Crime & gangster

Vintage Cinema presents

Crime film

Crime films are developed around the sinister actions of criminals or gangsters, particularly bankrobbers, underworld figures, or ruthless hoodlums who operate outside the law, stealing and violently murdering their way through life. In the 1940s, a new type of crime thriller emerged, more dark and cynical - see the section on film-noir for further examples of crime films.

The American Film Institute defines a gangster film or gangster movie as a film belonging to a genre that focuses on gangs and organized crime. It is a subgenre of crime film, that may involve large criminal organizations, or small gangs formed to perform a certain illegal act. The genre is differentiated from Westerns and the gangs of that genre.

The Black Hand (1906) by Wallace McCutcheon

Crime stories in this genre often highlight the life of a crime figure or a crime's victim(s). Or they glorify the rise and fall of a particular criminal(s), gang, bank robber, murderer or lawbreakers in personal power struggles or conflict with law and order figures, an underling or competitive colleague, or a rival gang. Headline-grabbing situations, real-life gangsters, or crime reports have often been used in crime films. Gangster/crime films are usually set in large, crowded cities, to provide a view of the secret world of the criminal: dark nightclubs or streets with lurid neon signs, fast cars, piles of cash, sleazy bars, contraband, seedy living quarters or rooming houses. Exotic locales for crimes often add an element of adventure and wealth. Writers dreamed up appropriate gangland jargon for the tales, such as "tommy guns" or "molls."

Film gangsters are usually materialistic, street-smart, immoral, meglo-maniacal, and self-destructive. Rivalry with other criminals in gangster warfare is often a significant plot characteristic. Crime plots also include questions such as how the criminal will be apprehended by police, private eyes, special agents or lawful authorities, or mysteries such as who stole the valued object. They rise to power with a tough cruel facade while showing an ambitious desire for success and recognition, but underneath they can express sensitivity and gentleness.

Gangster films are often morality tales: Horatio Alger or 'pursuit of the American Dream' success stories turned upside down in which criminals live in an inverted dream world of success and wealth. Often from poor immigrant families, gangster characters often fall prey to crime in the pursuit of wealth, status, and material possessions (clothes and cars), because all other "normal" avenues to the top are unavailable to them. Although they are doomed to failure and inevitable death (usually violent), criminals are sometimes portrayed as the victims of circumstance, because the stories are told from their point of view.

Similar to most of cinema’s largest genres, the gangster film dates back to the silent era of film. Perhaps the earliest 'crime' film was Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1900), a 45 seconds long short (released in 1903) that was shown one-person at a time in hand-cranked Mutoscope machines or nickelodeons in amusement arcades. It was also the earliest known film featuring Sherlock Holmes.

Although it wasn’t the first gangster movie ever made, D.W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) is widely recognized as the first significant gangster film, as well as a film that established preliminary interest in the genre.

The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) by D.W. Griffith

Raoul Walsh's first feature film, the silent crime drama The Regeneration (1915) has been regarded as the first feature-length gangster film, with presumably the first complex characterization of a criminal anti-hero. It showcased violent lawlessness on the streets of New York, and the rise of an orphaned Irish-American slum boy named Owen Conway. He grew up to become a drunken gangster  due to repressive social conditions in his environment. However, he was 'regenerated'  after falling in love with do-gooder social worker Marie Deering.

The upcoming 1920s decade was a perfect era for the blossoming of the crime genre. It was the period of Prohibition, grimy and overpopulated cities with the lawless spread of speakeasies, corruption, and moonshiners, and the flourishing rise of organized gangster crime.

Josef von Sternberg's gangland melodrama Underworld (1927) with George Bancroft and Clive Brook, reflected the 1920s. It has often been considered the first modern gangster film, with many standard conventions of the crime film - and it was shot from the gangster's point of view. It won the Best Original Story Award for Ben Hecht - the first Oscar ever awarded for an original screenplay, and the first of Hecht's two Oscar wins. And Lewis Milestone's The Racket (1928), a Howard Hughes-produced film, concentrated on big-city corruption and a municipality controlled by the mob, and was banned in Chicago because of its negative depiction of the police.

It wasn’t until the advent of sound in the 1930s that gangster films truly developed into an entertaining and rapidly expanding genre, as sound enabled the films to come alive via the inclusion of screeching car tires, gunshots, and so forth. Moreover, given that these films were released during the time of the Prohibition Era and when organized crime was on the rise in urban areas, audiences’ intrigue in the subject matter was heightened.

With Warner Bros’ release of Little Caesar (LeRoy, 1931), The Public Enemy (Wellman, 1931), and Scarface (Hawks, 1932) at the start of the 1930s, the genre’s blossoming reputation was solidified. Moreover, in each of these films, the lead’s charismatic personality enabled viewers to identity with the character, but through the character’s inevitable violent downfall, viewers were reminded of the consequences of crime, and an effective formula for the genre was established. Nevertheless, given that these films did glamorize crime and glorify the criminal, initial attempts to censor the gangster film genre were quite strong, and the Hays Production Code forced studios to make moral pronouncements and present criminals as psychopaths after 1934 .

In the 1940s and the post-war period, crime films became darker, more brutal, violent, and cynical - many crime/gangster films were actually film noirs. After World War II, gangsters were often businessmen who represented large and corrupt corporations (often anonymous). The first film to illustrate changes in the character of gangsters after WWII was Byron Haskin's I Walk Alone (1948). Burt Lancaster took the role of Frankie Madison, an ex-con who faced a changed world and a double-cross by his partner after his release from 14 years in prison. He learned that Noll 'Dink' Turner (Kirk Douglas) was now a pseudo-legitimate and respectable, high-flying Manhattan night-club owner/racketeer, unwilling to share in bootlegging profits from an earlier promise.

Crime films merged with film noirs in the post-war period, featuring tales of heroes doomed by passion - and made with highly expressionistic styles. Memorable gangster characters in film noirs included Alan Ladd as a cold, solitary, professional killer in This Gun For Hire (1942), and James Cagney as a violent, psychopathic, mother-fixated, bad-guy killer in the extremely violent White Heat (1949), marking the actor's return to gangster films after a full decade.

At mid-century, Alfred Hitchcock made a major contribution to the crime genre with a series of 'psychological' thrillers. In his mid-1940s film Spellbound (1946), a psychological mystery film, he used contemporary Freudian theory and current interest in analysis plus other psychological elements to increase the suspense.

In the decade of the 1950s, gangsterism was portrayed with organized crime organizations (the Mob) taking over, accompanied by tense action, realistic settings, rich characterizations, and a view of society as sick, immoral and corrupt. In Fritz Lang's classic crime film noir The Big Heat (1953), Glenn Ford played a vengeful homicide detective (after his wife was killed in a car bombing) in pursuit of a big crime operation and its crime lord to clean up the corruption with the aid of a gangster's moll (Gloria Grahame). Its most violent scene included the face scalding and disfigurement of the heavy's (Lee Marvin) girlfriend with a pot of coffee.

A gritty, grim view of New York's waterfront racketeering and corrupt union bosses was portrayed in the violently raw, documentary-style film titled  On the Waterfront (1954), starring Marlon Brando as ex-fighter Terry Malloy and Rod Steiger as Malloy's brother and the union boss' crooked lawyer. In an effective, classic film noir American crime film titled The Big Combo (1955), a gangster's ex-girlfriend helped half-crazed cop Cornel Wilde break a syndicated crime organization led by Richard Conte. At the height of the apocalyptic paranoia of the Cold War, Robert Aldrich's paranoid, suspenseful, noirish, melodramatic crime film Kiss Me Deadly (1955), based on Mickey Spillane's pulp fiction novel, told how sleazy, hard-hitting private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) tracked down a sinister conspirator named Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker) - who possessed an atomic, 'glowing' box containing the Great Whatsit.

The caper or heist film was subgenre of the crime film that developed in the 1950s - John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) was a superb film-noirish example of the 'heist' picture, depicting a gang of assorted criminals conducting a carefully-planned jewel robbery caper. A fatally-wounded gang member Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) died after returning to his father's Kentucky horse ranch in the film's lyrical ending. In Stanley Kubrick's dark, sharp-edged The Killing (1956), Sterling Hayden led a group of criminals in a precisely-timed rip off of a racetrack. In both films, things went awry with disastrous results.

