Enemy , and Scarface —defined the essential narrative patterns, settings, images, and types of social conflicts that would characterize the genre during the next decades.
In the classical gangster structure, the narrative focuses on the rise and fall of a career criminal, from his early, humble, frequently immigrant origins to the zenith of his success, and then to his decline from power and violent death. This narrative pattern characterizes Little Caesar, The Public Enemy , and Scarface , as well as many later gangster films, including the Godfather films, the 1983 remake of Scarface by Brian De Palma, and Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City (1991). Other gangster films, of course, deviate from the classical narrative. Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco (1997) forgoes the epic style of a rise-and-fall story in its low-key account of the last days of a small-time New York hood (Al Pacino). Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) has elements of the rise-and-fall story in its tale of a young Brooklyn man’s aspirations to join the local mob, but its main focus is a kind of ethnography of mob behavior and ritual.
In the classical structure, the gangster hero represents a perverse version of the American myth of success. He is an inverted and dark embodiment of the Horatio Alger myth, which stipulated that opportunities to advance were open to everyone, no matter how humble their origins. His determination and persistence enable him to achieve great economic success, but he must use harsh and violent tactics to do so, and his appetite for power, wealth, and violence is boundless. The gangster Tony Montana ( Scarface, 1983) dreams of possessing the world and all in it.
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The roots of the gangster film in U.S. culture include this Horatio Alger myth of success, as well as the example of the nineteenth-century robber barons, who, like the film gangster, amassed great fortunes through frequently ruthless methods. The genre’s cultural roots also include the impact of the Great Depression and its demonstration of economic injustice and the influence of Prohibition, which eroded respect for law-and-order and generated popular sympathy for the rum-running gangster.
Each of these cultural factors helped to make the movie gangster what he was and ensured that the genre offered a sustained critique of society. If society, after all, created gangsters like Little Caesar or Scarface, how healthy could it be? Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) opens with a dark screen, as a voice intones, “I believe in America.” As the lights come up, Don Corleone confers with an Italian man who has come to him because the courts have not provided justice. His daughter has been raped and assaulted, and the legal system failed to convict her assailants. He seeks from Don Corleone a more primitive kind of justice, one that involves violent retribution.
With his ability to exercise this kind of justice and his rejection and repudia-tion of established society, with his attainment of wealth and power, the gangster character appeals to an implicit dissatisfaction on the part of movie audiences with their social and economic status. By succeeding and becoming wealthy, the gangster fulfills the culture’s deepest ideals, but he does so by violating its norms. This appeal is nowhere more apparent than in the conventions that surround the death of the movie gangster. As dictated by the rules of the genre, the gangster’s death must be spectacular, and it often contains a powerful social critique. In High Sierra (1941), Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) is a romantic and sympathetic gangster with great compassion and empathy for the poor and downtrodden. The film presents his death as a cowardly act by the legal authorities.
Earle is not simply killed; he is shot off a mountaintop and falls from a great height, a hero of legendary stature brought down by callous authority. Shot in the DONNIE BRASCO (COLUMBIA TRISTAR, 1997)
Much distinguished work in the genre lies outside its classic narrative structure. Small-time hood and hanger-on Lefty Ruggerio (Al Pacino) is not the stuff of a rise-and-fall story.
Rather than an epic hero like Little Caesar or the Godfather, he’s a nobody, a foot soldier in the neighborhood mob. But he is a compelling character who illuminates the low end of gangsterdom, and the film invests the story of his last days with compassion. Frame enlargement.
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back, he is felled by a police sniper. His death is witnessed by Marie, the woman he loved, and in the closing moments of the film she murmurs, “Freedom,” equating Earle’s death with a final escape from unjust social authority. The end credits are presented on a scroll that moves toward the top of the frame in a visual design that echoes the distant High Sierra mountains and symbolizes the idea of transcendence and escape that Earle’s death embodies in the narrative.
At the conclusion of White Heat (1948), the psychopathic gangster Cody Jarrett immolates himself atop a huge chemical storage tank. In one of the most famous moments in all U.S. cinema, he screams, “Made it, Ma, top of the world!” just before he and the tank explode. The erupting mushroom cloud, which is the film’s final image, situates Jarrett’s crazed violence within the postwar atomic age and its nuclear anxieties. Jarrett is a violent psychopath, yet the energies of violence embodied in modern society and represented by the atomic weapon and the mushroom cloud are infinitely greater. The ending of the film suggests a nuclear apocalypse. Jarrett has made it to the top of the world, and now the world ends.
The famous montage that concludes The Godfather (1972), in which editor Peter Zinner cuts back and forth between the baptism ceremony for Michael Corleone’s infant nephew and the execution of Corleone’s enemies, suggests Michael’s own violent and corrupt nature and also the violence and corruption at the heart of established society. Michael has attained a position of eminence, wealth, and political power and commands sufficient social prestige to ensure a proper baptism for his nephew in one of the city’s largest and most prominent churches, even as he wipes out his enemies.
