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This chapter provides commentaries on the 1932 historical film Scarface. This film was directed by Howard Hawks and was based on Armitage Trail's novel of the same title which was about the life of Chicago gangster Al Capone. This chapter discusses the trend in contemporary crime and fictional gangster film during this period and explains the processes and challenges encountered in the production of Scarface.

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.

This chapter discusses the British gangster film. Unlike the vaguely romantic and detached violence of the Tommy-gun toting mobster, the British gangster of the 1940s fought with razors, vitriol and fists, at once a more prosaic and more hands-on method of violence — a reality that was reflected in the cinema. From its beginnings in the post-war period to the epic violence of The Long Good Friday (1979), the British gangster film has always adapted itself to the surrounding social milieu. Very often it has none of the mythic quality of its Hollywood counterpart and is certainly lacking in the budget or the star names. However, it also avoids the sentimentality of the Hollywood film and, aside from a few exceptions, tends to resist the glamorisation of its violence. Death in the British gangster film is brutal and ugly and retribution is often quick.

This chapter examines two gangster films made and set in Glasgow in the 2000s, the British film (with a major Scottish creative input) American Cousins (2003) and the French/US/UK coproduction starring Chinese martial arts action superstar Jet Li, Danny the Dog (2005). These gangster films enable a discussion of immigrant, diasporic, and otherwise globally dispersed identities in contemporary Scotland. The chapter first discusses the appearance in the 1990s of gangsters in films produced in Scotland, amidst the flourishing of crime as a subject within Scottish literature, television and film in the latter decades of the twentieth century. American Cousins draws on the U.S. gangster movie, with its long history of depicting Italian-American immigrants and diasporic communities, to examine Scottish-Italian identity in an international context. It offers a complex vision of the ‘family’ (in both the nuclear, and the ‘mob’ sense), as at once a local and a global phenomenon. Danny the Dog focuses on the international flows of people, finance and culture that pass through major Scottish cities like Glasgow.

This chapter studies how, over the last ten years, Indian cinema has seen an explosion in urban-based crime films. A haunting and gripping study of the Mumbai underworld, Satya (1998) was the catalyst for the Mumbai noir film genre. Satya has influenced many recent films in terms of both style and tone, including most pertinently Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008). A cult film abroad, Satya was an unexpected commercial success at the box office. The chapter approaches Satya from a range of perspectives, including the rise of Ram Gopal Varma as a genre provocateur and producer; the production contexts, genre, and the relationship with the American gangster film; the gangster as tragic hero; and finally, the significance the film holds as heralding a new vanguard of talented writers, directors, and actors.

This book examines filmmaking in Scotland in the 1990s and 2000s in a global context and considers the different identities on offer in the various fantasy Scotlands created by filmmakers from around the world. As this is a book about filmmaking in Scotland, rather than Scottish cinema, it includes numerous indigenous Scottish productions, whether on large or small budgets, and whether for domestic or international markets. However, these indigenous productions are considered alongside the coproductions Scotland has been involved in (in particular with the United States), and the location shoots of a number of British, French, U.S. and Indian films in Scotland. The book consists of ten chapters that examine a different genre or mode (style) of filmmaking: comedy, road movie, popular Indian or ‘Bollywood’ filmmaking, Loch Ness monster movie, horror movie, costume drama, gangster film, social realist melodrama, American independent/female friendship film and art film. These chapters suggest ten different ways of considering the history of cinema in Scotland, and of expanding existing debates concerning the cinematic depiction of Scotland.

Mukokuseki (literally, “nation-less”), is the practice of crossing, hybridization, and co-production. This chapter focuses on the concept of mukokuseki in the spatial imagination of Japanese gangster films or the yakuza genre, with a focus on the representation of Taipei. It consists of three parts: mukokuseki as a mode of production and urban representation; Taipei as an ambivalent site for mukokuseki ventures; and finally, Taiwan New Cinema scenes as desirable locations/edges for the stylistic reorientation of contemporary Japanese cinema.

