Crime film

Crime films, in the broadest sense, is a film genre inspired by and analogous to the crime fiction literary genre. Films of this genre generally involve various aspects of crime and its detection. Stylistically, the genre may overlap and combine with many other genres, such as drama or gangster film,^[1] but also include comedy, and, in turn, is divided into many sub-genres, such as mystery, suspense or noir.

Screenwriter and scholar Eric R. Williams identified crime film as one of eleven super-genres in his Screenwriters Taxonomy, claiming that all feature-length narrative films can be classified by these super-genres. The other ten super-genres are action, fantasy, horror, romance, science fiction, slice of life, sports, thriller, war and western.^[2] Williams identifies drama in a broader category called "film type", mystery and suspense as "macro-genres", and film noir as a "screenwriter's pathway" explaining that these categories are additive rather than exclusionary.^[3] Chinatown would be an example of a film that is a drama (film type) crime film (super-genre) that is also a noir (pathway) mystery (macro-genre).

Characteristics

The definition of what constitutes a crime film is not straightforward.^[4] Criminologist Nicole Hahn Rafter in her book Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society (2006) found that film scholars had a traditional reluctance to examine the topic of crime films in their entirety due to complex nature of the topic.^[5] Carlos Clarens in his book Crime Movies (1980), described the crime film as a symbolic representation of criminals, law, and society. Clarens continued that they describe what is culturally and morally abnormal and differ from thriller films which he wrote as being more concerned with psychological and private situations.^[6] Thomas Schatz in Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (1981) does not refer to the concept of crime film as a genre, and says that "such seemingly similar "urban crime" formulas" such as the gangster film and detective film were their own unique forms.^[7] Thomas Leitch, author of Crime Films (2004) stated that the crime film presents their defining subject as a crime culture that normalizes a place where crime is both shockingly disruptive and completely normal.^[8] Rafter suggested the best way to skirt complexities of various films that may be defined as crime films as works that focus primarily on crime and its consequences, and that they should be viewed as a category that encompasses a number genres, ranging from caper films, detective films, gangster films, cop and prison films and courtroom dramas. She said that like drama and romance film, they are umbrella terms that cover several smaller more coherent groups.^[9]

The criminal acts in every film in the genre represents a larger critique of either social or institutional order from the perspective of a character or from the film's narrative at large.^[10] The films also depend on the audience ambivalence towards crime. Master criminals are portrayed as immoral but glamourous while maverick police officers break the law to capture criminals. Leitch defined this as a critical to the film as the films are about the continual breakdown and re-establishment of borders among criminals, crime solvers and victims, concluding that "this paradox is at the heart of all crime films."^[11] Rafter echoed these statements, saying crime films should be defined on the basis of their relationship with society.^[4]

Leitch writes that crime films reinforce popular social beliefs of their audience, such as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the law is above individuals, and that crime does not pay.^[10] The genre also generally has endings that confirm the moral absolutes that an innocent victim, a menacing criminal, and detective and their own morals that inspire them by questioning their heroic or pathetic status, their moral authority of the justice system, or by presenting innocent characters who seem guilty and vice-versa.^[12]

Crime films includes all films that focus on any of the three parties to a crime: criminal, victims, and avengers and explores what one party's relation to the other two.^[13] This allows the crime film to encompass films as wide as Wall Street (1987); caper films like The Asphalt Jungle (1950); and prison films ranging from Brute Force (1947) to The Shawshank Redemption (1994).^[13] Crime films are not definable by their mise-en-scene such as the Western film as they lack both the instantly recognizable or the unique intent of other genres such as parody films.^[14]

Leitch and Rafter both write that it would be impractical to call every film in which a crime produces the central dramatic situation a crime film.^[15]^[16] Leitch gave an example that most Westerns from The Great Train Robbery (1903) to Unforgiven (1992) often have narratives about crime and punishment, but are not generally described as crime films.^[17] Films with crime-and-punishment themes like Winchester 73 (1950) and Rancho Notorious (1952) are classified as Westerns rather than crime films because their setting takes precedence over their story.^[18] Alain Silver and James Ursini argued in A Companion to Crime Fiction (2020) that "unquestionably most Western films are crime films" but that their overriding generic identification is different just as crime are different than horror, science fiction and period drama films.^[19] Rafter also suggested that Westerns could be considered crime films, but that this perception would only be "muddying conceptual waters."^[20]

