The Gangster Film: Fatal Success in American Cinema

SHORT CUTS

INTRODUCTIONS TO FILM STUDIES

OTHER SELECT TITLES IN THE SHORT CUTS SERIES

THE HORROR GENRE: FROM BEELZEBUB TO BLAIR WITCH Paul Wells

THE STAR SYSTEM: HOLLYWOOD’S PRODUCTION OF POPULAR IDENTITIES Paul McDonald

SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA: FROM OUTERSPACE TO CYBERSPACE Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska

EARLY SOVIET CINEMA: INNOVATION, IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA David Gillespie

READING HOLLYWOOD: SPACES AND MEANINGS IN AMERICAN FILM Deborah Thomas

DISASTER MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF CATASTROPHE Stephen Keane

THE WESTERN GENRE: FROM LORDSBURG TO BIG WHISKEY John Saunders

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: THE PLAY OF SHADOWS Vicky Lebeau

COSTUME AND CINEMA: DRESS CODES IN POPULAR FILM Sarah Street

MISE-EN-SCÈNE: FILM STYLE AND INTERPRETATION John Gibbs

NEW CHINESE CINEMA: CHALLENGING REPRESENTATIONS Sheila Cornelius with Ian Haydn Smith

ANIMATION: GENRE AND AUTHORSHIP Paul Wells

WOMEN’S CINEMA: THE CONTESTED SCREEN Alison Butler

BRITISH SOCIAL REALISM: FROM DOCUMENTARY TO BRIT GRIT Samantha Lay

FILM EDITING: THE ART OF THE EXPRESSIVE Valerie Orpen

AVANT-GARDE FILM: FORMS, THEMES AND PASSIONS Michael O’Pray

PRODUCTION DESIGN: ARCHITECTS OF THE SCREEN Jane Barnwell

NEW GERMAN CINEMA: IMAGES OF A GENERATION Julia Knight

EARLY CINEMA: FROM FACTORY GATE TO DREAM FACTORY Simon Popple and Joe Kember

MUSIC IN FILM: SOUNDTRACKS AND SYNERGY Pauline Reay

MELODRAMA: GENRE, STYLE, SENSIBILITY John Mercer and Martin Shingler

FEMINIST FILM STUDIES: WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA Janet McCabe

FILM PERFORMANCE: FROM ACHIEVEMENT TO APPRECIATION Andrew Klevan

NEW DIGITAL CINEMA: REINVENTING THE MOVING IMAGE Holly Willis

THE MUSICAL: RACE, GENDER AND PERFORMANCE Susan Smith

TEEN MOVIES: AMERICAN YOUTH ON SCREEN Timothy Shary

FILM NOIR: FROM BERLIN TO SIN CITY Mark Bould

DOCUMENTARY: THE MARGINS OF REALITY Paul Ward

THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: FROM BONNIE AND CLYDE TO STAR WARS Peter Krämer

ITALIAN NEO-REALISM: REBUILDING THE CINEMATIC CITY Mark Shiel

WAR CINEMA: HOLLYWOOD ON THE FRONT LINE Guy Westwell

FILM GENRE: FROM ICONOGRAPHY TO IDEOLOGY Barry Keith Grant

ROMANTIC COMEDY: BOY MEETS GIRL MEETS GENRE Tamar Jeffers McDonald

SPECTATORSHIP: THE POWER OF LOOKING ON Michele Aaron

SHAKESPEARE ON FILM: SUCH THINGS THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF Carolyn Jess-Cooke

CRIME FILMS: INVESTIGATING THE SCENE Kirsten Moana Thompson

THE FRENCH NEW WAVE: A NEW LOOK Naomi Greene

CINEMA AND HISTORY: THE TELLING OF STORIES Mike Chopra-Gant

GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST CINEMA: THE WORLD OF LIGHT AND SHADOW Ian Roberts

FILM AND PHILOSOPHY: TAKING MOVIES SERIOUSLY Daniel Shaw

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH CINEMA: FROM HERITAGE TO HORROR James Leggott

RELIGION AND FILM: CINEMA AND THE RE-CREATION OF THE WORLD S. Brent Plate

FANTASY CINEMA: IMPOSSIBLE WORLDS ON SCREEN David Butler

FILM VIOLENCE: HISTORY, IDEOLOGY, GENRE James Kendrick

NEW KOREAN CINEMA: BREAKING THE WAVES Darcy Paquet

FILM AUTHORSHIP: AUTEURS AND OTHER MYTHS C. Paul Sellors

THE VAMPIRE FILM: UNDEAD CINEMA Jeffrey Weinstock

HERITAGE FILM: NATION, GENRE AND REPRESENTATION Belén Vidal

QUEER CINEMA: SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES AND GAY COWBOYS Barbara Mennel

ACTION MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF STRIKING BACK Harvey O’Brien

BOLLYWOOD: GODS, GLAMOUR AND GOSSIP Kush Varia

THE SPORTS FILM: GAMES PEOPLE PLAY Bruce Babington

THE HEIST FILM: STEALING WITH STYLE Daryl Lee

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND FILM: SPACE, VISON, POWER Sean Carter & Klaus Dodds

FILM THEORY: CREATING A CINEMATIC GRAMMAR Felicity Colman

BIO-PICS: A LIFE IN PICTURES Ellen Cheshire

THE GANGSTER FILM

FATAL SUCCESS IN AMERICAN CINEMA

RON WILSON

A Wallflower Press Book

Wallflower Press is an imprint of Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York, Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © Ron Wilson 2015

All rights reserved.

E-ISBN 978-0-231-85067-4

Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press.

Cover image: Goodfellas (1990) © Warner Bros/Dirck Halstead

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ISBN 978-0-231-17207-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-85067-4 (e-book)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1    A Silent Era: From Gangs to Gangsters

2    The Racketeer and the Outlaw: Gangster Archetypes of the 1930s

3    Murder, Incorporated: Post-war Developments in the Gangster Film

4    La Famiglia: Coppola, Scorsese, and Gangster Ethnicity

Conclusion

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of Kansas, and particularly Dr. Tamara Falicov, the department Chair, for allowing the opportunity to teach several courses where I initially engaged many of the ideas expressed in this volume. I would also like to thank the immensely talented and industrious students in my graduate writing course who, time and again, were subject to hearing about writing examples such as paragraph structure, proper citation format, integration of sources etc that I was currently working on in drafts of this manuscript. Special thanks go to David Sutera, who helped with the images. Words cannot express my gratitude to Yoram Allon, Commissionng Editor at Wallflower Press, for his professional expertise, patience and fervent belief in this project. And finally I owe a heartfelt thanks to all of the staff at Wallflower Press in helping to develop and guide the manuscript through the publication process.

INTRODUCTION

The opening sequence of Bugsy (1991) is a perfect synthesis of some of the thematic concerns of the American gangster film. Within its short seven-minute duration director Barry Levinson is able to incorporate not only the delineation of character traits associated with its gangster protagonist Bugsy Siegel, but also a major concern of the gangster film itself – the power of consumption. The sequence begins with a medium shot of the outside of a house in the dead of winter. A voice-over conversation informs us that a husband/father is leaving on a business trip. We next see a car travelling along a road in long shot and hear its occupant indulging in elocution lessons (‘Twenty dwarves took turns doing hand stands on the carpet. Twenty dwarves…’). Inter-cutting these short scenes with the credits themselves, Levinson then shows the man in a clothing store buying shirts. When the salesman addresses him as ‘Mr. Siegel’ a bystander informs his wife, ‘That’s Bugsy Siegel’. It is at that point that we finally see a close-up of the man’s face as he has clearly heard the remark. Overshadowed by the silhouettes of store mannequins in the window who loom threateningly over the scene, ‘Bugsy’ admonishes and verbally intimidates the man’s reference to ‘something that crawls around in the dirt’ rather than his real name of Benjamin (‘It’s in the Bible’).

The following scene is in a hotel lobby where Bugsy Siegel picks up an attractive girl in an elevator (‘If we make love it will be the only time’). This is followed by an interior shot of the hotel room where clothes are strewn over a chair and we overhear the sounds of lovemaking in progress. The next scene is inside an automobile on a rain-soaked street; the people inside are presumably Siegel’s employers and are discussing a business problem that needs to be taken care of, Siegel taking care of the problem by killing the front-operator of a bookie joint who has been ‘stealing the shirt off my back’ then follows this. Before shooting him at point blank range, Siegel politely informs him that it is ‘just business, like selling insurance or importing dresses’. The short sequence highlights the power of the gangster in matters of family, sex, conspicuous consumption, intimidation, and killing. In so doing it also showcases our fascination with a character seemingly beyond the law and the bounds of morality. Ostensibly showing a man simply going to work we shortly discover what that work is and how successfully he performs it.

