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to an audience wracked by the Great Depression, whose solidarity with law and order had been undermined by Prohibition—repealed in 1933.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.