At the conclusion of Brian De Palma’s Scarface , Tony Montana (Al Pacino) is gunned down by a small army of South American narco mercenaries, but not before he engages them in a prolonged, hyper-violent gun battle. Although Tony has the appetites and moral sensibility of a shark, the ferocity with which he fights lends his death, when it comes, a stature befitting the genre, even though as a character he lacks the romantic appeal of Roy Earle or the sentimental rendering given Cody Jarrett or the Godfather.
HIGH SIERRA (WARNER BROS., 1941)
Cornered in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) dies a noble death, and the film’s credit design, with titles rolling toward the heavens, suggests that in death Earle has at last found freedom and transcendence. Frame enlargements.
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WHITE HEAT (WARNER BROS.,
1948)
Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) sec-
onds before his explosive death
in White Heat . Jarrett’s fiery end is
a cautionary note for the nuclear
age. Jarrett’s spectacular death
is a moment of such visual bril-
liance that it has become part of
cinema’s folklore, comparable
with King Kong’s last stand atop
the Empire State Building. Both
monsters, Kong and Jarrett, find
an unforgettably poetic death.
Frame enlargement.
The film ends by invoking the social critique inherent to the genre: The camera moves past Tony’s body to a statue bearing the inscription, “The World is Yours.”
Each of these films presents the gangster’s death in a spectacular manner that contains an implicit social critique. The genre stipulates that the gangster must have a great deal of charisma. The gangster’s appeal invites the viewer to ask about the kind of society that produces such seductive forms of corruption and violence. Like the cowboy, the movie gangster is a highly charged cultural symbol. (In other ways, though, he is the opposite of a Western hero. The gangster works hard, dreams big, and talks nonsto
p; the Western hero rarely holds a job, SCARFACE (UNIVERSAL, 1983)
Defiant to the end, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) finds a flamboyant death in a hyper-violent gun battle with South American narco bandits. One of the most unredeemable of movie gangsters, he nevertheless gains a savage stature in the manner of his death. Frame enlargement.
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THE DEPARTED (WARNER BROS., 2006)
Gangsters remain enduringly popular figures in American cinema, and in this Martin Scorsese film Jack Nicholson joined the ranks of screen actors with memorable gangster characters to their credit. His Irish mob boss is corrupt, sinister, and violent, yet also vividly human. Frame enlargement.
cares only about his horse and what possessions he can carry with him, and is silent and stoic.) The gangster embodies the danger of chaotic lawlessness as well as popular resentment of legal authority. The movie gangster represents a highly complex social fantasy about the prize and price of success. As such, in its uniquely American rendering, the gangster is a figure tied closely to a capitalist economy and is an expression of social ambivalence toward such an economy. In this
respect, unlike the Western, the gangster genre remains timely and contemporary, its appeal never fading or going out-of-date.
The Musical
Unlike the Western and gangster films, which appear in cinema during the silent era, musicals owe their origin to sound filmmaking. Indeed, the film that is popularly credited as being the first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer (1927), is a musical built around the singing of star Al Jolson. Sound made the cinema a receptive medium for the talents of the singers and dancers who would proliferate in musicals, and the genre flourished from the 1930s to the 1960s.
In the 1930s, Busby Berkeley choreographed and/or directed a string of hit
musicals— Footlight Parade (1933), 42nd Street (1933), and Gold Diggers of 1935
(1935)—that were enlivened with extravagant sets and his trademark manner of filming a chorus line as if it were a visual kaleidoscope. Dance partners Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers epitomized grace and elegance in a long film series including Flying Down to Rio (1933), The Gay Divorcée (1934), Top Hat (1935), and Swing Time (1936). In the 1940s and 1950s at MGM, producer Arthur Freed established a production unit that turned out a steady stream of the genre’s classics, many of which starred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Judy Garland: The Wizard of Oz (1939), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), An American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and The Band Wagon (1953). These decades, and Freed’s work in particular, may be regarded as the genre’s golden age.
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SWING TIME
(RKO, 1936)
With their joyous
optimism and happy
romance, the musical
couple is in love with
love and each other.
Dance expresses this
celebration. Ginger
Rogers and Fred Astaire
are the most famous
couple in musical
film history. They
courted each other
on the dance floor
in ten films. Frame
enlargement.
During this period, the genre’s essential stories centered on the courtship rituals of a romantic couple who sang and danced to express their desire for each other.