History

Silent era

The history of the crime film before 1940 follows reflected the changing social attitudes toward crime and criminals.^[21] In the first twenty years of the 20th Century, American society was under intense social reform with cities rapidly expanding and leading to social unrest and street crime rising and some people forming criminal gangs.^[22] In this early silent film period, criminals were more prominent on film screens than enforcers of the law.^[21] Among these early films from the period is D. W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) involving a young woman hounded by a mobster known as The Snapper Kid.^[23] Regeneration (1915) was an early feature-length film about a gangster who saved from a life of crime by a social worker.^[24] These two early films and films like Tod Browning's Outside the Law (1920) that deal with the world of criminal activity were described by Silver and Ursini as being gangsters "constrained by a strong moral code".^[25] Stuart Kaminsky in American Film Genres (1974) stated that prior to Little Caesar (1931), gangster characters were in films were essentially romances.^[26]

European films of the silent era differed radically from the Hollywood productions, reflecting the post-World War I continental culture. Drew Todd wrote that with this, Europeans tended to create darker stories and the audiences of these films were readier to accept these narratives.^[27] Several European silent films go much further in exploring the mystique of the criminal figures. These followed the success in France of Louis Feuillade's film serial Fantômas (1913).^[28]

The average budget for a Hollywood feature went from $20,000 in 1914 to $300,000 in 1924.^[29]^[30] Silver and Ursini stated that the earliest crime features were by Austrian émigré director Josef von Sternberg whose films like Underworld (1927) eliminated most of the causes for criminal behavior and focused on the criminal perpetrators themselves which would anticipate the popular gangster films of the 1930s.^[25]

1930s

James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in a promotional still for The Roaring Twenties (1939).

The groundwork for the gangster films of the early 1930s were influenced by the early 1920s when cheap wood-pulp paper stocks led to an explosion in mass-market publishing. Newspapers would make folk heroes of bootleggers like Al Capone, while pulp magazines like Black Mask (1920) helped support more highbrow magazines such as The Smart Set which published stories of hard-edged detetives like Carroll John Daly's Race Williams.^[31] The early wave of gangster films borrowed liberally from stories for early Hollywood productions that defined the genre with films like Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932).^[25] In comparison to much earlier films of the silent era, Leitch described the 1930s cycle as turning "the bighearted crook silent films had considered ripe for redemption into a remorseless killer."^[32]

Hollywood Studio heads were under such constant pressure from public-interest groups to tone down their portrayal of professional criminals that as early as 1931. Jack L. Warner announced that Warner Bros. would stop producing such films.^[33] Scarface itself was delayed for over a year as its director Howard Hughes talked with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America's Production Code Office over the films violence and overtones of incest.^[34] A new wave of crime films that began in 1934 were made that had law enforcers as glamourous and as charismatic as the criminals.^[35] J. Edgar Hoover, director the Bureau of Investigation (renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1935), promoted bigger budgets and wider press for his organization and himself through a well-publicized crusade against such real world gangsters as Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger.^[35] Hoover's fictionalized exploits were glorified in future films such as G Men (1935).^[36] Through the 1930s, American films view of criminals were predominantly glamorized, but as the decade ended, the attitudes Hollywood productions had towards fictional criminals grew less straightforward and more conflicted.^[37] In 1935, Humphrey Bogart played Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936), a role Leitch described as the "first of Hollywood's overtly metaphorical gangsters."^[38] Bogart would appear in films in the later thirties: Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and The Roaring Twenties (1939). Unlike actor James Cagney, whose appeal as described by Leitch "direct, physical, and extroverted", Bogart characters and acting suggested "depths of worldly disillusionment beneath a crooked shell" and portrayed gangsters who showcased the "romantic mystique of the doomed criminal."^[38]

1940s

The 1940s formed an ambivalence toward the criminal heroes.^[21] Leitch suggested that this shift was from the decline in high-profile organized crime, partly because of the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 and partly because of the well-publicized success of the FBI.^[38] Unlike the crime films of the 1930s, the 1940s films were based more on fictional tales with gangsters played by Paul Muni in Angel on My Shoulder (1946) and Cagney in White Heat (1949) were self-consciously anachronistic.^[39]

