Task 2 - Book Research

 

“ The legal and social status of the criminal produced a figure, the gangster, outside and opposed to society, who ‘violates a system of rules that a group of people live under’ (Shadoian, 1977).

 

Warner Bros. Studio, which produced many of classic tittles in the 1930s.

 

Andrew Tudor’s (1974) account of the genre where he compares it unfavourably with the western, characterising the ‘Urban nightmare’ so often attributed to the gangster film as a ‘brutal universe…mechanistic, offering little in the way of social and emotional riches.

 

Unlike the western there is no code governing the violence, no set of rules for the regulation of this war of all against all: (Tudor)

 

A feminist perspective might suggest that what is at stake here is the too naked expression of a certain form of male heroics.

 

Mc-Arthur: the gangster/thriller as iconography

‘the continuity over several decades of patterns of visual imagery, of recurrent objects and figures in dynamic relationship’.

 

Ryall 1979- stable iconographic elements can be divided into three categories:

1. The physical presence, attributes and dress of the actors and actress the characters the play:
2. The urban milieux in which the fiction is played out
3. The technology at the characters disposal, principally guns and cars

 

Levis Strauss – Binary opposition, Law vs. Lawless

 

Cook, Pam and Bernink, Mieke (1999): The Cinema Book, Stephen ST, London: BFI Publishing

 

“ No one has done more to represent gangsters to us than Martin Scorsese ”

 

“ Films like Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino (1995) and The Departed (2006) have given audiences his interpretation of this band of people; the fact that Robert De Niro has played major in three of these films is something which affects audience response too.

 

“ Raeburn, for example, has indicted how the gangster genre emerged out of prohibition in America and the consequent, criminal organisation of the illegal production and supply of alcohol in the 1920s. He argues that ‘prohibition and the notoriety of crime barons like Al Capone were the genre’s most obvious precipitants”. (1988:47)

 

Sanders, John (2009): The Film Genre Book, Leighton: Auteur