays Johnny, at his desk between takes. “We didn’t have the biggest construction budget.”) (Webster suspects that the walls were reused in the “real world” of the movie, for the set of the police office. The entire set consisted of just a couple of walls. Like most of the other interior shots in Home Alone, including all the scenes inside the McCallister family home, the sequence was shot on a sound stage in the abandoned New Trier West High School gymnasium. The high-key lighting, high-contrast aesthetic would evoke “a cross between film noir and the really crazy stuff you see in early television, like Playhouse 90 or One Step Beyond,” said production designer John Muto. It was Macat who persuaded Columbus to shoot the sequence using the techniques and black-and-white negative film stock of movies from the 40s. “Now that is a very old-fashioned sentence!” “I believe the title was decided upon only because we needed to create a label for the tape Kevin puts in the VHS player,” said art director Dan Webster. The script pages for the sequence turned up relatively late, referred to only as “the gangster film.” The eventual title-a tip of the fedora to the James Cagney’s Angels with Dirty Faces-came later.