Filmmakers from this period were fleeing Europe due to the rise of Nazism. These directors such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, and Billy Wilder would make crime films in the late 1930s and 1940s that were later described as film noir by French critics. Several films from 1944 like The Woman in the Window, Laura, Murder, My Sweet and Double Indemnity ushered in this film cycle. These works continued into the mid-1950s.^[40] A reaction to film noir came with films with a more semi-documentary approach pioneered by the thriller The House on 92nd Street (1945). This led to crime films taking a more realistic approach like Kiss of Death (1947) and The Naked City (1948).^[41]

By the end of the decade, American critics such as Parker Tyler and Robert Warshow regarded Hollywood itself as a stage for repressed American cultural anxieties following World War II.^[42] This can be seen in films such as Brute Force, a prison film where the prison is an existential social metaphor for a what Leitch described as a "meaningless, tragically unjust round of activities."^[43]

1950s

By 1950, the crime film was following changing attitudes towards the law and the social order that criminals metaphorically reflect while most film were also no more explicitly violent or explicitly sexual than those of 1934.^[21]^[41] White Heat (1949) inaugurated a cycle of crime films that would deal with the omnipresent danger of the nuclear bomb with its theme of when being threatened with technological nightmares, the main gangster Jody Jarrett fights fire with fire.^[43] These themes extended into two other major crime films by bring the issues down from global to the subcultural level: The Big Heat (1953) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) which use apocalyptical imagery to indicate danger with the first film which the film persistently links to images of catastrophically uncontrolled power and the "traumatic consequences" of nuclear holocaust and Kiss Me Deadly literally features an atom bomb waiting in a locker of the Hollywood Athletic Club.^[44]

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) consolidated a tendency to define criminal subculture as a mirror of American culture. The cycle of caper films were foreshadowed by films like The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949) to later examples like The Killing (1956) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). Leitch wrote that these films used the planning and action of a robbery todramatize the "irreducible unreasonableness of life."^[41] The themes of existential despair made the these film popular with European filmmakers, who would make their own heist films like Rififi (1955) and Il bidone (1955). Filmmakers of the coming French New Wave movement would expand on these crime films into complex mixtures of nostalgia and critique with later pictures like Elevator to the Gallows (1958), Breathless (1960) and Shoot the Piano Player (1960).^[41]

1960s

Following the classical noir period of 1940 to 1958, a return to the violence of the two previous decades.^[45] By 1960, film was losing popularity to television as the mass form of media entertainment. Despite To The crime film countered this by providing material no acceptable for television, first with a higher level of onscreen violence.^[46] Films like Psycho (1960) and Black Sunday (1960) marked an increase in onscreen violence in film.^[46]^[47] Prior to these films, violence and gorier scenes were cut in Hammer film productions by the British Board of Film Censors or conveyed mostly through narration.^[48] Box-office receipts began to grow stronger towards the late 1960s.^[46] Hollywood's demise of the Hays Code standards would allow for further violent, risqué and gory films.^[49]

As college students at the University of Berkeley and University of Columbia demonstrated against racial injustice and the Vietnam, Hollywood generally ignored the war in narratives, with exceptions of film like The Green Berets (1968).^[50] The crime film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) revived the gangster film genre and captured the antiestablishment tone and set new standards for onscreen violence in film with its themes of demonizing American institution to attack the moral injustice of draft.^[51]^[52] This increase of violence was reflected in other crime films such as Point Blank (1967).^[45]

Leitch found the growing rage against the establishment spilled into portrayal police themselves with films like Bullitt (1968) about a police officer caught between mob killers and ruthless politicians while In the Heat of the Night (1967) which called for racial equality and became the first crime film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture.^[53]

1970s

The French Connection (1971) dispensed Bullitt's noble hero for the character of Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle who Leitch described as a "tireless, brutal, vicious and indifferent" in terms of constraints of the law and his commanding officers.^[54] The film won several Academy Awards and was successful in the box office. This was followed in critical and commercial success of The Godfather (1972) which also won a Best Picture Academy Award and performed even better than The French Connection in the box office.^[54] The success of the film and its sequel The Godfather Part II (1974) reinforced the stature of the gangster film genre, which continued into the 1990s with films Scarface (1983), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), The Untouchables (1987), Goodfellas (1990) and Donnie Brasco (1997).^[55]