The gangster film presents a distorted vision of the American success story – where the gangster avoids the hard road to success by simply taking what he wants when he wants it. According to Robert Warshow, ‘the story of his career is a nightmare inversion of the values of ambition and opportunity’; the gangster, though crude, is never inarticulate and can state definitely what he wants, ‘to take over the North Side, to own a hundred suits, to be Number One’ (1962: 106, 107). Yet it would be a mistake to think that this is the only thing that the gangster represents or the only way he is depicted in American film. The gangster was presented differently at different historical junctures and circumstances. Even within the so-called ‘classical gangster films’ of the early 1930s the gangster was manifest in various genres from musicals to comedies. More important is how the representation of the gangster in American film is closely associated with his topicality outside of film. As historian Jonathan Munby notes ‘the gangster film changed over time subject to the multiple determinations of generic evolution, moral intervention, and the need to remain topical in a rapidly changing world’ (1999: 4). Indicative of this change is the etymology of the word itself.

According to the OED the initial use of the word ‘gangster’ occurred in 1884 in the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette in the following entry: ‘They have a candidate for the Presidency, and his name is Grover Cleveland, the creature of a combination of gangsters and cranks.’ In another instance the Columbus Evening Dispatch in 1884 reported: ‘The gangster may play all sorts of pranks with the ballot box, but in its own good time the latter will get even by kicking the gangster in the gutter.’ The word usage reveals several things that are important to bear in mind: first, the word ‘gangster’ is clearly a derogatory term indicating an individual or individuals who are beneath contempt, and more significantly, it is a topical term connected with actual events by virtue of its use in a newspaper article. Moreover, it is also related to an urban environment, as well as to a type of strong-arm behaviour that would become commonplace in turn-of-the-century American politics. This brief etymology of the term is significant in that it lays the foundation for a film genre that originates in the early 1900s and remains popular to this day.

The gangster film, unlike other film genres – such as the western, the action-adventure film, the science fiction film, and others – is the only genre whose nomenclature is centered on an individual, rather than a concept. The gangster as an individual becomes central to the genre itself and its significance, particularly to American culture and values. This becomes evident in some of the film titles alone: Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), Little Caesar (1931), Scarface (1932), Bonnie and Clyde (1968), The Godfather (1972), and Bugsy, as well as a host of others. In addition, whereas many film genres have their locus in originating literature, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (both horror and science fiction), Owen Wister’s The Virginian (the western), Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (film noir), by contrast, gangster film narratives originate from the headlines, topical events, and true-crime narratives of newspapers and tabloid publications. Warner Bros.’ head of production at the time of the initial gangster cycle of the early 1930s, Darryl F. Zanuck, wanted to produce stories ‘that were timely and which would touch upon subjects vital to the public’ (Custen 1997: 131). The ‘timely’ stories of 1930–31 concerned gangsterism that flaunted the 18th Amendment – Prohibition; and Al Capone, who flaunted the American success story. The gangster would become a subversive figure both on- and off-screen, but whereas the real-life gangster is ultimately simply a criminal, the on-screen gangster becomes something more – an imaginative idea, a metaphor for individualism, success, the Depression, the syndicate, post-war alienation, or family values.

The gangster film remains popular primarily because it is easily adaptable to reflect contemporaneous concerns. The gangster protagonist can be seen in films based on contemporary true-crime non-fiction such as Goodfellas (1990) through to the likes of Walter White, whose criminal activity as survival practice and ultimate hubris is the narrative thrust in the popular AMC series, Breaking Bad (2008–2013). The gangster remains a popular character in American film because of his relationship to outlaw culture and the meanings associated with that culture.

Genre Criticism and the Gangster Film

The gangster film was one of the first film genres to be the focus of both popular and scholarly writing in early genre criticism. Along with the western it established a methodological approach to film genre criticism from its aesthetic qualities to structural analysis. In addition, the gangster film provided a means for evaluating American cultural attitudes and values through its critique of individualism and the myth of the dream of success. More recently, gangster film criticism has focused on historical and cultural analysis rather than ideological perspectives with an emphasis on Hollywood studio production practices and the fragmentation of the genre into specific cycles of films. This short survey of gangster film criticism allows for an understanding of the ways the genre has been viewed as an important American genre within the context of film studies.

Popular criticism of the gangster film begins with Robert Warshow’s seminal essay, ‘The Gangster as Tragic Hero’, first published in The Parisian Review in 1948. Warshow contends that the gangster is a product of the modern age and is representative of the urban milieu that has surpassed American agrarian life. More specifically the gangster is a metaphor for ‘that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and demands