Love Gangster Movies

[Favio Cassidy]

Ihave something of a guilty pleasure in gangster movies, recently I watched some older classic gangster films and began wondering why they were so popular, why they resonated with people, specifically in America where they were most popular so here is another short essay of some of the reasons I think these films have stood the test of time. The films I talk about are The Godfather, Scarface and Mean Streets.

Secondly the idea of individuality, in some ways similar to the idea of the American dream the image of America as a melting pot brimming with people of every race and religion, the notion that America is all about freedom and liberty goes hand in hand with the idea of individuality, in America one is supposed to be able to practice any religion, reach any goal, and truly be individual this is a value held close by American citizens. However these films suggest that individuality is difficult to find first of all and then maintain in America. Lots of these characters are lost, they are seeking meaning and in many cases copying the people above them in the hierarchy of the mafia. And these choices to follow those above them and rise through the hierarchy and get involved with criminality often leads to a very desperate place for these characters.

When I was in Junior College (1966-1968) I knew two sisters whose father was rumored to be associated with organized crime. They missed a few classes in the middle of a semester. Their father was dead. Not of natural causes.

When the two returned to classes there was nothing glamorous about the sorrow and fear they were so obviously living with.

In the hands of some, the gangster tale is a story that does not involve law and government and everyday concerns. These are stripped away so that other concerns can be addressed without any particular narrative interference from mundane concerns. Normal people would go to the police or the FBI, but that option is off the table, which makes for a more interesting story.

In similar fashion the fascination so many Americans have with owning guns must be at least partly caused by the countless movies and TV shows in which a gun was the means for a man (rarely a woman) to behave heroically and win the grateful respect of his community.

In The Godfather problems are solved by violence. Violence generally works. Michael takes over the casino through a series of murders. Smart, deliberate, calculated violence. Ruthlessness carries an emotional cost but is nevertheless effective. It works.

In The Wire violence is a fact of life, like gravity, it solves nothing because there is no expectation of a solution, everyone is on a path to an inevitable end. Omar is a bit of an exception, carrying out his robberies and murders with a vaguely moral motivation but the result is just more squalid tragedy.

One pet peeve: shoot-outs where criminals act with the training and tenacity of special forces soldiers. Crooks are not soldiers. They may well be brave, but I suspect 90% of gangsters in actual gun fights are more Brave Sir Robin than SEAL Team Six.

There is an interesting back and forth between samurai movies and westerns. Kurosawa has said that he based his samurai movies on earlier westerns. And a number of westerns, especially from the late 60s are samurai movies with cowboys. And these especially show the hero as a mixed bag.

Why do we lovegangsters and crime cinema so much? They represent everything thatAmerica, and Americans, do not stand for. They focus on brutish,murderous thugs whose sole goal is accumulating power and money byusing fear tactics. They will do anything to anybody to get ahead,regardless of how many laws they break or people they shoot.

The Hollywoodmobster is an historic character. He got his start in the early daysof sound film because during the 1920s, thanks to endless mediaattention, he had already become a major figure on the Americanscene. Most of the early real life gangsters were immigrants whocould not succeed in American because of persecution anddiscrimination against ethnic groups. So, nowhere else to go, theyturned to crime. They had to turn to crime, shrugged Americans. Sinceall of us are, way back, immigrants from somewhere, we understoodthat.

What movie writers did was take thereal gangster, sanitize him, glamorize him and put him on the bigscreen as a hero. He was the immigrant tough guy who blasted his wayto the top. The judges, public officials and cops were the villainsin all those 1930s gangster movies (did they all star James Cagney ordid it just seem that way?). They were Robin Hoods with machineguns.

The movie gangstersucceeded because real life gangsters of the era, such as Al Capone,Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger, had also become folk heroes,thanks to huge press coverage of their lives. The movies just tookreal life, put some make up on it, added music, printed posters androlled the cameras.

I don't know about you, but I love the gangster genre. Crime films helped build the Hollywood we know and love today. While they are still made, they have shifted so greatly since their inception that they don't resemble the classic formula.