Dirty Harry (1971) create a new form of police film, where Clint Eastwood's performance as Inspector Callahan which critic Pauline Kael described as an "emotionless hero, who lives and kills as affectlessly as a psychopathic personality."^[56] Drew Todd in Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society described the character as different than films featuring rebellious characters from the 1940s and 1950s, with a character whose anger is directed against the state, mixed with fantasies of vigilante justice.^[56] Films like Dirty Harry, The French Connection and Straw Dogs (1971) that presented a violent vigilante as a savior.^[57] By the mid-1970s, a traditional lead with good looks, brawn and bravery was replaced with characters who Todd described as a "pathological outcast, embittered and impulsively violent."^[55]

Richard Roundtree as John Shaft in 1973.

Hollywood productions began courting films produced and marketed by white Americans for the purpose of trying to attract a new audience with blaxploitation film. These films were almost exclusively crime films following the success of Shaft (1971) which led to studios rushing to follow it's popularity with films like Super Fly (1972), Black Caesar (1973), Coffy (1973) and The Black Godfather (1974)^[58] The films were often derivations of earlier films such as Cool Breeze (1972), a remake of The Asphalt Jungle, Hit Man (1972) a remake of Get Carter (1971), and Black Mama, White Mama (1973) a remake of The Defiant Ones (1958). The cycle generally slowed down by the mid 1970s.^[59]

Prison films closely followed the formulas of films of the past while having an increased level of profanity, violence and sex.^[56] Cool Hand Luke (1967) inaugurated the revival and was followed into the 1970s with films like Papillon (1973), Midnight Express (1978) and Escape from Alcatraz (1979).^[56]

1980s and 1990s

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, he ushered in a conservative era.^[60] For crime films, this led to various reactions, including political films that critiqued official policies and citizen's political apathy. These included films like Missing (1982), Silkwood (1983), and No Way Out (1987).^[61] Prison films and courtroom dramas would also be politically charged with films like Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) and Cry Freedom (1987).^[62]

While films about serial killers existed in earlier films such as M (1931) and Peeping Tom (1960), the 1980s had an emphasis on the serial nature of their crimes with a larger number of films focusing on the repetitive nature of some murders.^[63] While many of these films were teen-oriented pictures, they also included films like Dressed to Kill (1980) and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) and continued into the 2000s with films like Seven (1995), Kiss the Girls (1997), and American Psycho (2000).^[63]

In an article by John G. Cawelti titled "Chinatown and Generic Transformations in Recent American Films" (1979), Cawleti noticed a change signaled by films like Chinatown (1974) and The Wild Bunch (1969) noting that older genres were being transformed through cultivation of nostalgia and a critique of the myths cultivated by their respective genres.^[64] Todd found that this found its way into crime films of the 1980s with films that could be labeled as post-modern, in which he felt that "genres blur, pastiche prevails, and once-fixed ideals, such as time and meaning, are subverted and destabilized".^[65] This would apply to the American crime film which began rejecting linear storytelling and distinctions between right and wrong with works from directors like Brian de Palma with Dressed to Kill and Scarface and works from The Coen Brothers and David Lynch whose had Todd described as having "stylized yet gritty and dryly humorous pictures evoking dream states" with films like Blood Simple (1984) and Blue Velvet (1986) and would continue into the 1990s with films like Wild at Heart (1990). Quentin Tarantino would continue this trend in the 1990s with films where violence and crime is treated lightly such as Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Natural Born Killers (1994) while Lynch and the Coens would continue with Fargo (1996) and Lost Highway (1997).^[66] Other directors such as Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet would continue to more traditional crime films Goodfellas, Prince of the City (1980), Q & A (1990), and Casino (1995).^[67]

Other trends of the 1990s extended boundaries of crime films, ranging from main characters who were female or minorities with films like Thelma and Louise (1991), Swoon (1991), Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Bound (1996) and Dolores Claiborne (1996).^[68]

