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.