Viewers knew that the characters played by Astaire and Rogers were right for one another because they moved so uniquely well together. At the same time, the genre broke its visual style into two domains. Dialogue scenes were shot in a realist style, whereas the musical sequences take filmmaker and viewer far from realism. These scenes include the wild geometric forms of Busby Berkeley, popular in the 1930s, and the aggressive color design of the ballet sequences from The Band Wagon (1953) and An American in Paris (1951). In the latter film, the compositions and color schemes evoke the style of French Impressionist painters. For filmmakers who wanted to experiment with radical color and image styles, the musical was an ideal genre, offering them possibilities unmatched by any other film format.
Contemporary audiences frequently have trouble accepting the genre’s bifurcated style. The transitions from everyday reality to the musical scenes with their extravagant song, dance, color, lighting, and camerawork often seem jarring to modern viewers, who may react nervously when a character in a classic musical suddenly breaks into song and dance.
Once again, though, it is important to understand the connection between these visual and narrative conventions and the underlying social values they express. The classical musicals— Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Band Wagon (1953), and An American in Paris (1951)—belong to a less cynical age, and they express a cultural optimism and innocence that contemporary viewers find quite foreign. The musical is a joyous celebration of life, romance, and desire, whereas modern audiences may be more accustomed to cynical representations of life on movie screens.
Furthermore, the musical is an antirealist, relatively antinarrative format. A semblance of realism only prevails during the dialogue scenes. By contrast, the musical 267
The Nature of Narrative in Film
SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN
(MGM, 1952)
The relatively naturalistic
presentation of dialogue
scenes in the musical gives
way to elaborately stylized
musical sequences, which
gave filmmakers oppor-
tunities to explore color,
light, and movement with
complete imagination. The
musical’s antirealism is the
most extreme of any film
genre, and narrative is rela-
tively unimportant. Frame
enlargement.
interludes are about the possibilities for stylizing color, sound, and movement in cinema, freed from the necessity to ground those styles in anything that smacks of realism. The story line in a musical is often the least important of its elements. The stories are typically very slight, without much elaboration, and serve mainly as a way of connecting the musical sequences, which is where the heart of the genre really lies.
The musical genre is about the pure poetry of image and sound, freed from all literal consideration. As a narrative art, it celebrates the rituals of courtship, in which music MOULIN ROUGE (20TH CENTURY FOX, 2001)
Director Baz Luhrmann added tremendous style to the movie musical with this fanciful, energetic tale of Satine (Nicole Kidman), a popular singer at the famous nineteenth-century French club. The movie’s frantic pace and self-conscious use of wildly different musical sources, including Madonna, Elton John, and The Sound of Music , make this a very untraditional musical and show how flexible genre can be. Frame enlargement.
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serves to herald love and heartbreak. Like the Western, this genre has notably diminished in recent years. The cinema is a poorer medium for its loss.
The Horror Film
Like Westerns and gangster films, horror has roots in the early silent period and existed as a literary and theatrical genre long before the invention of cinema. In the silent era, Lon Chaney (known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces”) used horrific makeup to create memorably grotesque characters in The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). Actor John Barrymore played a strikingly repellent Mr. Hyde in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920). Using distorted sets and compositions, the German expressionists created hauntingly bizarre worlds, such as that in F. W. Murnau’s vampire classic Nosferatu (1922).
Beginning in the 1930s, Universal Pictures gave the cinema its classic monsters: Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Wolf Man (1941).
The brilliant makeup and set design and the classic visual conceptions given to the monsters have made these Universal productions the golde
n age of movie horror, and they have exerted an enduring influence on popular conceptions of Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, and werewolves. During this period, producer Val Lewton at RKO made a series of poetic and atmospheric horror films— Cat People (1942), Isle of the Dead (1945), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943)—in which horrible or uncanny things were suggested rather than shown. Since then, horror has been big box office, an enduring genre that has never been long out of favor with audiences.
Critic Robin Wood defines the basic narrative situation in horror films as one whereby “normality” is threatened by the monster. Monster films from Frankenstein (1931) and Dracula (1931) to Halloween (1978) and The Fly (1988) often define normality in terms of the romantic, heterosexual couple or the family, particularly parent–child relationships ( The Exorcist , 1973; The Omen , 1976). This is THE MUMMY
(UNIVERSAL, 1932)
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THE MUMMY (UNIVERSAL, 1999)
In its golden age, the horror genre created its enduring monsters using brilliant makeup designs applied to the face and body of actors Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney.
Lacking a comparable generation of monster movie actors, today’s films use high-tech effects and digital animation. Karloff’s classic mummy used makeup and lighting to give the actor a sinister look; by contrast, the remake featured a monster created and animated in the computer. Frame enlargements.
not, though, an invariable pattern. John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing (1982), for example, is set amid an all-male community of scientific researchers based in Antarctica. But in virtually all cases, normal life, however it is portrayed in a given film, is under threat from something unspeakable, horrific and/or supernatural.
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