This chapter explores a selection of Johnnie To's works where the flaws qualify his auteur status and make him an uneven auteur. It specifically describes Needing You, Help!, Fulltime Killer, Running on Karma, and Throw Down, another group of five films which constitutes an “uneven pentad” from the point of view of genre and To's direction. Though the nucleus of this study is the gunplay action film with a concentration on the gangster film or the cops-and-robbers thrillers, it also reviews To's contribution to the Hong Kong genre cinema in toto as much as possible. All of these films contain unequal measures of excellence and flaws which result from the effort to integrate different qualities.

The Killer (John Woo, 1989) is one of the key films of the Hong Kong New Wave period. It achieved a secure cult status in the West and has exercised great influence on Western and Asian filmmakers. Additionally, the film served as the springboard for the fame of its director and contributed materially to the early attention given to Hong Kong cinema during the 1990s by Western film critics and audiences. Its connection to the chivalric tradition in Chinese and Hong Kong cinema is readily apparent and important, most particularly in its indebtedness to the work of masters such as the late Chang Cheh. The influence of The Killer on subsequent neo-noir films, including “hitman” and gangster films, becomes clearer when the influence of the noir canon on Woo is more fully understood.

This chapter focuses on Kim Je-Woon's A Bittersweet Life, a film which diverges from gangster films' conventional fixation with honor codes and sentimental displays of staunch masculinist camaraderie and offers, in their stead, a highly stylized cinematic poetics centered on a solitary city wandering. The film's cinematic city is the site of trauma, and in its stylistically disposed fantasy world, the hero stands alone, linking this film more with classic noir than the gangster genre.

This chapter examines the wish-fulfillment fantasy embedded in Wise Guys (1986). As a gangster comedy, Wise Guys is best appreciated as a happy alternative to Scarface (1983), as things that went wrong in that film—and in De Palma's life—now go miraculously right. At the same time it also features what De Palma has described as “the family as a structure involving manipulation and destruction of the individual”—embodied in the relationship of the film's two protagonists, small-time mobsters Harry (Danny DeVito) and Moe (Joe Piscopo), to crime boss Castelo (Dan Hedaya). Though Harry and Moe seek his approval, godfather Anthony Castelo is cold and distant toward them, much as De Palma felt that his own father, Anthony, often behaved toward him and his brothers.

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.

This chapter analyzes the complexities of the 1987 film, The Untouchables, one of De Palma's biggest box-office hits. Set in Prohibition-era Chicago, The Untouchables shows Treasury agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and his handpicked band of incorruptible men—veteran cop Malone (Sean Connery), rookie Stone (Andy Garcia), and accountant Wallace (Charles Martin Smith)—pitted against mob kingpin Al Capone (Robert De Niro). But sometimes, as De Palma has indicated, the film may seem less like “a gangster movie” and “more like a Magnificent Seven” (the John Sturges Western). In the film, De Palma once again returns to a subject he often explores in his previous works—the blurred line between the good guys and the bad guys, or the split within the self between good and evil.

Several companies producing musical films, such as Paramount, RKO, and Warner Bros., were hit by the Great Depression, although not driven to bankruptcy, and their response to this was to cut back on the production of musicals. Instead, Warner Bros. produced films that reflected the Great Depression, such as Public Enemy and Little Caesar, which are gangster films. Darryl F. Zanuck, second-in-command to the studio head of Warner Bros., knew that they needed a tough story to revive the backstager musical. Zanuck assigned a team of screenwriters to adapt Rope's novel, which is a story that involved a homosexual love affair between a director and a leading man. To provide songs to such particular numbers, Zanuck brought Harry Warren and Al Dubin in as their new songwriting team. They were assigned to Hollywood to write new songs for a film version of the Broadway musical Spring is Here.

