Silent era The history of the crime film before 1940 follows reflected the changing social attitudes toward crime and criminals. In the first twenty years of the 20th Century, American society was under intense social reform with cities rapidly expanding and leading to social unrest and street crime rising and some people forming criminal gangs. In this early
silent film period, criminals were more prominent on film screens than enforcers of the law. Among these early films from the period is
D. W. Griffith's
The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) involving a young woman hounded by a mobster known as The Snapper Kid.
Raoul Walsh's
Regeneration (1915) was an early feature-length film about a gangster who was saved from a life of crime by a social worker. These two early films and films like
Tod Browning's
Outside the Law (1920) that deal with the world of criminal activity were described by Silver and Ursini as being gangsters "constrained by a strong moral code". Stuart Kaminsky in
American Film Genres (1974) stated that prior to
Little Caesar (1931), gangster characters were in films were essentially
romances. European films of the silent era differed radically from the Hollywood productions, reflecting the post-World War I continental culture. Drew Todd wrote that with this, Europeans tended to create darker stories and the audiences of these films were readier to accept these narratives. Several European silent films go much further in exploring the mystique of the criminal figures. These followed the success in France of
Louis Feuillade's film serial
Fantômas (1913). The average budget for a Hollywood feature went from $20,000 in 1914 to $300,000 in 1924. Silver and Ursini stated that the earliest crime features were by Austrian
émigré director
Josef von Sternberg whose films like
Underworld (1927) eliminated most of the causes for criminal behavior and focused on the criminal perpetrators themselves which would anticipate the popular
gangster films of the 1930s.
1930s The groundwork for the gangster films of the early 1930s were influenced by the early 1920s when cheap wood-pulp paper stocks led to an explosion in mass-market publishing. Newspapers would make folk heroes of bootleggers like
Al Capone, while
pulp magazines like
Black Mask (1920) helped support more highbrow magazines such as
The Smart Set which published stories of hard-edged detetives like
Carroll John Daly's Race Williams. The early wave of gangster films borrowed liberally from stories for early Hollywood productions that defined the genre with films like
Little Caesar (1931),
The Public Enemy (1931), and
Scarface (1932). In comparison to much earlier films of the silent era, Leitch described the 1930s cycle as turning "the bighearted crook silent films had considered ripe for redemption into a remorseless killer." Hollywood Studio heads were under such constant pressure from public-interest groups to tone down their portrayal of professional criminals that as early as 1931,
Jack L. Warner announced that Warner Bros. would stop producing such films.
Scarface itself was delayed for over a year as its director
Howard Hughes talked with the
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America's
Production Code Office over the films violence and overtones of incest. A new wave of crime films that began in 1934 were made that had law enforcers as glamorous and as charismatic as the criminals.
J. Edgar Hoover, director the Bureau of Investigation (renamed the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1935), promoted bigger budgets and wider press for his organization and himself through a well-publicized crusade against such real world gangsters as
Machine Gun Kelly,
Pretty Boy Floyd and
John Dillinger. Hoover's fictionalized exploits were glorified in future films such as
G Men (1935). Through the 1930s, American films view of criminals were predominantly glamorized, but as the decade ended, the attitudes Hollywood productions had towards fictional criminals grew less straightforward and more conflicted. In 1935,
Humphrey Bogart played Duke Mantee in
The Petrified Forest (1936), a role Leitch described as the "first of Hollywood's overtly metaphorical gangsters." Bogart would appear in films in the later thirties:
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and
The Roaring Twenties (1939). Unlike actor
James Cagney, whose appeal as described by Leitch "direct, physical, and extroverted", Bogart characters and acting suggested "depths of worldly disillusionment beneath a crooked shell" and portrayed gangsters who showcased the "romantic mystique of the doomed criminal."
1940s The 1940s formed an ambivalence toward the criminal heroes. Leitch suggested that this shift was from the decline in high-profile organized crime, partly because of the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 and partly because of the well-publicized success of the FBI. Unlike the crime films of the 1930s, the 1940s films were based more on fictional tales with gangsters played by
Paul Muni in
Angel on My Shoulder (1946) and Cagney in
White Heat (1949) were self-consciously anachronistic. Filmmakers from this period were fleeing Europe due to the rise of Nazism. These directors such as
Fritz Lang,
Robert Siodmak, and
Billy Wilder would make crime films in the late 1930s and 1940s that were later described as
film noir by French critics. Several films from 1944 like
The Woman in the Window,
Laura,
Murder, My Sweet and
Double Indemnity ushered in this film cycle. These works continued into the mid-1950s. A reaction to
film noir came with films with a more semi-documentary approach pioneered by the thriller
The House on 92nd Street (1945). This led to crime films taking a more realistic approach like
Kiss of Death (1947) and
The Naked City (1948). By the end of the decade, American critics such as
Parker Tyler and
Robert Warshow regarded Hollywood itself as a stage for repressed American cultural anxieties following World War II. This can be seen in films such as
Brute Force, a prison film where the prison is an existential social metaphor for a what Leitch described as a "meaningless, tragically unjust round of activities."
1950s By 1950, the crime film was following changing attitudes towards the law and the social order that criminals metaphorically reflect while most film were also no more explicitly violent or explicitly sexual than those of 1934.
White Heat (1949) inaugurated a cycle of crime films that would deal with the omnipresent danger of the
nuclear bomb with its theme of when being threatened with technological nightmares, the main gangster Jody Jarrett fights fire with fire. These themes extended into two other major crime films by bring the issues down from global to the subcultural level:
The Big Heat (1953) and
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) which use apocalyptical imagery to indicate danger with the first film which the film persistently links to images of catastrophically uncontrolled power and the "traumatic consequences" of nuclear holocaust and
Kiss Me Deadly literally features an atom bomb waiting in a locker of the Hollywood Athletic Club.
The Asphalt Jungle (1950) consolidated a tendency to define criminal subculture as a mirror of American culture. The cycle of
caper films were foreshadowed by films like
The Killers (1946) and
Criss Cross (1949) to later examples like
The Killing (1956) and
Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). Leitch wrote that these films used the planning and action of a robbery to dramatize the "irreducible unreasonableness of life." The themes of existential despair made these films popular with European filmmakers, who would make their own heist films like
Rififi (1955) and
Il bidone (1955). Filmmakers of the coming
French New Wave movement would expand on these crime films into complex mixtures of nostalgia and critique with later pictures like
Elevator to the Gallows (1958),
Breathless (1960) and
Shoot the Piano Player (1960).
1960s Following the classical
noir period of 1940 to 1958, a return to the violence of the two previous decades. By 1960, film was losing popularity to television as the mass form of media entertainment. Despite To The crime film countered this by providing material no acceptable for television, first with a higher level of onscreen violence. Films like
Psycho (1960) and
Black Sunday (1960) marked an increase in onscreen violence in film. Prior to these films, violence and gorier scenes were cut in
Hammer film productions by the
British Board of Film Censors or conveyed mostly through narration. Box-office receipts began to grow stronger towards the late 1960s. Hollywood's demise of the Hays Code standards would allow for further violent, risqué and gory films. As college students at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University demonstrated against racial injustice and the Vietnam, Hollywood generally ignored the war in narratives, with exceptions of film like
The Green Berets (1968). The crime film
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) revived the gangster film genre and captured the antiestablishment tone and set new standards for onscreen violence in film with its themes of demonizing American institution to attack the moral injustice of draft. This increase of violence was reflected in other crime films such as
Point Blank (1967). Leitch found the growing rage against the establishment spilled into portrayal police themselves with films like
Bullitt (1968) about a police officer caught between mob killers and ruthless politicians while
In the Heat of the Night (1967) which called for racial equality and became the first crime film to win an
Academy Award for Best Picture.
1970s The French Connection (1971) dispensed
Bullitts noble hero for the character of
Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle who Leitch described as a "tireless, brutal, vicious and indifferent" in terms of constraints of the law and his commanding officers. The film won several Academy Awards and was successful in the box office. This was followed in critical and commercial success of
The Godfather (1972) which also won a Best Picture Academy Award and performed even better than
The French Connection in the box office. The success of the film and its sequel
The Godfather Part II (1974) reinforced the stature of the gangster film genre, which continued into the 1990s with films
Scarface (1983),
Once Upon a Time in America (1984),
The Untouchables (1987),
Goodfellas (1990) and
Donnie Brasco (1997).