Sub-genres

Every genre is a subgenre of a wider genre from whose contexts its own conventions take their meaning, it makes sense to think of the gangster film as both a genre on its own terms and a subgenre of the crime film.^[69]

Gangster film

In these films, the gangster and their values have been imbedded through decades of reiteration and revision, generally with a masculine style where an elaboration on a codes of behavior by acts of decisive violence are central concerns.^[70]

The archetypal gangster film was the Hollywood production Little Caesar (1931).^[26] A moral panic followed the release of the early gangster films following Little Caesar, which led to the 1935 Production Code Administration in 1935 ending its first major cycle.^[71] As early as 1939, the traditional gangster was already a nostalgic figure as seen in films like The Roaring Twenties (1939).^[71] American productions about career criminals became possible through the relaxation of the code in the 1950s and its abolition in 1966.^[72] While not the only or first gangster film following the fall of the production code, The Godfather (1972) was the most popular and launched a major revival of the style.^[71] The film followed the themes of the genres past while adding new emphasis on the intricate world of the mafia and its scale and seriousness that established new parameters for the genre.^[72]

Heist film

The heist film, also known as the "big caper" film is a style of crime film that originated from two cinematic precursors: the gangster film and the gentleman thief film.^[73]^[74] The essential element in these films is the plot concentration on the commission of a single crime of great monetary significance, at least on the surface level.^[75] The narratives in these films focus on the heist being wrapped up in the execution of the crime more or at as much as the criminal psychology and are characterized by and emphasis on the crime unfolding often though montage and extended sequences.^[76]

The genre is sometimes used interchangeable with the term "caper".^[77] The term was used for the more dramatic films of the 1950s, while in the 1960s, it had stronger elements of romantic comedy with more playful elements as seen in films like The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) and Topkapi (1964).^[78]

Hybrid genres

Leitch described combining genres as problematic.^[79] Screenwriter and academic Jule Selbo expanded on this, describing a film described as "crime/action" or an "action/crime" or other hybrids was "only a semantic exercise" as both genres are important in the construction phase of the narrative.^[80] Mark Bould in A Companion to Film Noir stated that categorization of multiple generic genre labels was common in film reviews and rarely concerned with succinct descriptions that evoke elements of the film's form, content and make no claims beyond on how these elements combine.^[81]^[82]

Reception

Leitch, stated that the genre has been popular since the dawn of the sound era of film.^[83] Ursini and Silver said that unlike the Western, the horror film, or the war film, the popularity of crime cinema has never waned.^[84]

References

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^ Leitch 2004, pp. 13––14.
^ Rafter 2006, p. 6.
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^ Leitch 2004, p. 15.
^ Leitch 2004, pp. 14–15.
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^ Leitch 2004, p. 10.
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^ Rafter 2006, pp. 5–6.
^ Leitch 2004, pp. 5–6.
^ Leitch 2004, p. 9.
^ Silver & Ursini 2020, p. 57.
^ Rafter 2006, p. 7.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Leitch 2004, p. 20.
^ Todd 2006, pp. 22––23.
^ Todd 2006, p. 23.
^ Todd 2006, pp. 23–24.
^ ^a ^b ^c Silver & Ursini 2020, p. 58.
^ ^a ^b Kaminsky 1974, p. 14.
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^ Hampton 1970, p. 313.
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^ Leitch 2004, p. 23.
^ Leitch 2004, p. 24.
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^ ^a ^b Silver & Ursini 2020, p. 61.
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^ Todd 2006, p. 56.
^ Leitch 2004, p. 4.
^ Langford 2005, p. 134.
^ ^a ^b ^c Langford 2005, pp. 134–135.
^ ^a ^b Langford 2005, p. 135.
^ Lee 2014, pp. 1–2.
^ Lee 2014, p. 19.
^ Lee 2014, p. 6.
^ Lee 2014, p. 7.
^ Lee 2014, p. 12.
^ Lee 2014, pp. 12–13.
^ Leitch 2004, p. 6.
^ Selbo 2014, pp. 229–232.
^ Bould 2013, p. 34.
^ Bould 2013, p. 44.
^ Leitch 2004, p. 1.
^ Silver & Ursini 2020, p. 59.

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