The American movie
The Black Hand (1906) is thought to be the earliest surviving gangster film. In 1912,
D. W. Griffith directed
The Musketeers of Pig Alley, a short drama film about crime on the streets of
New York City (filmed, however, at
Fort Lee, New Jersey) rumored to have included real gangsters as extras. Critics have also cited
Regeneration (1915) as an early crime film. Though mob films had their roots in such silent films, the genre in its most durable form was defined in the early 1930s. It owed its innovations to the social and economic instability occasioned by the
Great Depression, which galvanized the organized crime subculture in the United States. The failure of honest hard work and careful investment to ensure financial security led to the circumstances reflected in the explosion of mob films in Hollywood and to their immense popularity in a society disillusioned with the American way of life.
1930s '' (1931) The years 1931 and 1932 saw the genre produce three enduring classics:
Warner Bros.'
Little Caesar and
The Public Enemy, which made screen icons out of
Edward G. Robinson and
James Cagney, respectively, and
Howard Hawks'
Scarface starring
Paul Muni, which offered a dark psychological analysis of a fictionalized
Al Capone and launched the film career of
George Raft. These films chronicle the quick rise, and equally quick downfall, of three young, violent criminals, and represent the genre in its purest form before moral pressure would force it to change. Though the gangster in each film would face a violent downfall which was designed to remind the viewers of the consequences of crime, audiences were often able to identify with the charismatic anti-hero. Those suffering from the Depression were able to relate to the gangster character who worked hard to earn his place and success in the world, only to have it all taken away from him.
Production code As the appeal and attraction of gangster movie stars such as Cagney, Robinson, Muni, and Raft grew, so too did the efforts to combat their fascination. During the early years of crime film,
Scarface, arguably the most violent of gangster films created during the entire decade, particularly was the subject of criticism. Released in 1932, it ushered in the worst year of the Depression, and as profits slid, Hollywood did what it could to restore its earnings, which resulted in the upping of sex and violence in the movies.
Scarface can be interpreted as a representation of the American dream gone awry, presented when US capitalism had reached its lowest, and Prohibition was being seen as a failed social experiment and would soon be abolished. It faced opposition from regulators of the
Production Code, and its release was delayed for over a year while Hawks attempted to tone down the incestuous overtones of the relationship between Paul Muni's character Tony Camonte and his sister (Ann Dvorak). The Capone-like Carmote is in many ways the most monstrous gangster portrayed in 1930s films, a man utterly devoid of any positive qualities as he ruthlessly schemes and shoots his way to the top. Through Carmote was closely based on Al Capone, the most notable aspect of his character, namely his "incestuous obsession" with his sister and the way he kills any man who expresses any sort of interest in her as he wants her for himself, was not based on Capone. Besides for Capone, there are many references to
The Great Gatsby in
Scarface such as the scene where Carmonte lovingly caresses his silk shirts, which like the same scene in
The Great Gatsby are a sign of material success for the protagonist.
The Great Gatsby was the best-selling novel of 1925, and the references to the novel in the film were meant to symbolize the decay of America from the hopeful days of 1925 to the sense of collapse of 1932. The violence and the barely veiled theme of incestuous passion greatly outraged critics, churches, politicians and civic groups in 1932. The journalist Jack Alicoate in the
Film Daily wrote that watching
Scarface induced "nausea" in him and that "There are certain things that simply do not belong on the screen. The subject matter of
Scarface is one of them". Eventually the Production Code and general moral concerns became sufficiently influential to cause the crime film in its original form to be abandoned, with a shift to the perspective of the law officers fighting criminals, or criminals seeking redemption. This is illustrated by James Cagney's role as a law officer in the 1935 movie
G Men, and his part as Rocky Sullivan in
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), for which he received an Academy Award nomination. These pictures demonstrate the growing acceptance of crime films during the 1930s as long as criminals were not portrayed in a flattering light. For example, in
G-Men, Cagney plays a character similar to that of Tom Powers from
The Public Enemy, and although the film was as violent and brutal as its predecessors, it had no trouble getting a seal of approval from the Production Code office. It was now the law officers that the films attempted to glamorize, as opposed to the criminals.
