Each month, one of our writers will be sharing movies that were set and/or shot near where they have lived as a personal lens into these films…

by Kevin Bresnahan, Contributor

I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.
– Frank Costello, The Departed, 2006

Boston has undergone a film renaissance in the last generation, beginning with Good Will Hunting and carrying on through Boondock Saints and Gone Baby Gone, one sordid tale after another of low-class grit and the “old neighborhood,” each one cementing the vision of Boston as one of the last bastions of something or other.

Some great directors have come to town, like Clint Eastwood, and Martin Scorsese twice. They study poor white Boston in the same way anthropologists study the San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, as a way to imagine how their ancestors lived. They have forged a modern cinematic myth about the city which endures to this day. 

But not long ago Boston was a cinematic graveyard. “Banned in Boston” was a way of advertising a picture’s sexiness, in contrast to the city’s dour moralistic oppression. The Catholic Church, in rare agreement with the old Protestant aristocracy, intended to look after the morals of the children of Boston. It’s hard now to conjure the place cities like Boston and Philadelphia used to have in the popular culture. They were the American Europe. Boston used to be fancy. Boston used to be snooty. Henry James wrote The Bostonians in 1886 and Merchant Ivory made a movie out of it in 1984. It was gorgeous, a celebration of the vanished aristocratic Boston, the last call for old Anglo-American ascendancy. Any Late George Apleys after this were just too late. Oddly enough, it starred Dame Judy Dench in every single role. 

But Boston no longer stands for old line aristocracy and pince-nez. The city has taken on another cinematic identity, as the last true bastion of poor white authenticity.

Truth be told, Boston is not my hometown. I grew up in a small suburb on the North Shore, an hour from the city, the last stop on the commuter rail, a place where the Irish lived after they moved out of the city. But I’ll never forget those magic carpet rides into that rusty old town, and being a kid with my parents or my cousins, rumbling over the triple-deckers of Chelsea, my faced glued to the window, and then coming up out of the T at Kenmore and forging through the vast, mixed, crazy city crowds, the smell of sausage and pepper and the hubbub of city life. I loved it. 

When I graduated from college I did two things. I took out a shit ton of credit cards, and I moved into the city of Boston. It was the first time I had ever lived alone in my life. My first apartment was on the then-more modest North Side of Beacon Hill.  I took particular delight in knowing that this neighborhood had been haunted by America’s first major serial killer. I sat in my stuffy walk-up studio apartment and watched the VHS of the 1968 Henry Fonda number, The Boston Strangler, starring Tony Curtis as the killer, Albert DeSalvo, who may or may not have done it. He was murdered in prison so we’ll never know. The city was still rusty and riveted when I moved in. The vast gentrification of the next twenty years was only just beginning. The Big Dig was just starting, and “Whitey” Bulger had not yet gone into the wind. 

When we think of the deep American myth, we think of cowboys, and the Wild West. Rugged individualism. That’s our epic story, right? But “the West” is largely an imagined notion conceived by the writers of dime novels, and fed off by politicians trying to lower taxes, and it neither bears nor ever bore any resemblance to the truth of the West, which is that it was a barren death hole until the Federal government showed up and dammed the rivers.Had our politics gone a different way in this country, the immigration story would be our true national myth. It should have been. And it was born in Boston – and also in that other city at the mouth of Hudson with the shitty sports teams. 

The great director John Ford, our cinematic poet-laureate of vanishing myths, knew something about creating the idea of the West. Because he had created the idea of the west. In The Last Hurrah (1958) he sets out to shift that focus to his home on New England.

The picture is based on the same-named novel by local journalist Edwin O’Connor. It’s a story of immigrants overcoming the oldest aristocracy in America, Boston, the original City of the Hill. The Puritans who stole the city from the Shawmuts, and now in turn were being displaced by the hordes of beery Irish immigrants who have flooded in. The Last Hurrah details the final political campaign of Francis J. “Frank” Skeffington, a corrupt but beloved mayor, and a ward healer of the old school, tightly based on the very real James Michael Curley, the Purple Shamrock himself. 

In Boston, the Frank Skeffingtons of the world took care of the old neighborhood, ensuring that the home folks had access to housing, to jobs. And in the end, the myth would have it, they charged up Beacon Hill like Gaelic Teddy Roosevelts and seized the city from the dread English-Americans.

The truth is more boring of course. The Irish took over Boston by becoming lawyers and accountants. The Irish took over Boston by studying hard in school and getting into good colleges and becoming stock brokers and executive VPs. The glamorless reality is that the Kennedys never made a dime from rum running. They were investors. Hard to put to a ballad, what with the fiddle and all. But there it is. 

In The Last Hurrah the torch is being passed to this new generation of middle-class Bostonians, tempered by the war, with GI Bill college degrees and golden retrievers and television sets.

Spencer Tracy’s portrayal of Mayor Skeffington is good – Tracy was almost always good – but a bit too sweet, too sentimental. Jeffrey Hunter takes on Adam, the nephew Frank Skeffington takes under his wing. The mayor’s own son, Junior, is a gibbering hepcat fool and has no more interest in Frank’s world than Frank has in his.

