Luis Texidor

LEH 355

Final Paper

The world is full of tragedy and tragic heroes who only sometimes get to taste true

freedom. That is only the gist of what categorizes a film as gangster genre. According to Thomas

Schatz, “…the genre exists sort of tacit contract between filmmakers and audience; the film

genre is an actual event that honors such a contract”. He further explains, “To discuss a Western

genre is to address neither a single Western film nor even all Westerns, but rather that system of

conventions which identifies Western films as such”. The gangster genre is no different because

the movies that are identified as a gangster genre honor its conventions and codes.

In 1931, one of the three gangster classics was released in theaters and it went by Little

Caesar. The film stared a hot headed cunning street tough named Rico. Rico quickly became

friendly with a city gang, took advantage of his skills and smarts to eventually pull off a heist

and take the chair of the local mob boss. He makes it to the top just like he knew he would but

his glory would not last long. In the classical gangster film, the hero always loses. The moral to

the story, crime always pays. Rico, starts to become a target to other gangs and has been under

the cops radar since the day of his greatest heist.

Eventually he attempts to kill his beloved friend, changes his mind and almost gets caught by the

law. An on the run Rico, eventually lets his ego get in the way of survival and dies by the hands

of the cops who were on his tail. This was the end of Rico and no longer will he be able to assert

his will on the surrounding world.

 The following films followed different narratives but the classic tropes carried on. It is

pretty astounding to think that three films, close in proximity with released dates, carried out

similar gangster genre conventions that future filmmakers honor to this day. Little Caesar

featured a rising star who’s success ended up being his downfall. The gangster is alienated from

society therefore he lives just the same as he dies; alone. Robert Warshow states, “No convention

of the gangster film is more strongly established than this; it is dangerous to be alone. And yet

the very conditions of success make it impossible for it to alone, for success is always the

establishment of an individual pre-eminence that must be imposed on others, in whom it

automatically arouses hatred; the successful man is an outlaw”. In all of the classic films, the

gangster ends up trapped by the causes of his actions and dies alone. This trope is honored

throughout later films identified as gangster genre.

The reality of the urban criminal is that they will always be trapped with no chance of

truly succeeding. The use of their “left-handed” methods will inevitably place them in a corner

with no where to go. The pursuit to freedom in an immoral and dark world is a hopeless fight in

gangster noir, most notably White Heat. Fran Mason articulates this idea by stating, “This

tendency in noir to identify the failures of American ideology without actually criticizing the

ideology itself, or offering any solutions, can be seen as one of its most important elements. One

way of describing noir is to see it as an articulation of a crisis in modernity and its ideologies and

economic systems, but one that is less a reflection of an actual crisis in modernity than a

construction of it”. The gangster noir film can be seen as a diagnosis of the modern world within

the context of its crises.

“The gangster noir hero, on the other hand, is part of a process of the deterritorialization

in which his identity is not expressed through the extension across space, but dissipated by it,
existing in ‘liminal uncertainty’”(Warshow 78). The gangster noir hero, the space he controls

and his existence is taken away throughout the film concluding with his/her downfall. Cody

Jarrett, the alienated, psychologically disturbed, mamas boy and leader of a small heist crew

loses it all after being double-crossed by Hank Fallon, an undercover cop who was assigned to

win over Jarrett’s trust. Getting incarcerated, losing the loyalty of his wife to one his own crew

members, and the loyalty of the rest of his crew members put Jarrett in tight corner. In the tight

space he believed he was controlling, Jarrett made mistakes which ended in his explosive demise

in the conclusion of the film.

The gangster genre evolves and adapts to the times as the American conscious goes to

massive changes. The 60’s was an era of great historical changes like the Civil Rights

Movement, free love and the rise of counter-cultures. Filmmakers like Arthur Penn with his

modern gangster film, Bonnie and Clyde gave acknowledgement to the rising American counter

cultures. The world was changing as so was conventions of film making.

Martin Scorsese adds new elements to the gangster genre with his approach to the

life of a mobster with his film, Goodfellas, a postmodern expression of the American

underground mob society. Scorsese, tells a story of Henry Hill, a guy who started out working

for mobsters doing small jobs like parking their cars to eventually become a close respected

member of the society. The film expresses a postmodernist interpretation of the American dream,

a traditional trope of the gangster genre. The American dream is not the family and white picket

fence to Henry. It’s doing whatever you want including parking wherever you want, life was like

an amusement park for Henry.

Henry did not have the disturbing mentality of the people he surrounded himself with, but

he was seduced by the perks of the lifestyle which ended up catching up to him. The modern
1970s landscape, the control and freedoms the mobster has over the environment was much more

detailed than most earlier films. Henry’s tragic flaw that ended him was his desire for more.

More money, more property, more drugs and more woman. He did not have enough and ended

up settling for very little in the end. There is always that same moral lesson that echoes

throughout all of the violent gangster genre films, crime always pays.