Dirty Harry (1971) create a new form of police film, where
Clint Eastwood's performance as
Inspector Callahan which critic
Pauline Kael described as an "emotionless hero, who lives and kills as affectlessly as a psychopathic personality." Drew Todd in
Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society described the character as different than films featuring rebellious characters from the 1940s and 1950s, with a character whose anger is directed against the state, mixed with fantasies of vigilante justice. Films like
Dirty Harry,
The French Connection and
Straw Dogs (1971) that presented a violent vigilante as a savior. By the mid-1970s, a traditional lead with good looks, brawn and bravery was replaced with characters who Todd described as a "pathological outcast, embittered and impulsively violent." as John Shaft in 1973. Hollywood productions began courting films produced and marketed by white Americans for the purpose of trying to attract a new audience with
blaxploitation film. These films were almost exclusively crime films following the success of
Shaft (1971) which led to studios rushing to follow its popularity with films like
Super Fly (1972),
Black Caesar (1973),
Coffy (1973) and
The Black Godfather (1974) The films were often derivations of earlier films such as
Cool Breeze (1972), a remake of
The Asphalt Jungle,
Hit Man (1972) a remake of
Get Carter (1971), and
Black Mama, White Mama (1973) a remake of
The Defiant Ones (1958). The cycle generally slowed down by the mid-1970s. Prison films closely followed the formulas of films of the past while having an increased level of profanity, violence and sex.
Cool Hand Luke (1967) inaugurated the revival and was followed into the 1970s with films like
Papillon (1973),
Midnight Express (1978) and
Escape from Alcatraz (1979).
1980s and 1990s When
Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, he ushered in a conservative era. For crime films, this led to various reactions, including political films that critiqued official policies and citizen's political apathy. These included films like
Missing (1982),
Silkwood (1983), and
No Way Out (1987). Prison films and courtroom dramas would also be politically charged with films like
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) and
Cry Freedom (1987). While films about
serial killers existed in earlier films such as
M (1931) and
Peeping Tom (1960), the 1980s had an emphasis on the serial nature of their crimes with a larger number of films focusing on the repetitive nature of some murders. While many of these films were teen-oriented pictures, they also included films like
Dressed to Kill (1980) and
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) and continued into the 2000s with films like
Seven (1995),
Kiss the Girls (1997), and
American Psycho (2000). In an article by
John G. Cawelti titled "
Chinatown and Generic Transformations in Recent American Films" (1979), Cawelti noticed a change signaled by films like
Chinatown (1974) and
The Wild Bunch (1969) noting that older genres were being transformed through cultivation of nostalgia and a critique of the myths cultivated by their respective genres. Todd found that this found its way into crime films of the 1980s with films that could be labeled as
post-modern, in which he felt that "genres blur, pastiche prevails, and once-fixed ideals, such as time and meaning, are subverted and destabilized". This would apply to the American crime film which began rejecting linear storytelling and distinctions between right and wrong with works from directors like
Brian de Palma with
Dressed to Kill and
Scarface and works from
The Coen Brothers and
David Lynch whose had Todd described as having "stylized yet gritty and dryly humorous pictures evoking dream states" with films like
Blood Simple (1984) and
Blue Velvet (1986) and would continue into the 1990s with films like
Wild at Heart (1990).
Quentin Tarantino would continue this trend in the 1990s with films where violence and crime is treated lightly such as
Reservoir Dogs (1992),
Pulp Fiction (1994) and
Natural Born Killers (1994) while Lynch and the Coens would continue with
Fargo (1996) and
Lost Highway (1997). Other directors such as
Martin Scorsese and
Sidney Lumet would continue to more traditional crime films
Goodfellas,
Prince of the City (1980),
Q & A (1990), and
Casino (1995). Other trends of the 1990s extended boundaries of crime films, ranging from main characters who were female or
minorities with films like
Thelma and Louise (1991),
Swoon (1991),
Devil in a Blue Dress (1995),
Bound (1996) and
Dolores Claiborne (1996). ==Sub-genres==