Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Crime films rule the world from East to West—from
Shanghai Triad to Kalifornia—because they allow audiences
to indulge two logically incompatible desires: the
desire to enter a criminal world most of them would take
pains to avoid in real life, and the desire to walk away
from that world with none of its traumatic or fatal
consequences. Whether they focus on criminals, convicts,
avengers, detectives, police officers, attorneys, or victims,
crime films depend on a nearly universal fear of crime
and an equally strong attraction to the criminal world.
They play on a powerful desire for a modern-day version
of the catharsis that Aristotle contended should evoke
and purge pity and terror. Crime films from every nation
help establish that nation’s identity even as criminals
seem to be trying their hardest to undermine it.
This sense of contested national identity is especially
strong in the United States, whose crime films, constantly
synthesizing such disparate influences as German expressionism
(Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler [Dr. Mabuse: The
Gambler], 1922), French poetic realism (Le Quai des
brumes [Port of Shadows], 1938), and the Hong Kong
action film (Lashou shentan [Hard-Boiled ], 1992), have
been the acknowledged model for international entries as
different as Tirez sur la pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player;
France, 1960), Tengoku to jigoku (High and Low; Japan,
1963), and L’Uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird
with the Crystal Plumage; Italy, 1970). A Martian visiting
Hollywood might well conclude from its products
that crime was the predominant economic activity in
America, and the one that best dramatized the collision
course between American ideology, which promises freedom
and equal opportunity to all citizens, and American
capitalism, in which money protects the secure and
CRIME FILMS
successful from their criminal competitors. Crime does
not pay, insists the self-censoring 1930 Production Code
that shaped the content of all Hollywood movies from
1934 to 1956 and left shadows long after it lapsed. Yet
movies consistently show crime paying, at least for an
intoxicatingly long moment.
The crime film is by far the most popular of all
Hollywood genres—or would be if it were widely
acknowledged as a genre. Many specific kinds of crime
films have been more readily recognized and closely
analyzed than crime films in general. Viewers familiar
with private-eye films like The Maltese Falcon (1941),
police films like The French Connection (1971), prison
films like The Shawshank Redemption (1994), caper films
like The Asphalt Jungle (1950), man-on-the-run films like
North by Northwest (1959), outlaw films like The
Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), films about lawyers like
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), or the extensive film series
presenting the exploits of detectives from the saturnine
Sherlock Holmes (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1939)
to the slapstick cast of Police Academy and its sequels
(1984–2006) would have a hard time defining the crime
film. So would commentators who have written on gangster
films (Scarface, 1931/1983) and film noir (Double
Indemnity, 1944), the two kinds of crime films that have
inspired the most extensive critical discussion. Everyone
can recognize a private-eye film by its hard-boiled hero’s
wisecracks, a caper film by its atmosphere of professional
fatalism, and a film noir by the distinctive high-contrast
visuals that break the physical world into a series of
romantically dehumanized objects and gestures. But the
crime film, like crime itself, seems so pervasive a social
reality that it is hard to step outside it and pin it down.
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 399