Film Genre (English Class) - Research Paper Example

The success of the gangster film with audiences later influenced filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, whose 1972 epic The Godfather casts its criminal characters as appealing archetypes of good “family men,” doing whatever is necessary to survive and thrive in a dangerous world. The growing popularity of gangster films in the first three decades of the twentieth century owes a great deal to the American public’s fascination with notorious real-life gangsters such as Al Capone. The gangster cut a dashing figure—his sharp dressing style, marked by “pinstripe suits, fedoras, and fancy neckties,” created a whole new image for the American gangster, serving to “legitimize their status as businessmen” and allowing them to represent themselves as “a model of the new American ideal for the urban working class” (Beshears 197).

Of course, his carefully-crafted outward appearance served to disguise the fact that Capone was, for all intents and purposes, little more than a common criminal. Like many of his criminal contemporaries, Capone made a fortune bootlegging liquor after Prohibition was enacted in 1920. Yet Capone and his cronies were not roundly vilified for their criminal activity. Instead, the public became enamored with the heady tales of the ongoing struggle between gangsters and the police who sought to shut them down.

The “old moral order” (199) had broken down—in its place, many Americans had begun to embrace “a nihilistic outlook on life” (198) driven by disillusion in the wake of World War I. The resulting lack of optimism and distrust of authority created an environment in which gangsters were painted almost as folk heroes. They were perceived by many to be Robin Hood-type figures fighting the establishment on behalf of the downtrodden. In reality, however, the gangsters were solely in it for themselves, eager to make a profit even through the most nefarious of means.

Based in large part on the infamous persona of criminals like Capone, the “gangster film” became a popular genre, exploding into success in the early 1930s. The gangster film is a sub-category of crime films in which the main characters are part of a gang or are otherwise affiliated with a crime organization or mob. The film typically depicts the rise and fall of the main character, a man whose ruthlessness, cunning, and unrepentant narcissism take him to the top and cause his subsequent downfall.

The movies are set in large cities so as 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” (filmsite.org). The movies are generally bloodbaths—multiple characters die as a result of their association with the gangster. Though in the earliest gangster films, much of the violence occurred off-screen, later films almost gleefully depicted the random violence associated with the gangster way of life.

Additionally, these films are crafted as “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”