The Studio that’s armed and dangerous

Warner executives have decided to delay the planned Sept. 7 release of another film,Gangster Squad,according to a person who was briefed on the studio’s plans and spoke anonymously because the change has not been officially announced. The film is a hard-edged cinematic portrayal of the police war on mobsters in mid-20th-century Los Angeles. Warner executives declined to discuss their plan or the studio’s posture in general toward

screen violence.

To go forward with Gangster Squad as is might trigger revulsion at scenes that seem to recall the movie-theater slaughter in Colorado. But to change it substantially or delay it for long might seem to acknowledge an otherwise debatable link between movie violence and real events,breathing life into a discussion that is perhaps more familiar at Warner than at any of Hollywood’s major studios.

The best known of Warner’s early gangster titles were Little Caesar,Public Enemy and I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. A real-life chain-gang member was portrayed in I Am a Fugitive,which was released amid a public outcry over brutality in the name of law. A chain-gang warden sued Warner for defaming him in the film. And the studio had thus entered the fray.

But it was A Clockwork Orange,which was directed by Stanley Kubrick and had its U.S. premiere on Dec. 19,1971,that drew Warner deep into the controversy over movies and their presumed consequences. A fantasy about violent young sociopaths in a skewed future,the movie was sold with a tag line that promised “rape,ultraviolence and Beethoven.” In one English town a woman was later reported in news accounts to have been raped by a gang who sang Singin’ in the Rain,imitating a character played by Malcolm McDowell in the movie.

But even as A Clockwork Orange was first being shown in the United States,Warner created a second set of shock waves,in December 1971,with the release of Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry. In it Clint Eastwood,as a San Francisco cop disgusted by the legal coddling of criminals,settled his scores with a .44 Magnum.

Quentin Tarantino,the master of a new,more whimsical sort of violence,made his debut as a studio writer with True Romance,a drug-and-crime caper released by Warner in 1993.

Natural Born Killers,another film based on a story by Quentin Tarantino but directed by Oliver Stone and written by Stone and others,set up what may have been Warner’s most threatening encounter with real events,at least until the shooting last week. That film,released in 1994,was about a pair of lovers,played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis,whose murderous spree was egged on by the media. Amid a flurry of crimes that were described as having copycat elements,Patsy Byers,a Louisiana store clerk,was shot and paralyzed by a couple,one of whom said she and her boyfriend had been influenced by the film.

Byers filed suit against Stone and Warner’s parent company,Time Warner. The U.S. Supreme Court,in a step that briefly shook the film industry,let stand a decision that allowed the lawsuit to proceed,on the theory that any movie designed to incite violence could indeed create liability. Eventually the case was dismissed in Louisiana on First Amendment grounds but not before Warner and Stone spent years in the legal system.

By the time the Natural Born Killers suit had ended,in 2002,The Matrix,again a Warner film,had already created a new kind of screen violence.

With their intricacies and black-coated hero,played by Keanu Reeves,The Matrix and its two successors were,in a sense,antecedents to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy,which began in 2005 with Batman Begins and ends with The Dark Knight Rises.