Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Crime Films
(From left) Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Jeffrey Lynn in the classic gangster film The Roaring Twenties (Raoul
Walsh, 1939). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
ABRIEFHISTORYOFMOVIECRIME
Most popular genres have a history. The crime film has
none—or rather, it has so many that it is impossible to
give a straightforward account of the genre’s evolution
without getting lost in innumerable byways as different
crime formulas arise, evolve, compete, mutate, and crosspollinate.
Crime films arise from a radical ambivalence
toward the romance of crime. That romance gave heroic
detectives like Sherlock Holmes—burlesqued onscreen as
early as 1900 or 1903 (the exact date is uncertain), in the
thirty-second Sherlock Holmes Baffled—a matchless
opportunity to make the life of the mind melodramatic
and glamorous, and it made silent criminals like
Fantômas (Fantômas and four sequels, France, 1913–
1914) and Bull Weed (Underworld, 1927) both villain
and hero. The arrival of synchronized sound in 1927 and
the Great Depression in 1929 created an enormous
appetite for escapist entertainment and a form of mass
entertainment, the talkies, capable of reaching even the
most unsophisticated audiences, including the millions of
lower-class immigrants who had flocked to America. The
great gangster films of the 1930s and the long series of
detective films that flourished alongside them, their
detectives now increasingly ethnic (Charlie Chan Carries
On, 1931, and forty-one sequels; Think Fast, Mr. Moto,
1937, and seven sequels; Mr. Wong, Detective, 1938, and
four sequels), were nominally based on novels. But crime
films did not seek anything like the literary cachet of
establishment culture until the rise of film noir—
atmospheric tales of heroes most often doomed by passion—named
and analyzed by French journalists but
produced in America throughout the decade beginning
in 1944.
Postwar crime films, whatever formula they adopted,
were shaped in America by cultural anxiety about the
nuclear bomb (Kiss Me Deadly, 1955) and the nuclear
family (The Desperate Hours, 1955). The decline of film
noir after Touch of Evil (1958) was offset by a notable
400 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM