Let me be clear, I am writing about gangster movies: films that go inside the world of the mob, NOT cops and robbers or petty crime movies. Organized crime is the order of the day with what I am exploring with this article, big and small. Warner Brothers built their studio on gangster films, romanticizing life in the mob to make it exciting, even glamorous in the thirties and forties. Yet there was always the end when the criminals died or went to prison, they always got what they deserved. The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932) and Little Caesar (1931) were the best of the early gangster films, and there were many through the decade and beyond. Never though was there an intimate, inside look at how the mafia or organized crime worked, and just how it impacted the men who were operating it, and their families surrounding them. So really the gangster film, if there is a true gangster film, began with The Godfather (1972), Francis Ford Coppola’s magnificent look at the mob, a perverse study of the American Dream turned upside down and the story of a father and his three sons.
The Gangster Squad was. The LAPD takes on organized crime. The dapper former prizefighter who had come to town as Bugsy's muscle but soon had his own cafe. Gangsters: Organized Crime? Cheat because I’m straight up gangster 4 life. Gangsters: Organized Crime now lives on GOG which. To muscle in on.
Coppola drew on his own heritage as an Italian American and brought to the film an intimacy that might not have otherwise been there in the hands of another director. Of course he brought a great deal more to the mix as well, casting (refusing to buckle), an epic seep yet intimate feel to the film, and we seemed to be on the inside of the dimly lit rooms where murder was discussed like going for groceries. The film allowed Marlon Brando to create one of the most iconic characters ever put on film, and win a second Academy Award for Best Actor, as well as a second coming of method acting and actors, with Al Pacino emerging as one of the important actors of the seventies.
The sequel, made just two years later, would surpass the first in every way, no mean feat, yet Coppola and writer Mario Puzo made it deeper, more complex, darker and near visionary. With a broken narrative the film told the story of young Vito (Robert De Niro) rising to power in the early part of the 20th century, borne out of necessity, while we watch his Michael (Pacino) consolidate his extraordinary power in the fifties, overseeing an operation bigger than US Steel. Yet in Michaels world there is treachery from a place his least expects it, and it will tear apart the strong family his father sought to build. More than anything the picture explores how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Both films won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Coppola twice won DGA Awards for his work, and their box office take was incredible.
What the two films made clear, was the crime was just a business, no different to the men operating it than running as massive company, the difference being killing was art of the everyday routine, and was never taken personally. The best of the gang films followed suit, exploring how the business operated, and how the police were truing in one way or another to infiltrate the mob.
Organized Crime Today
The door was opened for further studies of the mob and filmmakers to advantage of it, Martin Scorsese making no less than four films dealing with organized crime, the best of them Goodfellas (1990), not far behind The Departed (2006) and the under appreciated Casino (1995). Sergio Leone gave us the massive, haunting Jewish gang epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984), initially butchered by the studio, the long version surviving and being the only one to see. Tarantino of course exploded into movies with the thrilling Pulp Fictin (1994) the mob on a smaller level, while Oscar winner Barry Levinson made the biographical Bugsy (1991) with Warren Beatty giving the performance of his life as the dangerous but visionary Bugsy Siegel. The black mob came to the screen in the superb American Gangster (2007) with Denzel Washington going toe to toe with Russell Crowe, and another Oscar winner Sam Mendes gave us the fine thriller Road to Perdition (2002), an excellent father-son story set against the background of the Depression and the heyday of Capone. And of course there were many more, Brian De Palmas Scarface (1983) and The Untouchables (1987), each in their own way a superb addition to the genre, Mean Streets (1973) an early Scorsese film, The General (1998), John Boorman’s study of Martin Cahill an Irish mobster they could never convict, and many, many more.