In the light comedic caper Ocean's 11 (1960), the 'Rat Pack', a group of ex-WWII soldiers led by Danny Ocean, orchestrated a heist of five Las Vegas strip casinos  on New Year's Eve. Their successful caper, precisely accomplished with a power outage, ended with a twist - the money hidden in a coffin and transported to San Francisco ended up in a crematory! The original The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) combined two elements - the heist film and a romance, between dapper millionaire/bank robber Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) and sleuthing insurance investigator-lover Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway) - with the famous scene of their seductive chess game. And in The Italian Job (1969), an audacious heist of $4 million in gold bullion from the payroll of Turin-based automaker Fiat was planned by Charlie Croker (Michael Caine) - his clever ruse was to create a paralyzing traffic jam in the streets and while getting away in three Mini Coopers.

With the 1970s, Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) brought a radical revival to the gangster film genre and proved the genre’s critical worth to the history of cinema. The Doberman Gang (1972) was advertised in taglines as having "the most incredible caper ever conceived." An ex-con and some of his friends trained a pack of Dobermans to rob a bank. In Peter Yates' comedic The Hot Rock (1972), a foursome of thieves led by John Dortmunder (Robert Redford) were in continual pursuit of a hot rock - a valuable gem dubbed the Sahara Stone. The Best Picture-winning The Sting (1973) reunited the buddy team of Robert Redford and Paul Newman as two con artists in 1930s, Depression-and Prohibition-Era Chicago who joined together for revenge (with an off-track horse betting trick) against a big-time New York racketeer (Robert Shaw). And after a bank job in Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972), Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw were chased across Texas toward the Mexican border. In Don Siegel's Charley Varrick (1973), Walter Matthau found himself on the run from hitman Joe Don Baker after robbing a bank with mob-laundered funds.

The lesson of the films' successes was not wasted on Hollywood. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the studios issued a steady flow of films about Italian American gangsters and the Mafia. Some of these were critically acclaimed. Scorsese's Goodfellas about Henry Hill's life and relationship with the Lucchese and Gambino crime families, was nominated for 6 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director and won the award for Best Supporting Actor for Joe Pesci's performance. Others, however, strayed into stereotypes and the gratuitous use of Italian ethnicity in minor characters who happened to be criminals. This created a backlash in the Italian American community.

Director Sergio Leone's epic American gangster film, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), a lengthy and sometimes confusing saga, was packed with authentic period details in a story that spanned 50 years. It told about the relationship between two Jewish gangsters, Maxie (James Woods) and Noodles (Robert DeNiro), who grew up together in the ghetto and eventually became major hoods. Brian DePalma's The Untouchables (1987) was an exciting action tale set in Prohibition-era Chicago, where federal agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) battled crime boss Al Capone (Robert DeNiro), with the help of tough veteran Irish street cop Jim Malone (Sean Connery), idealistic, sharp-shooting, Italian-American rookie agent George Stone / Giuseppe Petri (Andy Garcia), and bookish Treasury accountant/agent Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith).

The Coen Brothers contributed the rich character study Miller's Crossing (1990), a stylized gangster film set in an unnamed eastern city in the 1930s. There, Irish mob leader-gangster Leo O'Bannon (Albert Finney) and his laconic right-hand lieutenant-partner Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) had a falling out with the same woman, Leo's mistress Verna (Marcia Gay Harden). Leo competed with rival Italian hood Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) whose henchman was brutal, bisexual Eddie Dane (J.E. Freeman). One of the main plot points was that Leo and rival boss Johnny Caspar feuded over the execution (at Miller's Crossing) of unlikeable bookie "Bernie" Bernbaum, Verna's brother, who was cheating Caspar.

In the early 90s, young screenwriter Quentin Tarantino made his debut film as writer and director. He turned toward directing his own scripts set in the unusual, volatile world of the criminal element. His own directorial debut for a feature film, after having others direct his scripts for True Romance (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994), was for the ultra-violent crime thriller Reservoir Dogs (1992) - in which six thieving strangers were assembled to conduct a diamont heist that unraveled rapidly in the aftermath. Afterwards, he perfected his mix of humor and ultra-violence in the popular, critically-acclaimed film  Pulp Fiction (1994), a complex interweaving of three crime stories.

Modern filmmakers take elements from all the above-mentioned films and sub-genres when creating gangster films today. These films build upon themes and motifs of movies made decades ago to tell new stories about the criminal world. Modern gangster films can be both dark and serious while having humorous, lighthearted moments that tell a rich story about the criminal world. The elements that these movies portray still fall to some of the original themes that were prevalent in the gangster movies of the 1930’s. The ideas of capitalism, living the American dream, gaining power and authority, and generally being in charge of one’s own life are still some of the most important themes in any gangster movie presented to today’s audience.