Crime film
The other ten super-genres are action, fantasy, horror, romance, science fiction, slice of life, sports, thriller, war and western.
Clarens continued that they describe what is culturally and morally abnormal and differ from thriller films which he wrote as being more concerned with psychological and private situations.
[21] 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.
[26] 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.
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.
"[32] 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.
[33] 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.
[35] 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.
[37] 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.
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.
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).
Despite To The crime film countered this by providing material no acceptable for television, first with a higher level of onscreen violence.
[45] 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.
[53] The French Connection (1971) dispensed Bullitt's 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.
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.
[55] 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.
[56] Films like Dirty Harry, The French Connection and Straw Dogs (1971) that presented a violent vigilante as a savior.
[57] 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.
[56] 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).
[63] In an article by John G. Cawelti titled "Chinatown and Generic Transformations in Recent American Films" (1979), Cawleti 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.
[65] 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).
[66] 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).
[69] In these films, the gangster and their values have been imbedded through decades of reiteration and revision, generally with a masculine style where an elaboration on a codes of behavior by acts of decisive violence are central concerns.
[72] While not the only or first gangster film following the fall of the production code, The Godfather (1972) was the most popular and launched a major revival of the style.
[73][74] The essential element in these films is the plot concentration on the commission of a single crime of great monetary significance, at least on the surface level.
