Modernity and the Classic Gangster Film

Abstract

Although the classic gangster cycle of Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface was initiated with Little Caesar in 1931 it did not spring into life fully formed, like Athene out of Zeus’ head. The gangster genre already had a history by 1931, not only in silent and sound cinema, but also in the theatre. One reason for the rise of the gangster film was the popularity of gangster dramas on Broadway from 1927 onwards which provided ready-made scripts for Hollywood during its flurry of gangster activity between 1930 and 1932. The silent era was not without its interest as far as the gangster genre was concerned, most notably producing The Musketeers of Pig Alley (D. W.Griffith, 1912), generally regarded as the ‘first genre-oriented gangster film’ (Everson, 1998: 227), The Gangsters and the Girl (Thomas Ince, 1914), Regeneration (Raoul Walsh, 1915), Underworld (Josef von Sternberg, 1927) and The Racket (Lewis Milestone, 1928).¹ Most of these films, however, narrativise their gangsters within the frame of Victorian melodrama with its easily identifiable moral categories and gender constructions (the male villain and the duped female victim).