1930s culture '' (1936) Politics combined with the social and economic climate of the time to influence how crime films were made and how the characters were portrayed. Many of the films imply that criminals are the creation of society, rather than its rebel, and considering the troublesome and bleak time of the 1930s this argument carries significant weight. Often the best of the gangster films are those that have been closely tied to the reality of crime, reflecting public interest in a particular aspect of criminal activity; thus, the gangster film is in a sense a history of crime in the United States. The institution of Prohibition in 1920 led to an explosion in crime, and the depiction of bootlegging is a frequent occurrence in many mob films. However, as the 1930s progressed, Hollywood also experimented with the stories of the rural criminals and bank robbers, such as
John Dillinger,
Baby Face Nelson, and
Pretty Boy Floyd. The success of these characters in film can be attributed to their value as news subjects, as their exploits often thrilled the people of a nation who had become weary with inefficient government and apathy in business. However, as the FBI increased in power there was also a shift to favour the stories of the FBI agents hunting the criminals instead of focusing on the criminal characters. In fact, in 1935 at the height of the hunt for Dillinger, the Production Code office issued an order that no film should be made about Dillinger for fear of further glamorizing his character. '' (1939) Many of the 1930s crime films also dealt with class and ethnic conflict, notably the earliest films, reflecting doubts about how well the American system was working. As stated, many films pushed the message that criminals were the result of a poor moral and economic society, and many are portrayed as having foreign backgrounds or coming from the lower class. Thus, the film criminal is often able to evoke sympathy and admiration out of the viewer, who often will not place the blame on the criminal's shoulders, but rather a cruel society where success is difficult. When the decade came to a close, crime films became more figurative, representing metaphors, as opposed to the more straight forward films produced earlier in the decade, showing an increasing interest in offering a thought provoking message about criminal character. An additional factor concerning public attitudes was the rural bank robbers operating in the Midwest and in the South were usually WASPs or at least of German descent unlike the gangsters in urban areas who were often Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans or Jewish-Americans. The fact that many gangsters in the cities had Italian, Irish or Ashkenazi surnames was used by xenophobes at the time to argue that all of the crime in America was caused by immigrants, making the emergence of bank robbers with Anglo-Saxon or German surnames from families long resident in American problematic for those of an xenophobic outlook. One critic in the Communist newspaper
The New Masses mocking wrote in 1934: "It must be a point of some concern to the professional patriots to realize that the crooks of the Midwest are not Wops, Pollacks or Jews. There are Barrows and Barkers and Pretty Boy Floyds of Texas and Oklahoma, the Twohys of Minnesota, the Dillingers and Pierpoints of Indiana, all native-born". In part because most American audiences preferred "evil foreigners" as villains, there was tendency of the part of Hollywood productions to focus on the urban gangsters, who were usually so-called hyphenated-Americans who were "ethnic" in contrast to Hollywood's ideal WASP Americans. For an example, in the 1931 film
The Star Witness, a middle-class WASP family witnesses a murder committed by Italian-American gangsters who kidnap their child to prevent them from testifying. In response, the Leeds family patriarch, the crotchety Grandpa, warns against the "yellow-bellied, back-stabbing foreigners" presumably causing all the crime in America and in the climax of the film delivers an xenophobic speech in a courtroom where he says "I'll tell you, a danged, dirty foreigner can crowd an American just so far-
just so far!", leading the courtroom to erupt in applause. Perhaps the most extreme anti-gangster film was
Gabriel Over The White House (1933) concerning a corrupt politician named Jud Hammond who is elected president and after encountering the Archangel Gabriel becomes a drastically changed man. Hammond suspends the constitution, disbands Congress, declares martial law and orders all criminals to be shot, saying that crime has reached such a point that America has to do away with the rule of law. The film's principle villain, the Al Capone-like gangster Nick Diamond and his entire gang are all lined up and summarily shot under the Statue of Liberty. Afterwards, their corpses are dumped into the Atlantic Ocean to symbolize that America has rejected them. The film was largely a reflection of the ideas of the media magnate William Randolph Hearst who financed it and worked uncredited on the script. Even in the years 1930-32 when gangster films were at the height of their popularity in the United States, such films usually did better at the box office overseas than within the United States as the twisted version of the "
American Dream" trope presented in these films were more popular with audiences abroad than with American audiences. The suggestion made in the gangster films that ruthlessness and amorality were the qualities that American society rewarded the most provoked considerable outrage at the time, and a great many newspaper editorials condemned Hollywood for releasing such films. A review in
The New York Post called the 1931 film
Little Caesar a "Horatio Alger tale transferred to the underworld". As early as the summer of 1932, Will Hays of the Hays office advised Hollywood production chiefs that he wanted no more gangster films, leading to a promise that "there would be no more sawed off shotgun stuff". Despite the promise made in 1932, it was being reported in
Variety on 13 June 1934 that "infuriated federal officials" were planning to impose censorship to end gangster films once and for all if Hollywood did not promise to end such films. The Labour Department contended that watching gangster films were the leading cause of criminality in children while the Justice Department claimed that such films "encouraged a general disrespect for the police and a lenient attitude towards thugs". Largely as a result of such pressure, in July 1934 gangster films were effectively banned within Hollywood as the Hollywood moguls were always terrified about the possibility of the federal government imposing censorship.
