The Purple Gang

1959: Frank McDonald, director; starring Barry Sullivan, Robert Blake, Elaine Edwards. A less-than-stellar fictionalized version of the Purple Gang’s story. The Detroit gang, reportedly one of the toughest in the country, really had less than a decade on top of the Detroit rackets before schisms within the gang led to its downfall. The film has been criticized for getting some important details wholly wrong: the real-life gang was mostly Jewish, which was completely taken out of the movie. Newsreel footage and an introduction by Congressman James Roosevelt, son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, failed to overcome what was essentially a “teens out of control” drive-in movie script with a young Italian-American Blake as the lead gangster.