Jack Shadoian - Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film

Dreams & Dead Ends

THE AMERICAN GANGSTER FILM
SECOND EDITION

JACK SHADOIAN

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Copyright 2003 by Oxford University Press

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This volume is a revised edition of Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/Crime Film published 1977 by MIT Press.

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Stills courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc., Miramax Films, Paramount Pictures Corporation, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, United Artists Corporation, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros., Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shadoian, Jack.
Dreams and dead ends : the American gangster film / Jack Shadoian. 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 0-19-514291-8; 0-19-514292-6 (pbk.)
1. Gangster filmsUnited StatesHistory and criticism. I. Title.
PN1995.9.G3 S5 2001
791.43655dc21 2001035081

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To Christopher and Jessica,
in whom the passion
for film lives on

A large percentage of feature films are genre films. Filmmakers do not normally proceed without an awareness of the kind of film their time and money is being used to create. The decision they arrive at becomes a basic controlling factor for the film. Viewers use genres to help themselves determine the kind of evening they would prefer to spend at the movies. Critics use genre as a method of organization, as a term and a concept that serves their discourse and allows for particular kinds of discoveries. Since genre considerations figure so importantly in the production and the viewing of so many films, the direction for critical thought that genre supplies is central to the attempt at understanding them.

Criticism of film genres has largely been concerned with systematizing what most filmgoers haphazardly discern, with placing and classifying films on the evidence of descriptive definition. This is of course necessary, but both classification and description are open to dispute, despite claims to objectivity. More to the point, however, is that thinking about film genres should go beyond stressing their repetitive iconographical, situational, and narrative elements. Genres persist, change, and overlap, and we must ask questions about both their persistence and their evolution. If they persist, they must be useful, but useful for what? Observation must be incorporated into argument, into theory and interpretation. We must ponder the meaning of genres.

In dealing with the American gangster/crime film, I have posed to myself this question: What does the genre do that cant be done as well elsewhere? This seems to me the large question necessary to genre definition. What does the framework of any particular genre allow the expression of? I think, also, that we are well aware that the bare bones of generic description do not adequately account for the complexities of any given film, that infinite qualifications as to how generic elements function are required before our perception and experience of the film can proceed toward a criticism capable of exploring the films value, meaning, and impact. Resemblances are often enough superficial and/or merely serviceable. It goes without saying that a genre critic is obliged to see a great number of films before attempting discriminations of kind, likeness, similarity. However, it is not enough to see a sufficient number of films. The critic is also obliged to think them through, if only to make classification, and designation of patterns and qualities, reasonably accurate. Even genre criticism that is predicated upon an intellectual grasp of a distinct and distinguishable body of work must ultimately rise to the challenge of understanding specific works, not only because a film addresses us in its totality but also to ensure the flexibility and credibility of its generalizations.

The gangster/crime genre is an involved system of family relationships. Specific films tend to violate, extend, adapt, and sometimes dismiss the conventions that in part color and motor them even as they are evoked and put into play. Paring down the complexity of the genre is no solution, whatever the advantage to critical convenience and efficiency. A theory of the genre that does it justice should be capable of elucidating its most complex manifestations as they occur in individual films. Whatever general ideas and implications can be drawn from the films of the genre, they must be shown to emerge from the films themselves. My discussion, therefore, centers on key, representative films, from which theory is derived and developed. Undertaking theory and close analysis in conjunction will, I hope, prevent theory from limiting and misrepresenting the films and advance criticism of the genre toward a complex consideration of works in relation to their informing structures. An activity it has been reluctant to perform.

Genres are cultural metaphors and psychic mirrors. We dont know of what until we study the films that comprise them. In varying degrees, each film genre offers an account of the life we lead, wish to lead, or ought to lead. To study a sequence of films that use similar frameworks allows us to think about the utility and potential of those frameworks. The sequence should be chronological so that changes may be perceived in their proper relation to social/historical factors and advances in the medium itself and, more fundamentally, because films must be understood as standing in a line of influence. There remains the problem of which films belong in which genres. We all make hurried, though generally pretty reliable, distinctionswe know, more or less. what musicals, westerns, gangster films, soap operas, horror films, and war films are. (Comedy is notoriously amorphous and is not really a genre at all but a sensibility, a way of looking at the world.) In the five years or so that I have applied concentrated (as opposed to random) thought to the gangster/crime film, several writers have charted out some possibilities and there seems to be a general consensus as to the outer limits of what films can be included. I stand indebted to all those writersLawrence Alloway, John Baxter, John Gabree, Stuart Kaminsky, and Colin McArthur, in particularfor their thoughts on the matter, although my personal sense of the continuity of the genre approximates Baxters and McArthurs most closely. That is to say. my view of the genre is rather a wide one: it embraces a great many films. In terms of their purpose, and their visual-iconic organization, the genre includes not only those works obviously concerned with the character and fate of the gangster hero but also certain films noirs, policiers, juvenile delinquent films, private eye films, and syndicate films.