The mayor knows this is a farewell tour. He wants to beam the whole history of a vanishing civilization into Adam’s brain, like the probe did to Star Trek’s Captain Picard in “Inner Light.”

Tracy and Ford, two giants of American cinema, didn’t like each other. Not only because it is often best not to have two angry Irish drunks in the room at the same time if it can be avoided, but also because they were both in love with Tracy’s longtime partner, Katherine Hepburn. For Kate’s part, she sometimes wondered if the two weren’t ever so slightly into each other. 

Ford’s well-known Achilles heel for sentimentality is very clear here. He goes easy on the old corrupt political machine. But in another sense, the great expressionist is in his element. He grew up in a New England Irish ghetto, too, in Portland, ME, and he seems to have loved recreating that vanished world, the crowded spaces, the chatter, the tippling, the bullshitting, the contempt bred by familiarity and the intimacy bred by contempt. In the end, the old street fighter Frank Skeffington goes down just as he lived, with a final resonant Fuck You to the aristocrats and their lace-curtain Irish subalterns. 

Alan J. Pakula’s The Verdict occupies Boston thirty years later, and the meantime has been eventful for the city. This is the grim gritty 70s. This is Boston seen through the eyes of Mean Streets. Paul Newman is a disgraced lawyer who ends up with a dog of a case, suspiciously gifted to him by an old friend. 

The Verdict is a terrific courtroom drama backed up by a tight David Mamet script and one killer performance after another, from Newman of course, but also Jack Warden, Charlotte Rampling, and from the smoothly sinister James Mason; Lindsay Krause will break your heart as Kaitlin, the nurse put in an impossible situation by the rich doctors, and the Catholic Church itself. Newman’s exquisitely drunk lawyer finds one last windmill to tilt at, the Archdiocese of Boston, the single most politically powerful bishopric of the Catholic Church since Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians. 

At one time during the 20th century, Boston was basically a religious city-state out of medieval Italy. It’s hard to describe the hold the Church had on Irish Americans. In the old country every aspect of Irish identity had been stripped away by the British, even the unpronounceable Irish language itself. But Catholicism was there, the one thing the Irish had that could stand up to anything, that was older than the English crown. The monarchy were Johnny-Come-Latelies, mere parvenús, compared to Holy Mother the Church.

It was one of the things the immigrant clung to most fiercely when they got to Massachusetts and found themselves in a Yankee state dominated by upper class English Americans who were often the literal cousins of their “betters” back at home. 

Catholicism protected us for a hundred years. But my goodness the Church took a terrible price for it. 

The series of articles which define Spotlight (2015) began to land on the doorsteps of Eastern Mass in 2001, laying out the sordid history of sexual assault by priests in the Archdiocese. This came as a surprise to precisely zero people. Growing up, we all knew that it was a bad idea to be alone with Fr O’Redacted, or had heard tales of strange doings in the rectory. Every once in a while, there would be an “incident” and one of the parish priests would go away, “on retreat.” Priests were regarded as special, as men not like others, and they did strange things. They had given up so much for us. When there was a “problem” the Church took them somewhere else to get treatment. 

Or so we had thought. What those Boston Globe articles taught us, as they hit the street one after another like a drumbeat, was that the hierarchy of the church had been merely shifting these “problem” priests into new parishes, with new victims; the Cardinal had aided and abetted these rapists, had fed them victims on a conveyor belt. 

John Slattery, a Boston boy himself out of Saint Sebastian’s – preppy Irish, God help us – takes on the role of Globe editor Ben Bradlee Jr. Bradlee’s father had broken a little political scandal called Watergate, at the Washington Post. The son, as portrayed by Slattery, seems more intent on going along to get along, and the performance gets perfectly that kind of genial sardonic New Englander.

But an outsider arrives to take the helm at the Globe, in the form of Liev Schreiber as Marty Barron. You think this guy has no idea what he has walked into in Boston – he’s Jewish, for the love of Mike, and he doesn’t like baseball – until Schreiber’s watchful, cagey performance hints that maybe the new editor-in-chief may know exactly what he’s doing. 

In the end,Michael Keaton’s investigative Spotlight team reveals the brutal truth. It’s worse than anybody can imagine, and the list is too long, far too long, of those charged with the care of city’s children who opted to stay silent in abeyance to power and money. 

Boston has never been the same.

In September 1981 James “Whitey” Bulger strangled a young woman with his own hands. Debra Davis.  She was the girlfriend of his best friend, Stephen Flemmi. She maybe knew something about a crime they committed. Bulger wanted to be sure. He told his friend to kill the girlfriend, but Flemmi couldn’t do it. So Whitey Bulger volunteered to strangle Deb himself. She was like 5’2” and he lifted her off the ground as he choked the life out of her in an empty South Boston apartment. Her legs shook and she soiled herself.  

Irish culture is full of stories of the noble outlaw. The Irish themselves were basically criminalized in their own country, not unlike Black people here. The traditional view of crime and lawfulness gets turned on its head when you’re born an offender. 