This chapter examines the production of historical films in the U.S. during the period from 1933 to 1938. When censorship dismantled the production of historical gangster films, film studios were also unable to produce another award-winning film like Cimarron. Most of the films produced during this period reflect their authors' desire to revise, embarrass, emulate, or add to the work of traditional historians. Their different inabilities to sustain a critical view of the American past indicated a moment of crisis and doubt for historical filmmaking.

This chapter examines Fernando Meirelles’ Brazilian film Cidade de Deus alongside his deterritorialized English language films The Constant Gardener and Blindness. The chapter begins by re-examining the terms of the critical arguments ignited by Cidade de Deus’ seeming commerciality, ‘foreignness’ and mainstream depictions of violence. It challenges these arguments by suggesting that Cidade de Deus’ gangster/gangsta (Goodfellas/New Black Cinema) film derived formal self-consciousness is actually a means of counter mainstream political engagement. The chapter continues by analysing The Constant Gardener and how aspects of the cinema-novo inspired critique of Cidade de Deus are carried into these films through their genre-based critique of white privilege and nefarious drug companies (film noir in the Constant Gardener) and allegorical treatment of Latin America’s history of political repression (disaster/contagion movie in Blindness).

This chapter discusses representations of alcohol use in film. It focuses on three Prohibition gangster films: Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and The Roaring Twenties (1939). Little Caesar was one of the earliest of the Prohibition-era gangster films with audible dialogue. It starred Edward G. Robinson who played Caesar Enrico Bandello, a social climber, mob boss, and efficient killer. In The Public Enemy, James Cagney displayed this tremendous energy; first, as a young man involved in petty crime with childhood friend Matt Doyle; then, with the advent of Prohibition, as a distributer of illegally produced beer, beating up owners who refuse to buy his brand. The Roaring Twenties also starred James Cagney; he played the sympathetic character of Eddie Bartlett, who is trapped in circumstances beyond his control.

This chapter focuses on how the public glamorized crimes and criminal figures, as evident in the increasing consumption of gangster-headlined newspapers and motion pictures. The most prominent criminal personalities include Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, as well as John Dillinger. Bonnie and Clyde were American outlaws and robbers, responsible for killing nine police officers and several civilians; while Dillinger is a gangster and bank robber who escaped from jail twice. The chapter also describes four ways in which radio programs attempted to shift the blame for the crime problem from the police to criminals, strongly criticizing vigilantism and arguing that citizens can help prevent crime by yielding to the expertise and authority of the police.

This chapter examines De Palma's departure from Scarface (1983) in Carlito's Way (1993). At first hesitant to make another Scarface, he was eventually persuaded to do the film: “What I liked about it was it was completely different from Scarface. Where Tony Montana is cold, calculating and willing to do anything to rise to the top, Carlito is at the other end of the spectrum: he's trying to reform. He slowly gets dragged back into the game.” The new film's many references to Scarface also help the viewer mark the differences separating them, as do their stylistic differences. The chapter explores Carlito's character throughout the film and the doubts it raises about whether or not Carlito is backsliding into his old ways—perhaps in the same way that Carlito's Way is turning into another Scarface.

This chapter explores Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. Refn’s first feature Pusher (1996) was a local box-office success that helped usher in the era of the Nordic crime film, which includes his own follow-up Bleeders (1998) and two Pusher sequels (2004 and 2005). His American crime and gangster film, Drive (2011), is set in Los Angeles and is indebted to notable American classics of the genre. Reunited with Hollywood star Ryan Gosling, Refn continued to explore the international pedigree of the crime thriller in Only God Forgives (2013), where Gosling plays an American struggling to stay afloat in the Bangkok underworld. In Neon Demon (2016), Refn returns to Los Angeles, this time the world of fashion, where Hollywood gloss and European film aesthetics meet head-on. His three “American” films thus offer a striking blend of Hollywood genre and European art cinema traditions helping to explain their wildly mixed receptions.