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This chapter examines the post-millennial gangster film. It begins by differentiating between Gangster Heavy and Gangster Light. The chapter then describes how the protagonist of the post-millennial gangster film (with a few notable exceptions) comes not from the ranks of the Mafioso or the well-organised criminal fraternity but from the door of the nightclub or the big city back street. They are small-time operators or part of a close-knit street crew and unlike their more ethical forebears, their main source of income is drugs. Moreover, their on-screen violence is often more graphic and detailed. The post-millennial gangster film has in more recent years begun to examine street and knife crime, and the gangsters themselves have become ever younger, as the surrounding society seeks to come to terms with widely disseminated images of youth gangs and rioting. Thus, the chapter looks at the sons, daughters, and even grandchildren of gangsters and asks how they fit in with the story of British cinema. What emerges is a depiction of gang culture that is tinged with issues of class, race, and gender as British cinema seeks to represent a society shaped by changes in Government, socio-economics, and, as the first decade of the new millennium progressed, increasing anxieties over issues such as knife crime, immigration, and youth violence.

Initially building on the work of Cornel West, whose quote introduces this chapter, the blaxploitation form is discussed in terms of its characters and its difference from Hollywood cinema and African-American representations therein. The Hollywood film ‘Shaft’ is introduced and spoken about – with the chapter arguing about its status as part of the ‘blaxploitation’ pantheon.

The Brooklyn armored car robbery, which occurred on August 21, 1934, not only represented the “nation’s biggest cash heist at the time” but also provided the source material for Richard Fleischer’s Armored Car Robbery (1950), a B picture that was released the very same day as the acknowledged prototypical heist film, The Asphalt Jungle. Although the heist picture could not, and did not, crystallize as a genre until 1950 because the Production Code expressly forbid filmmakers from showing the preparation and commission of heists, the competition represented by television and the 1948 “divorcement” decree forced the motion picture industry to find new ways to attract audiences. One strategy was to continue to produce B movies. If Armored Car Robbery demonstrates the vitality of B movies before the majors decided to cease production of them in 1951 and The Killing (1956) represents the appeal of “low” crime genres such as the “caper” movie for aspiring auteurs like Stanley Kubrick, Plunder Road (1957) testifies to the rise of independent production and the sort of niche markets favored by young adults hungry for more daring cinematic fare than previously had been available.

This chapter employs the metaphor, twisted criminalities, to probe the complex and often invisible structures that inform inter-group dynamics and to think critically about how acts of exclusion encourage the very structures that so often oppress black people socially and politically. It considers the twisted way in which certain heterosexual, black male criminals are deemed sympathetic or heroic, while gay black men are always already criminalized due to the perception that they have injured the race. Using Lawrence v. Texas and its co-plaintiff Tyron Garner as a theoretical framework, this chapter maps the dialectical relationship between the black thug and gay black men by performing close readings of Ridley Scott’s film American Gangster, Cornelius Eady’s poetry cycle “The Running Man Poems,” and the viral video and news media spectacle, Antoine Dodson. The result produces a chilling location that emphasizes the limits of imagined grace in a world where those so frequently denied grace are both intolerant and indifferent to difference.

This crime film is based on the true-life story of kingpin drug dealer Frank Lucas, portrayed by Denzel Washington, who was hunted down and eventually captured by Ritchie Roberts, played by Russell Crowe. The movie takes place in the late 1960s in Harlem, and details the explosion of heroin on the streets through the criminal efforts of Lucas. There are also sequences set in Southeast Asia, where Lucas finds his tremendous supply. The film features a large supporting cast of mainly African American actors and a highly realistic re-creation of Harlem at the end of the 1960s. The period effect is greatly aided by a musical score of iconic records that sets the scenes and provides narrative layers of atmosphere and detail.

This chapter examines the ways in which a range of films shot in New Towns or other suburban locations in Britain during the 1970s offer evidence of shifts in representations of criminal behaviour which can be tied to the apparent modern ‘newness’ of these locations. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the film The Offence employs location shooting and impressively designed interiors (shot in the studio) in order to evoke a rapidly changing nation which is unsure of how to police itself. The chapter develops in order to examine how far crime and gangster films of the period such as The Squeeze and Get Carter often depict cruelty being meted out to young, innocent characters, and places these representations within socio-cultural context.

Although Allen has asserted that the Cliff plot (“Misdemeanors”) was a mistake, undermining the gravity of the more compelling Judah (“Crimes”) murder plot in Crimes and Misdemeanors. this chapter contends that the two are effectively balanced in the film, creating one of his most substantial mixed-genre movies. The Misdemeanors narrative invokes romantic and professional reversals and disappointments suffered by Cliff, who is fired from shooting a documentary on the same media star who marries Halley, the woman Cliff loves, leaving him resentful, desolate. Judah has his lover murdered to save his marriage and professional reputation, and, never charged with the crime, he retreats into his “protected world of wealth and privilege,” seldom experiencing pangs of conscience. Cliff’s fecklessness feeds narcissistically on itself, his Judah-like want of spiritual moorings leaving him nothing to affirm but himself and his erotic needs; Judah’s nihilism allows him to erase the error of his affair and return unscathed to his unsuspecting wife. The injustice of this outcome is the movie’s thematic jist, confirming Yeats’s plaint in “The Second Coming” that “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Most scholars and critics have generally seen film noir as an American genre, emphasizing the fact that noir films have hailed from the classic Hollywood industry, or in the case of neo-noir, from the post-classical Hollywood cinema. Essentially, the perspectives of these scholars focus on the American contexts surrounding the films. This chapter examines films noir produced by two major film industries in Asia, the Hong Kong and South Korean cinemas which have been the most prolific in fashioning and transforming the noir tendency for their respective Asian contexts. The chapter sets out to understand the contexts of these motion pictures including detective and gangster genre films produced over the last ten years or so. The chapter thus follows the imperative on contextuality established in American scholarship of noir. Film noir in the Asian contexts (a darker than dark sensibility and an overwhelming urge towards violence) may be seen as alternative reactions to the American contexts of noir criticism.