Not only did Whitey Bulger take advantage of this leniency toward the criminal to make himself a crime legend in Boston, but in the same way Boston crime movies also learned to trade on this twisted view to celebrate the illicit and the criminal because it is thought to be “real.”

In the end, it took the eye of an Italian-American stonecutter from Queens to see how the pieces really fit together. 

I was a big fan of Infernal Affairs, the top notch 2002 Andy Lau actioner out of Hong Kong’s fertile 90s movie scene, so when I heard that Martin Scorsese was adapting the story in Boston, I was pretty chuffed.  Lately things had been going well for Massholes. We’d won the Super Bowl; we’d won the World Series. The best artists, the funniest comedians were coming out of Boston, suddenly, in a kind of Southie Renaissance. It was enough to shame that city north of New Jersey where smokes cost $12 a pack. It seemed only natural that the best director in the country should make a movie about our strange dark home. 

Brad Pitt, who produced, had bought the Lau property and then did something smart. He found William Monahan, a Dorchester boy, like the ubiquitous Wahlbergs  – they are properly called “Dot Rats” – who’d been doing some good but unnoticed writing work in LA, and asked him to adapt the script to his hometown. 

The result is one of those pictures – Star Wars Episode IV is one, Pulp Fiction is another – which stop time a little bit, and you realize there isn’t a single scene you wouldn’t die for.  

Colin Sullivan, Matt Damon’s soulless bounder of an inspector on the pay of the mob boss, is well done, but the movie hinges on undercover cop Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is torn between his duty as a State Police officer and the loyalties he’s forged in the underworld. As it happens, Costigan is used to being split between two worlds – his long-dead father was a small time South Boston guy, and his mother came from a lace-certain family on the North Shore. Mark Wahlberg’s hard-ass Sergeant Dignam sniffs out Billy’s lack of city cred right off the bat. 

“You were kind of a double kid, I bet, right? One kid with your old man. One kid with your mother. Upper middle class in the week, and then dropping your 'r's and hanging in the Southie projects with daddy the donkey on the weekends…” And then Dignam delivers the coup de grace, “You had different accents. You did, didn’t you? You little fucking snake…”

There is no more damning accusation in Boston than trying to hide your accent. 

I myself grew up speaking the pure Boston, but hastily scoured the accent away when I got to college. I watched and listened. I drilled myself on rhotal Rs. I practiced for hours. The key to changing your accent is to just be a different person.

But this kind of thing does have a price, and Costigan ends up seeing a police trauma therapist, if mostly to score Xanax. In yet another criss-crossing of paths, Damon’s Sullivan, the actual mob mole, ends up involved with the therapist as well. And as in the Andy Lau original, the therapist feels torn between two men – one is a crook pretending to be a cop and the other is a cop pretending to be a crook. Farmiga takes what could have felt forced, and gives it a natural edge. She’s one of those gifted performers who seem not to be acting at all.  She’s learned how to appear to be a human being who happens to be caught on film. I’d pay $20 to watch her paint a chair. 

Behind it all is Frank Costello, The Departed’s answer to Whitey Bulger. This isn’t the only time Bulger has been rendered on film. In Black Mass Johnny Depp gave a careful performance, more accurate to the historical Bulger, but Jack Nicholson’s “Frank Costello” is so over the top, so operatic, so satanic that it almost put me off lobster. The performance bears down hard on the sheer amorality of Costello, the nihilism, and it is terrifying.   

My father, I should probably admit, was a casual acquaintance of William Bulger, the mobster’s brother and the “legit” member of the family, who served first a President of State Senate, and later as president of the University of Massachusetts. Benedict Cumberbatch misses him, I think, in Black Mass. Billy was a tough little Southie kid, too, but he just studied in class. 

At any rate, in the end, the State Troopers came for Whitey, after Boston PD and the FBI had covered his back for so many years. 

As much as anything else, as much as lobsters, cream pies or obnoxious sports fans, Boston is known as home of the accent. Linguists called it East New England dialect, or ENE. In the movies it means local authenticity. A fun parlor game is rating how badly the actors screw the accent up. They try too hard, they try to make it too weird, and end up sounding like carnies. 

Boston, to Hollywood, is atavistic, it is authentic, and it is, above all, white. It’s a reassuring story, in a way. If the whites of Boston are as poor, as dysfunctional, as fucked up as urban Black communities, then this will absolve America of the stain of race. 

It doesn’t, and they always get the accent wrong anyway. 

The truth is, of course, that Boston is far more diverse than the Hollywood record has it. Black communities in Boston go back three hundred years free, and may be window dressing for filmmakers, but possibly are not to themselves. And like every other major city in America, Boston has been reinvigorated by recent waves of immigrants from the global south. The last time I was in town, my Uber driver was a Sudanese grad student in public health called Yusif, and we both agreed we needed to be wary of “that son of bitch” Trump.

But Yusif still couldn’t get me into to the Neptune Oyster Bar. Boston is too goddamn hip now. 

I still know where the good dives are though.