Emily

Another highly masculine film genre is the gangster genre, which also has a long cinematic history, dating back to D.W. Griffith's //Musketeers of Pig Alley// (1912). The gangster genre surged in popularity during the 1930s, and most historians locate the beginning of its classical phase at this time. The gangster picture became an excellent format to display cinema's sound capacities: ballistic machine gun fire, screeching tires and sharp streets electrified the screen. The rise also coincided with historical conditions of Prohibition, notorious real gangsters, like Al Capone, and violent outbursts, such as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929. Film historian Robert Warshow has argued that gangster films represent an American form of tragedy, pivoting on capitalism's dark underbelly. Warshow's formula for all gangster films typically involves a poor immigrant so desperate for the American dream--money, position, flashy clothes and cars--that he falls prey to a life of crime. His rise is feverish and his downfall complete, usually culminating in a spectacularly violent death. This climactic ending was necessitated, in part, by censorship's demands for compensating moral values. Filmmakers couldn't glorify crime; they had to make sure that it didn't pay in the final analysis. Yet, the interest center--a film's most memorable and influential qualities--of the gangster film rests squarely with the use of guns, cars, piles of cash and street smarts. As with the Western, the gangster film reinvents the public's fascination with the swaggering male Western outlaw who has an underlying distrust of modern society, this time set in a decidedly urban milieu. During the 1930s, cultural anxieties continued to mount over the ghettoization of major urban cities across America. Public attention was focused on individual's fight to access financial security, in addition to new forms of contraband. These factors ensured the success of the gangster film genre, which developed at this time. Key examples of classical gangster films include //Little Caesar// (1930), //Scarface, The Shame of The Nation// (1932) and //The Roaring Twenties// (1939). http://www.fathom.com/course/10701053/session3.html
 * The gangster genre**
 * [[image:http://www.fathom.com/course/10701053/scarface2.gif width="248" height="189" caption="scarface"]] ||
 * American Film Institute ||
 * Paul Muni stars in the classic gangster movie, //Scarface, the Shame of a Nation// (1932). ||


 * Crime and Gangster 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 murdering their way through life.

Criminal and gangster films are often categorized as **film noir** or mystery films, or they are related to detective films - because of underlying similarities between these cinematic forms.

Crime stories in this genre often **highlight or 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.

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.


 * Gangster films are morality tales**, Horatio Alger success stories turned upside down in which criminals live in an inverted dream world of success and wealth.

Although they are doomed to failure and inevitable death, criminals are portrayed as the victims of circumstance, because the stories are told from their point of view - all other "normal" avenues to the top are unavailable to them.

Film gangsters are usually materialistic, street-smart, immoral, meglo-maniacal, and self-destructive.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/crime films are **usually set** in large, crowded cities in the secret world of the criminal: dark nightclubs or streets with lurid neon signs, fast cars, sleazy bars, seedy living quarters or rooming houses.

Criminal/gangster films date back to the early days of film during the silent era. One of the first to mark the start of the gangster/crime genre was **D. W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912)**.
 * 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."

Two of the most influential films that helped to launch the entire genre in the 1930s were German director **Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (Parts I and II) (1922-1923) -** a two-part crime melodrama about an evil, criminal boss capable of disguise and tremendous hypnotic powers, and **Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927)** - a film with many of the crime film's standard conventions and shot from the gangster's point of view. The latter film won the Best Story Award for Ben Hecht - the first Oscar ever awarded for an original screenplay. Lewis Milestone's **The Racket (1928)**, a Howard Hughes-produced film, concentrated on big-city corruption and a municipality controlled by the mob.

Rouben Mamoulian's **City Streets (1931),** was a story penned by Dashiell Hammett and reportedly was Al Capone's favorite film, starring Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sydney as two lovers trapped by gangland connections.

Tay Garnett's violent **Bad Company (1931)** was the first picture to feature the gangland massacre on St. Valentine's Day.

It wasn't until the sound era that gangster films became an entertaining, popular way to attract viewers to the theatres during the **Depression Era and the Prohibition Era** Dbetween 1930 and 1932, when contemporary organized crime was on the rise.

The talkies era accounted for the rise of crime films, because these films couldn't come to life without sound (machine gun fire, screeching brakes, screams, chases through city streets and squealing car tires).

