The Gangster Film: Fatal Success in American Cinema PDF
Preview The Gangster Film: Fatal Success in American Cinema
THE GANGSTER FILM FATAL SUCCESS IN AMERICAN CINEMA RON WILSON SHORT CUTS SHORT CUTS INTRODUCTIONS TO FILM STUDIES OTHER SELECT TITLES IN THE SHORT CUTS SERIES THE HORROR GENRE: FROM BEELZEBUB TO BLAIR WITCH Paul Wells THE STAR SYSTEM: HOLLYWOOD’S PRODUCTION OF POPULAR IDENTITIES Paul McDonald SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA: FROM OUTERSPACE TO CYBERSPACE Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska EARLY SOVIET CINEMA: INNOVATION, IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA David Gillespie READING HOLLYWOOD: SPACES AND MEANINGS IN AMERICAN FILM Deborah Thomas DISASTER MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF CATASTROPHE Stephen Keane THE WESTERN GENRE: FROM LORDSBURG TO BIG WHISKEY John Saunders PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: THE PLAY OF SHADOWS Vicky Lebeau COSTUME AND CINEMA: DRESS CODES IN POPULAR FILM Sarah Street MISE-EN-SCÈNE: FILM STYLE AND INTERPRETATION John Gibbs NEW CHINESE CINEMA: CHALLENGING REPRESENTATIONS Sheila Cornelius with Ian Haydn Smith ANIMATION: GENRE AND AUTHORSHIP Paul Wells WOMEN’S CINEMA: THE CONTESTED SCREEN Alison Butler BRITISH SOCIAL REALISM: FROM DOCUMENTARY TO BRIT GRIT Samantha Lay FILM EDITING: THE ART OF THE EXPRESSIVE Valerie Orpen AVANT-GARDE FILM: FORMS, THEMES AND PASSIONS Michael O’Pray PRODUCTION DESIGN: ARCHITECTS OF THE SCREEN Jane Barnwell NEW GERMAN CINEMA: IMAGES OF A GENERATION Julia Knight EARLY CINEMA: FROM FACTORY GATE TO DREAM FACTORY Simon Popple and Joe Kember MUSIC IN FILM: SOUNDTRACKS AND SYNERGY Pauline Reay MELODRAMA: GENRE, STYLE, SENSIBILITY John Mercer and Martin Shingler FEMINIST FILM STUDIES: WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA Janet McCabe FILM PERFORMANCE: FROM ACHIEVEMENT TO APPRECIATION Andrew Klevan NEW DIGITAL CINEMA: REINVENTING THE MOVING IMAGE Holly Willis THE MUSICAL: RACE, GENDER AND PERFORMANCE Susan Smith TEEN MOVIES: AMERICAN YOUTH ON SCREEN Timothy Shary FILM NOIR: FROM BERLIN TO SIN CITY Mark Bould DOCUMENTARY: THE MARGINS OF REALITY Paul Ward THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: FROM BONNIE AND CLYDE TO STAR WARS Peter Krämer ITALIAN NEO-REALISM: REBUILDING THE CINEMATIC CITY Mark Shiel WAR CINEMA: HOLLYWOOD ON THE FRONT LINE Guy Westwell FILM GENRE: FROM ICONOGRAPHY TO IDEOLOGY Barry Keith Grant ROMANTIC COMEDY: BOY MEETS GIRL MEETS GENRE Tamar Jeffers McDonald SPECTATORSHIP: THE POWER OF LOOKING ON Michele Aaron SHAKESPEARE ON FILM: SUCH THINGS THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF Carolyn Jess-Cooke CRIME FILMS: INVESTIGATING THE SCENE Kirsten Moana Thompson THE FRENCH NEW WAVE: A NEW LOOK Naomi Greene CINEMA AND HISTORY: THE TELLING OF STORIES Mike Chopra-Gant GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST CINEMA: THE WORLD OF LIGHT AND SHADOW Ian Roberts FILM AND PHILOSOPHY: TAKING MOVIES SERIOUSLY Daniel Shaw CONTEMPORARY BRITISH CINEMA: FROM HERITAGE TO HORROR James Leggott RELIGION AND FILM: CINEMA AND THE RE-CREATION OF THE WORLD S. Brent Plate FANTASY CINEMA: IMPOSSIBLE WORLDS ON SCREEN David Butler FILM VIOLENCE: HISTORY, IDEOLOGY, GENRE James Kendrick NEW KOREAN CINEMA: BREAKING THE WAVES Darcy Paquet FILM AUTHORSHIP: AUTEURS AND OTHER MYTHS C. Paul Sellors THE VAMPIRE FILM: UNDEAD CINEMA Jeffrey Weinstock HERITAGE FILM: NATION, GENRE AND REPRESENTATION Belén Vidal QUEER CINEMA: SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES AND GAY COWBOYS Barbara Mennel ACTION MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF STRIKING BACK Harvey O’Brien BOLLYWOOD: GODS, GLAMOUR AND GOSSIP Kush Varia THE SPORTS FILM: GAMES PEOPLE PLAY Bruce Babington THE HEIST FILM: STEALING WITH STYLE Daryl Lee INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND FILM: SPACE, VISON, POWER Sean Carter & Klaus Dodds FILM THEORY: CREATING A CINEMATIC GRAMMAR Felicity Colman BIO-PICS: A LIFE IN PICTURES Ellen Cheshire THE GAN GSTER FILM FATAL SUCCESS IN AMERICAN CINEMA RON WILSON WALLFLOWER LONDON and NEW YORK A Wallflower Press Book Wallflower Press is an imprint of Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York, Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © Ron Wilson 2015 All rights reserved. Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press. Cover image: Goodfellas (1990) © Warner Bros/Dirck Halstead A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-231-17207-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-85067-4 (e-book) Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 A Silent Era: From Gangs to Gangsters 11 2 The Racketeer and the Outlaw: Gangster Archetypes of the 1930s 29 3 Murder, Incorporated: Post-war Developments in the Gangster Film 56 4 La Famiglia: Coppola, Scorsese, and Gangster Ethnicity 81 Conclusion 105 Filmography 110 Bibliography 119 Index 125 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of Kansas, and particularly Dr. Tamara Falicov, the department Chair, for allowing the opportunity to teach several courses where I initially engaged many of the ideas expressed in this volume. I would also like to thank the immensely talented and industrious students in my graduate writing course who, time and again, were subject to hear- ing about writing examples such as paragraph structure, proper citation format, integration of sources etc that I was currently working on in drafts of this manuscript. Special thanks go to David Sutera, who helped with the images. Words cannot express my gratitude to Yoram Allon, Commissionng Editor at Wallflower Press, for his professional expertise, patience and fer- vent belief in this project. And finally I owe a heartfelt thanks to all of the staff at Wallflower Press in helping to develop and guide the manuscript through the publication process. INTRODUCTION The opening sequence of Bugsy (1991) is a perfect synthesis of some of the thematic concerns of the American gangster film. Within its short seven- minute duration director Barry Levinson is able to incorporate not only the delineation of character traits associated with its gangster protagonist Bugsy Siegel, but also a major concern of the gangster film itself – the power of consumption. The sequence begins with a medium shot of the outside of a house in the dead of winter. A voice-over conversation informs us that a husband/father is leaving on a business trip. We next see a car travelling along a road in long shot and hear its occupant indulging in elocution lessons (‘Twenty dwarves took turns doing hand stands on the carpet. Twenty dwarves…’). Inter-cutting these short scenes with the credits themselves, Levinson then shows the man in a clothing store buying shirts. When the salesman addresses him as ‘Mr. Siegel’ a bystander informs his wife, ‘That’s Bugsy Siegel’. It is at that point that we finally see a close-up of the man’s face as he has clearly heard the remark. Overshadowed by the silhouettes of store mannequins in the window who loom threateningly over the scene, ‘Bugsy’ admonishes and verbally intimidates the man’s reference to ‘something that crawls around in the dirt’ rather than his real name of Benjamin (‘It’s in the Bible’). The following scene is in a hotel lobby where Bugsy Siegel picks up an attractive girl in an elevator (‘If we make love it will be the only time’). This is followed by an interior shot of the hotel room where clothes are strewn 1
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