Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

exemplify in Part III (“Space and the Noir City”). Robert Warshow documented it well
when he observed:
The gangster movie with its numerous variations (...) sets forth the attractions of
violence in the face of all our higher social attitudes. It is a more “modern” genre
than the Western, perhaps even more profound, because it confronts industrial
society on its own ground – the city – and because, like much of our advanced art,
it gains its effects by a gross insistence on its own narrow logic. (Warshow
1972:152)
While the influence of thirties gangster films on film noir is great, I have noted that
the protagonist acts differently in each cinematographic context. Moreover, the gangster
film rapidly defined a genre embedded in social reality (which the public could easily
identify from their reading of newspapers), and made audiences understand that at the end
the downfall of the gangster comes rapidly and inexorably (one could argue however that
this was the Hays Office propaganda, and that after all crime can pay). The criminal
archetype that came into existence was imbued with the idea of social alienation and the
notion that his destruction will be due to his excessive willingness to strive for power and
money and that the loss of self-control results in self-destruction (a conception which is not
so very different from film noir). The changing representation of criminality from streetlevel
gangsterism to smooth and occluded organised crime appeared throughout the fifties
in film noir, from The Enforcer (1951) and the Racket (1951) only to continue up to the
present with The Departed (2006), for example.
Susan Hayward also states that the two major events in the socioeconomic history
of the United States - the period of Prohibition and the Depression that set in after it -
facilitated to structure the legendary significance of the gangster in movies. She also notes
that the many gang conflicts and acts of violence and criminality that occurred in the cities
were daily reported in the popular press. The male protagonist in these films embodied
contradictions between the desire for success and the need for social constraint, which
made spectator identification possible. The gangster film is after all about capitalism, and
hence the death of the gangster is almost an ideological necessity: his exhilarating success
is a radical challenge to the social fabric.
As I said above, this was essentially the core message or theme that gangster films
wanted to convey: crime pays but not for too long and criminals end up being taken to
court and punished accordingly. All in all, social norms and justice for law-abiding citizens
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