CRIME FILMS

Crime Films

Crime Films

Audiences love rubbing shoulders with criminals in the knowledge that they can dip into the world of crime, experience the rush that comes from breaking the law, and slip back safely into their everyday lives when the lights go up. The very first feature film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), thrilled viewers with its bandits, murders, chase and shoot-out, but it wasn't until sound came along that the crime genre really got going. Led by Warner Brothers, the rise of gangster movies in the 1930s filled cinema screens with hyperactive, self-destructive characters who rose and fell to a cacophony of bullets, police sirens, snarled threats and speakeasy jazz. Official outcries over the glorification of gangsters switched the focus to equally ruthless lawmen, and crime in 1940s cinema often focused on detectives mired in shady mysteries. Throughout the following decade the tone became darker, as the genre probed the psychology of violence. By the 1960s, the outlaw status of the criminal appealed to the counterculture generation, with films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) becoming more graphically violent. Crime as an organized business, particularly Mafia-related, was a key theme during the 1970s. Meanwhile, cop movies took an ambivalent approach, with The French Connection (1971), Dirty Harry (1971) and vigilante fantasy Death Wish (1974) placing one foot on either side of the moral divide. By the 1980s, Hollywood had absorbed the crime genre into the high-concept action thriller. (Forman, 2009, 5)

In recent years Hollywood has added a hip-hop gloss to depictions of urban street crime, but the UK film industry continues to display a fascination with wide-boy gangsters who aim too high. The genre has looked to the Far East for inspiration, drawing upon a wealth of high-octane cop and killer movies from Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. (Geberth, 1996, 4)

Crime and 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. In the 1940s, a new type of crime thriller emerged, more dark and cynical - see the section on film-noir for further examples of crime films. Criminal and gangster films are often categorized as post-war film noir or detective-mystery films - because of underlying similarities between these cinematic forms. (Jordan, 2009, 1-44)

Most popular genres have a history. The crime film has none—or rather, it has so many that it is impossible to give a straightforward account of the genre's evolution without getting lost in innumerable byways as different crime formulas arise, evolve, compete, mutate, and cross-pollinate. Crime films arise from a radical ambivalence toward the romance of crime. That romance gave heroic detectives like Sherlock Holmes—burlesqued onscreen as early as 1900 or 1903 (the exact date is uncertain), in the thirty-second Sherlock Holmes Baffled —a matchless opportunity to make the life of the mind melodramatic and glamorous, and it made silent criminals like Fantômas ( Fantômas and four sequels, France, 1913-1914) and ...