“In ways that we do not easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the american psyche which rejects the qualities and demands of modern life, which rejects ‘Americanism’ itself.”
-Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as a Tragic Hero”
In 1948, film scholar Rober Warshow wrote a short essay titled “The Gangster as a Tragic Hero”, in which he analyses from a cultural perspective the gangster genre and figure. It is important to note that this was in a time where the most common references for this (sub)genre were Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932) or Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931); there was no Godfather trilogy (Coppola, 1972-1990), no Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990), no Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994). Since the publication of this essay the genre has already been developed, reimagined, deconstructed and reconstructed countless times. Also, while the article focuses on mainly american productions, the genre has seen many interpretations in world cinema, with the likes of Japan’s Tokyo Drifter (Suzuki, 1966), Brazil’s City of God (Meirelles, 2002), Italy’s Gomorrah (Garrone, 2008) or France’s A Prophet (Audiard, 2009). Still, I recently had to read Warshow’s essay for the university and I wanted to discuss his ideas onto the genre and how this may apply (or not) to the films post-1948. For the sake of simplicity, I will focus on american gangster films, just like Warshow did in the 40s.
First we have to define the gangster genre: “Gangster Films are developed around the sinister actions of criminals or gangsters, particularly bankrobbers, underworld figures, or ruthless hoodlums who operate outside the law, stealing and violently murdering their way through life.” (http://www.filmsite.org/crimefilms.html) Ok, that’s a simple definition with which we can work with. Second, we must understand the difference between crime film and gangster film: a crime film can be a detective story for example, naturally crime plays a big role, but its focus doesn’t necessarily lie in the gangsters themselves; whereas gangster films are crime films, not every crime film is a gangster film – the gangster film works rather as a subgenre of the crime film.
That being said, let’s take a look at Warshow’s main thesis, which can be seen clearly in the quote above. The figure of the gangster exists with the sole purpose of subverting the american dream, of rising from the masses as an individual and achieving success. This success comes, as expected, at the expense of crime and violence. We as an audience only get to see the criminal and violent aspects of a gangster’s career, thus we associate their enterprise and business mentality with this acts of brutality. And yet, there’s a part of us that admires the gangster and even wishes to become him: they are anti-heroes in the sense that they do what most of us wouldn’t dare, namely going against the establishment into the criminal underworld and rising from the masses as a powerful individual. Much like horror films (click here for my analysis on that genre), the gangster film can reveal aspects of our psyche that we’d rather ignore, but then again, just like the aforementioned genre, it may provide a sort of catharsis for such “inpure” desires.
Warshow adresses the gangster mythos by claiming that the core of it all is the city, a hostile place where anonimity reigns above the individuals and the gangster depends on his wits and brutality to raise in such enviroment. He further says that it is worth knowing the difference between a criminal and a gangster: for him, the former exists in real cities and real underworlds, while the latter exists only as an imaginary construct of our culture. Basically, the gangster is a mythological figure (and a tragic one at that) that has been romanticised by a culture that knows it should condemn him but deep down sympathizes and even adores him.
But there is a second dimension to the function of the gangster genre as a cultural phenomena, and here is where I wanna draw differences between the films pertient to this genre before the writing of this article and those that came later. This dimension is, in essence, a moral one: in the classical era, all gangster films (according to Warshow) end with the death of the anti-hero, a downfall that serves as a reckoning for those who dare go against the system and go into the criminal world (it is also worth noticing that most of these were produced before the Hays Code kicked in in 1932). And while I won’t argue that in more modern iterations the gangster doesn’t suffer consequences for his actions, it is his final punishment that is different: by the end of The Godfather Part II (which was intended to be the final entry before Coppola decided to return 16 years later because of financial reasons) Michael loses his family, the trust of his closest allies and even his convictions by killing his own brother – he may still be at the top of his empire, but he has basically lost everything on a personal level; at the end of Goodfellas, Henry is forced to renounce his wealthy lifestyle and his dream of always being a gangster in order to simply survive; in American Gangster (Scott, 2007), Lucas is caught by the police and is sentenced to 70 years of prison (though to be fair, his sentence is shortened because of his collaborating with the police).
Sure, there are still plenty of examples of newer films where the gangster is dead by the end, but it comes as a final ordeal after having already suffered greater punishment: Sullivan’s wife leaves him after discovering his involvement with the mob in The Departed, and by the end of Reservoir Dogs basically every gangster is dead except for one, but before that the heist went completely wrong and their trust as a group was broken. Ok, we can agree that the practice of killing the gangster by the end of the movie as a sort of moral judgement and as a message of warning is still in use, but what I’m trying to argue is that this particular trope, which was employed in virtually every gangster film of the classical Hollywood period according to Warshow, is an example of an aspect of the genre that has been revolutionized since the essay was written.
We can still see in the american gangster films of today many of the traits with which Robert Warshow characterized the genre back in 1948: the gangster as an anti-hero who subverts the ideal of the american dream, the desire to trascend the masses and raise as an individual, and the final punishment of justice falling above him as a consequence for the crimes he has committed throughout his career. Still, given that this essay was written 70 years ago, it is no wonder that the genre has evolved since then – in this case, I wanted to show how the gangster’s final fate is not exactly how it was executed back in the day, even though we still get examples for such resolutions. The gangster genre is one that is very interesting to look at, and many of the greatest films ever made can be found within this genre. That’s why it is important to look into it and its theories, they may reveal aspects of our culture we hadn’t considered before.
Sources:
-Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as a Tragic Hero”
-“Crime and Gangster Film”, http://www.filmsite.org
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Breaking the Fourth Wall 