Today, for the sake of conciseness, we're talking about that original Warner Bros. gangster movie, which follows a boy from the neighborhood who rides in crime, becomes part of higher society, but it all falls apart and he pays the price, usually with his life.

Always. I won't let you get too far into reading without telling you that I think this video essay is awesome, but I don't think one movie killed a genre. I think we are starving for new artists to tackle it.

I want to reiterate how much I loved the deep analysis within this video. The history of the American gangster movie and an analysis of how Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America killed the genre is top-notch. This video essay considers the major characteristics of the gangster film, how the genre evolved, and how Leone exploited genre archetypes to reveal the innate brutality of the gangster myth.

As a very brief refresher, Warner Bros. perfected the rise-and-fall narrative and made sure these gangsters were punished at the end. As the movies evolved past the 1930s and '40s, people changed things up. We saw movies like Bonnie and Clyde turn them into folk heroes and we even saw something like Scarface, which while whitewashed, told this story from the immigrant's point of view.

As the essay posed, this all changed after Once Upon a Time in America. Modern gangster films are just as concerned with the cops as the criminals, or they have lost the setting of a romanticized world.

Leone was the master of reinvention. He went from making real westerns but took a hard look at the violence and brutality then he went to the mob with Once Upon a Time in America. He flipped the narrative of the boy from the neighborhood with the tale of Noodles.

Noodles is pathetic and vile. He's futile but violent. We don't see an arc, just a guy living a sociopathic lifestyle that is violent, alienating, and lacks any love or affection. We never want to be Noodles, because nothing about his existence is romanticized.

I think the answer is a resounding nope. Look at how television reinvented these tropes. Tony Soprano is that guy who was able to rise. He lives in a house that looks like what he thinks rich people should have. He even sees a therapist, which is a sign of being elite to him as well as a sign of weakness.

Both have riffed on the traditional gangster genre and the WB arc. And we haven't even gotten into The Irishman, in which Scorsese masterfully shows the tropes he helped design, but features a deeper and more introspective reflection than Once Upon a Time in America. Its main character has emotions, feelings, and regrets. We can empathize with him, and he has a family and love he lost.

Whenever someone says a genre is dead, don't listen. They may be hard to sell or hard to make, but if you can tell the story in a new way, a way that engages people and brings an audience excited by the story, then you're obliged to tell it.

Here's where I'm at right now in the journey because it changes, right? I mean, I'm an old man now and I've been doing this thing for a minute and it keeps evolving. Evolving, and I keep learning and I keep growing. I hope I do until I'm bones. But I think that at the moment, the thing that intrigues and fascinates me the most is probably the boring answer. Maybe it's not boring, but it's the very heady answer of I have so many perplexing questions about this life at this moment. I thought at 49 I would've really figured stuff out. I really thought I would understand why I get so depressed, why I get so anxious over little weird things. Why is it so hard sometimes to wake up in the morning? Why am I so afraid of the things that I'm afraid of? And I think that through the lens of this genre, which is unfortunately, it's not that it can't be fun, right?

Fun can happen and you could still wrestle with and explore those questions. Right now, I'm just at this place where I'm staring at the universe around me being like, God, this doesn't get easier. And then when you go through a story where you have an incredible new iconic monster or entity or event, whatever it may be, nature horror, serial killer horror, supernatural Horror, slasher gore fest. To me, that's the thing that when someone sends me a project or we're starting to develop an idea with the company that I am running right now or I'm trying to create something, that's the thing that hooks me, gets me, gets me going. It gets me really revved up about the thought of jumping in on something and giving that energy to it.

Angel Melanson: The cycle has come back around and it's time for the stuff that I really, really champion and enjoy. And also to piggyback on that, I love to see just diverse characters like queer characters, and characters of color, and it has nothing to do with the story. They just happen to be there because they just exist in normal spaces. And I would like to see a little more of that. I feel like we're slowly getting there, but we need more of that.

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