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.