The perfection of sound technology and mobile cameras also aided their spread. Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and George Raft were the major early stars, establishing and defining their careers in this genre.

The screen flaunted the archetypal exploits of swaggering, cruel, wily, tough, and law-defying bootleggers and urban gangsters. The allied rackets of bootlegging, gambling and prostitution brought these mobsters to folk hero status in the newspapers' headlines.


 * Audiences during that time vicariously participated in the gangster's rise to power and wealth.**

The first "100% all-talking" picture and, of course, the first sound gangster film was **The Lights of New York (1928)** - it enhanced the urban crime dramas of the time with crackling dialogue and exciting sound effects of squealing getaway car tires and gunshots.

Three great classical gangster films (among the first of the talkies) marked the genre's popular acceptance and started the wave of gangster films in the 1930s in the sound era. The first two were released almost simultaneously by Warner Bros. (considered the gangster studio par excellence). All three leading men/criminals, bootleg racketeers of the Prohibition era, met their doom in the final scenes of these films, as if they were receiving retribution for their crimes:


 * (1) Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar (1930)** starred Edward G. Robinson as a gritty, coarse and ruthless killer named Caesar Enrico Bandello (a flimsy disguise for a characterization of Al Capone.)


 * (2) William Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931)** starred James Cagney (in his first film) as a cocky, nasty, and brutal criminal - most memorable in a vicious scene where the snarling gangster pressed a half grapefruit into the face of his moll girlfriend (Mae Clarke). [The same stars were reunited in another Pre-Code quasi-gangster/comedy film, Lady Killer (1933).]

In tribute over fifty years later, Brian de Palma remade the film with Al Pacino in the title role **(Scarface (1983). http://www.katpad.co.uk/media%20website%202000/gangster%20genre.html\
 * (3) Howard Hawks' raw Scarface: The Shame of a Nation** (1932) from UA starred Paul Muni as a power-mad, beastly hood (the characterization of Tony Camonte was loosely based on Chicago's brutal, murderous racketeer Al Capone), George Raft (as his coin-flipping emotion-less, right-hand killer), and Ann Dvorak (as Tony's sister Cesca). The ultra-violent, landmark film in the depiction of gangsters included twenty-eight deaths, and the first use of a machine gun by a gangster.

=The Independent Moviemaker - Understanding Genre: the Gangster Film= By [|Will Wright], published Feb 15, 2007 Published Content: 205 Total Views: 600,793 Favorited By: 83 CPs [|Contact] [|Subscribe] [|Add to Favorites] Rating: 4.4 of 5 [|Font] [| Font] Every genre has an archetypical storyline specific to the particular genre. This is particularly true of the Gangster genre. Popularized in the 1930s, this genre is all about impatience. The 'hero' is a man who wants it all, but doesn't want to go through the normal channels to get it. A typical gangster in these stories doesn't have time to advance slowly through the ranks - he wants it all, and he wants it now.
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The strength of this genre is watching the rise and fall of a person who breaks society's rules. Like Icarus reaching for the sun, the gangster must pay the price for wanting everything. The roots of this genre are steeped in Greek mythology, where hubris was always punished swiftly by the gods.

__Motifs of The Gangster Genre__

1. The hero is an immigrant who dislikes his low status in life and wants more.

2. Unlike the Western, this story takes place in the big city. The wide open plains have been traded in for the seedy alleyways and wharves of the urban jungle.

3. The gangster can only gain power by taking it. It is survival of the fittest, and the only law is the law of the jungle.

4. The only loyalty the gangster feels is for his own immigrant roots.

5. Success is measured in material goods - flashy cars, expensive clothes, and mansions. Women are measures of success as well.

6. The hero's antagonist is society, and the enforcers of the law. The police, the FBI, the CIA represent the enforcers of societal status quo.

7. The end justifies the means.

The classic gangster [|film] has been around since Jimmy Cagney learned to [|eat] grapefruit. It is a powerful representation of the underbelly of the [|American] Dream. The inability of the gangster to fit into society ultimately causes his downfall in the classic form. More modern gangster films have added a [|new] twist to the genre. The gangster is undone, not by society, but by betrayal from within. This twist represents a shift in [|American] culture away from looking at 'decent' society as a unified whole, to a society so fragmented that it doesn't supply the unified front necessary to make the genre [|work] in a contemporary setting.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/143685/the_independent_moviemaker_understanding.html**