Movies

Film, as a reflection of society, conveys the hopes and anxieties of the culture in which it is created. In American film, criminal characters—mob bosses, robbers, contract killers, gangsters—have become posterized icons. The crime movie includes such subgenres as gangster films, film noir, prison films, detective films, cop action films, and serial killer or horror films. Traditionally, crime movies have centered on White male cops or criminal enterprises, though the minority criminal/cop has gradually come to be more commonly represented in film.

The crime genre is nearly as old as film itself. Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery, a silent short western, was released in 1903. D. W. Griffith introduced organized crime to film with The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912). But it was real-life gangster Al Capone and the organized crime of Prohibition era bootlegging that coincided with the rise of talkies (films with audible speaking) to propel the popularity of crime movies. The three classic gangster films of the era, all based loosely on Capone, were Little Caesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarf ace: The Shame of a Nation (1932), the release of which was delayed 2 years due to its portrayal of excessive violence. It was at this time that the Hays Production Code was adopted to instate moral acceptability codes and ultimately to censor film. For movie production studios, Hays proscribed the glorification of crime, restricted the amount of violence and drug use, and ordered retribution for criminal acts. In 1967, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) film rating system replaced Hays.

In 1939, The Roaring Twenties, which portrays rival bootlegging gangs during Prohibition and [Page 538]solidified the reputations of actors Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, became the last of the classic gangster films. The 1940s saw the birth of American film noir, a dark cinematographic and thematic style of filmmaking that featured plots ranging from mystery (The Maltese Falcon, 1941) to murderous double cross (Double Indemnity, 1944) to bank heist (The Killing, 1956) and even espionage (Notorious, 1946). Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958) is arguably the last true film noir picture, though many subsequent crime films (i.e., Blood Simple, 1984; Reservoir Dogs, 1992; A History of Violence, 2005) have been derived from classic film noir.

Prison films have portrayed life behind bars and commented on such issues as harsh prison conditions, wrongful imprisonment, and the lives of prisoners awaiting execution. The Defiant Ones (1958) is a particularly renowned film in this genre that deals with race relations between two escaped convicts shackled together by chain: one White (Tony Curtis) and one Black (Sidney Poitier), as the two are forced to overcome their racial hatreds in order to survive life on the run. For their roles, both actors, in addition to the film itself, were nominated for Academy Awards. Cool Hand Luke (1967), a story of prisoner rebellion, and Escape From Alcatraz (1979), which details an escape from the infamous prison, respectively made Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood prisoner antiheroes. The Shawshank Redemption (Best Picture Academy Award nominee, 1994), which revisited prison race relations, featured a Black protagonist (Academy Award-nominated Morgan Freeman) prison con man who befriends a wrongly imprisoned White banker (Tim Robbins). American History X (1998) tells the story of a neo-Nazi murderer liberated by an old teacher and a fellow prisoner, both African Americans.

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