Gangster Films

I

Introduction

Gangster Films, action-oriented films that focus on the criminal activities of gang members. Such films are almost as old as the cinema itself.

II

Early Development in the United States

The Musketeers of Pig Alley, a one-reel (twelve-minute) picture made by D. W. Griffith in 1912, was the first notable gangster film. The appearance of “real” gangsters was a selling point for films like the three-reel The Wages of Sin (1913), which claimed to show how ordinary people “can be changed by law-abiding citizens into police-hunted criminals by the machinations of soulless capitalists”.

These early films were mainly shot in the slums of New York, with gritty realism and stern social warnings. The Volstead Act—the law prohibiting alcohol—promulgated in the United States in 1920, turned American gangsters such as Al Capone into a social force they never were before. This new reality was expressed in films like The City Gone Wild, directed by James Cruze in 1927. Underworld by Josef von Sternberg (1927) is considered the template for the American gangster cycle that flourished in the early days of sound films, kick-started by Warner Bros. with Little Caesar (1930) starring Edward G. Robinson. Jimmy Cagney seared the screen in 1931 with The Public Enemy, and Paul Muni and George Raft starred in Scarface, The Shame of a Nation, in 1932.

For these films, Hollywood contract writers such as John Bright, Kubec Glasmon, Rowland Brown, and others developed a fast, wisecracking style that soon became the slang everyone adopted as gangster dialogue. The more the film-makers struggled to fulfil the censor’s edict that crime films should not glamorize crime, the more these independent, violent street bandits became heroes to an audience wracked by the Great Depression, whose solidarity with law and order had been undermined by Prohibition—repealed in 1933. Actors like Cagney and Robinson, and George Raft’s coin-tossing, were imitated by boys across the United States and the world. The film-makers’ solution to the censorship problem was to portray the hoodlums as tragic figures, risen from poverty to be trapped by the cycle of crime and retribution. This only made these figures more popular.

III

French and British Gangster Films

In other countries, gangster films also became a staple. In France, Jean Gabin portrayed a Robin Hood-like character in Pépé Le Moko (1937, directed by Julien Duvivier), a thief inhabiting the lower depths of the Algerian casbah. French gangster films revived in the 1950s with Rififi (1955) by Jules Dassin, the template of jewel-robbery films. The same year saw Jean-Pierre Melville direct Bob Le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler), establishing his series of laconic crime films: Le Doulos (1961; The Finger Man), Le Samouraï (1967; The Godson), and Le Cercle Rouge (1970) all explored the themes of criminal loyalty, betrayal, and the elusive hope of redemption. Melville’s films constitute a bridge between American crime pictures and the freewheeling experiments of the French New Wave.

British gangster films had to await the departure to Hollywood of Alfred Hitchcock, who dominated the thriller genre in the 1930s with his string of spy films, and it is only relatively recently that the gangster has established a strong presence on the screen, notably in Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance (1970) and 1971’s Get Carter, directed by Mike Hodges and starring Michael Caine. The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980), continued this occasional cycle, which, with Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie, 1998) began a phase of excessive, somewhat comic-book crime films.

IV

Revival of the Genre Since the 1970s

In post-war America, the gangster became a less prominent character in a world dominated by psychological shadows, the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the character of the ambiguous law enforcer, as reflected in the private-eye world of novelist Raymond Chandler and the films known as Film Noir. The tragic figure was now the cop, rather than the criminal. The 1950s saw a real dip in gangster films, but the genre was reinvigorated in 1972 with The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola, based on Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel, with the iconic role of Don Corleone played by Marlon Brando, followed by The Godfather, Part II (1974), described by the New Yorker as “an epic vision of the corruption of America”.

This time round, the real-life mafia figures were no longer tragic, but icons of a corporate culture of consummate greed, rotting the very fabric of “family” that was so powerful an American ideal. Al Pacino, snorting his way through his own cocaine mountain in the Brian De Palma updating of Scarface (1983), reconfigured the original Paul Muni character as a Cuban refugee wallowing in violence that had become an end in itself. Society could no longer be defended against the gangster, as the law played by the same twisted rules.

Elsewhere in the cinema, other societies adopted gangster films as a reflection of their own often severe flux and change. This has been most apparent in Hong Kong and Japan, whose own genre films have tended to eclipse the American product in panache and excess. Essentially old-fashioned “cops and robbers” stories, Hong Kong films like Tsui Hark’s The Butterfly Murders (1979) and the cycle initiated by John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), led to a string of films that blurred the distinction between policeman and gangster, showing both as tragic romantics engaged in a highly choreographed dance of death. Love is unattainable, and only male bonding of a particularly doom-laden nature appears to make any sense.

A very similar attitude is expressed in many Japanese “Yakuza films”, made by directors such as Seijun Suzuki, Kinji Fukasaku, and “Beat” Takeshi Kitano. Crime lords who fancied themselves as inheritors of the samurai tradition, the Yakuza have been portrayed in more recent films as existentially lost in an absurd ritualistic drama, as in Kitano’s Sonatine (1993), in which a crime boss and his gang try to escape their fate at a seaside hideout. The gangsters, once seen as a social evil, or as violent nihilists, are now seen as symbols for Japan’s current anomie and moral vacuum. Elsewhere, the gangster continues as before, a destructive free spirit, tempting a conformist society with a delusory sense of personal power, doomed to an increasingly apocalyptic failure.