Mafia Westerns In Italian cinema after the Second World War, the Mafia was depicted in genre that was very close to the
Westerns produced by Hollywood at the same time, as people on the mainland of Italy tended to see Sicily as a "frontier", an island that the Italian state did not entirely control, and as a remote, mysterious and dangerous place. Typical of these films was
In nome della legge (1949) directed by Pietro Germi, which told the story of the magistrate Schiavo newly arrived from the mainland in a town in Sicily oppressed by the corrupt Baron Lo Vasto, who employs the Mafia to terrorize the people. In this and other films like
I Mafiosi (1959) by Roberto Mauri, the Mafia was portrayed in romantic terms, with Mafiosi depicted as criminals who lived by a strict code of honor which reflected a peculiarly Sicilian version of
machismo. Marlon Brando who played Vito Corleone described his character: "I had a great deal of respect for Vito Corleone: I saw him as a man of substance, tradition, refinement, a man of unerring instinct who just happened to live in a violent world and who had to protect himself and his family in this environment". The American author Tom Santopietro argued that much of the appeal of the
Godfather lay with the way Brando played his character as an Old World gentleman who still lived by his traditional values such as
omertà (the Mafia code of silence) and a certain modesty, which stood in stark contrast to modern American values, most notably the way in which the media relentlessly publicized everything relating to the lives of the famous. Santopietro argued the way in which the media never allowed any privacy together with the way in which many Americans were happy to share the most intimate details of their lives made
omertà all the "more alluring" in modern America. The
Godfather films also offered up a perverted version of the "
American Dream" trope as the Corleones rise up to power and wealth via thoroughly illegal and brutal means. The American columnist Jerry Capeci stated: "
The Godfather romanticised the gangsters and made them out to be people who killed only for reasons of honour. But
Goodfellas showed them to be what they really are: violent, murderous guys who killed just at the drop of a hat, who shoot people in the legs just to make them dance for fun". The Vatican Bank, which owned the majority of the shares in the Banco Ambrosiano, which were accused of amongst other things of money laundering for the Mafia. One of the film's characters, the corrupt Archbishop Gilday in charge of the Vatican Bank seems to have based on Archbishop
Paul Marcinkus, the American cleric who was at the center of the Vatican Bank scandal. The film courted controversy by including the allegation that Pope John Paul I had been murdered in 1978 after he ordered a "clean up" of the corrupt Vatican Bank.
Lo zio di Brooklyn (
The Uncle From Brooklyn) followed the misadventures of three Sicilian brothers trying to operate business honestly who are the subject of extortion by Mafiosi who are portrayed by dwarf actors as to make literal the metaphorical smallness of the Mafiosi. The stockbroker hero, Titta Di Girolamo, is notable for avoiding all human contact for last 8 years of his life, which is revealed half-way through the film to be a punishment by the Mafia after he made a poor investment; if he ever speaks to anyone again, he will be killed.
Gomorrah is still regarded as one of the more prominent mafia films from the Italian cinema. Another Italian film from 2008 was
The Brave Men, which despite its title, which roughly translates "gentlemen", told the story of a female boss in the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia. The film told very a Romano and Juliet story as it related the relationship between the Sacra Corona Unita boss, Lucia Rizzo and a prosecutor, Ignazio De Raho, who initially set out to imprison her. Through the story in the film is fictional, there is an element of truth in that a number of women who hold leadership positions in the Sacra Corona Unita, very much unlike the Mafia in Sicily. The American scholar Dana Renga argued that the film with its portrayal of Puglia as a lost eden before the founding of the Sacra Corona Unita in the 1980s and Rizzo as the seductive Lilith-like gangster who lures De Raho to his doom has strong sexist elements. The animated movie
Shark Tale contained an
Italian Mob boss as one of its main characters and had several references to the acclaimed
The Godfather including character traits, etc. In addition, mob film veteran
Robert De Niro playing a
Mob Boss and notable mob film director
Martin Scorsese behind the voice of an integral character.
2010s The 2010s continued the 2000s trend of bringing new movies featuring both prohibition and post–World War II real life mob incidents into the box office. In 2012,
Lawless was based on the 2008 novel
The Wettest County in the World as the film follows a trio of siblings who run an illegal moonshine business during
Prohibition.
Gangster Squad is a crime film directed by
Ruben Fleischer, from a screenplay written by
Will Beall, starring an ensemble cast that includes
Josh Brolin,
Ryan Gosling,
Nick Nolte,
Emma Stone, and
Sean Penn. It is the story of a group of LAPD officers and detectives called the "Gangster Squad" who are attempting to keep Los Angeles safe from
Mickey Cohen, a real life post–World War II Los Angeles gangster who became a powerful figure in the criminal underworld, and intended to continue to expand his criminal enterprise and his gang during the 1940s and '50s. The film was released 11 January 2013. A 2015
Italian mob film,
Suburra, directed by
Stefano Sollima, based on the 2013 novel of the same name by Carlo Bonini and
Giancarlo De Cataldo, starred
Pierfrancesco Favino,
Elio Germano and
Claudio Amendola, and focused on the connections between
organized crime and politics in
Rome in 2011. A 2018
biographical mafia film,
Gotti, directed by
Kevin Connolly, stars
John Travolta as John Gotti, released in June. On review aggregator
Rotten Tomatoes, the film
holds an approval rating of 0% based on 38 reviews, and an average rating of 2.3/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "
Fuhgeddaboudit." In 2019, Martin Scorsese released a biographical mafia film through
Netflix,
The Irishman, starring all three heavyweights in the genre,
Robert De Niro as
Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran,
Al Pacino as
Jimmy Hoffa, and
Joe Pesci as
Russell Bufalino. ==See also==