Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

series of crime comedies at England’s Ealing Studios
(such as The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951) and a masterly
series of psychological thrillers directed by Alfred
Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train, 1951; Rear Window,
1954; Vertigo, 1958; North by Northwest, 1959; Psycho,
1960). The 1960s was the decade of the international spy
hero James Bond, who headlined history’s most lucrative
movie franchise in a long series beginning with Dr. No
(1962). But it was left to a quartet of ironic valentines to
retro genres, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Godfather
(1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), and Chinatown
(1974), to reinvent the crime film for a hip young
audience. The replacement of the 1930 Production
Code by the 1969 ratings system allowed niche films to
be successfully marketed even if they were as graphically
violent as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990) or as
bleak in their view of American politics as The Parallax
View (1974) or JFK (1991). The closing years of the
century, marked by a heightened public fear of crime, a
fascination with the public-justice system, and a deep
ambivalence toward lawyers, allowed a thousand poisoned
flowers to bloom around the globe, from the sociological
sweep of the British television miniseries Traffik
(1989), remade and softened for American audiences as
Traffic (2000), to the ritualistic Hong Kong crime films
of John Woo (Die xue shuang xiong [The Killer], 1989)
and Johnny To (Dung fong saam hap [The Heroic Trio],
1993) and their American progeny (Pulp Fiction, 1994),
to the steamy eroticism of the all-American Basic Instinct
(1992) and its direct-to-video cousins. Perhaps the most
distinctive new strain in the genre has been the deadpan
crime comedy of Joel (b. 1954) and Ethan (b. 1957)
Coen, whose films, from Blood Simple (1985) to The
Ladykillers (2004), left some viewers laughing and others
bewildered or disgusted.
THE STRUCTURE OF CRIME FORMULAS
Crime films, like most popular formulas, are defined by a
relatively small number of consistent plots and plot transformations.
The one common feature all crime films
share is a crime; they differ in what sort of crime it is
(though murder, the most serious and irreversible of
crimes, disproportionately predominates), how they stage
that crime, what attitude they take toward it, and how
they present the people who are involved in it.
Although they all agree that crime is the defining
feature of crime films, critics have taken two different
approaches to the profusion of crime formulas. Jack
Shadoian and Carlos Clarens, following the lead of
Robert Warshow’s influential essay ‘‘The Gangster as
Tragic Hero’’ (1962), make criminals as central to the
genre as crime. In their accounts, the gangster film, the
film focusing on the lives and deaths of professional
Crime Films
criminals, is the central crime formula to which all other
sorts of crime films are subordinate. Gangster films,
according to these commentators, present urban heroes
whose law-breaking behavior is the quintessential expression
of the American Dream and its ultimate bankruptcy.
The big-city gangster, born in silent shorts like The
Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and given definitive shape
in the Depression-era triptych of Little Caesar (1930),
Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932), licenses its
criminal hero to follow his dreams of wealth at the price
of ensuring his destruction. Crime becomes for these
commentators a rich metaphor for the extravagant promises
and tragic contradictions of American capitalism,
social equality, and unlimited upward mobility. Other
crime formulas—especially, in Shadoian’s case, the film
noir—are important to the extent that they participate in
the economic and social critique of American culture that
makes the gangster film quintessentially American.
Instead of locating the gangster film at the heart of the
American crime film, theorists like Gary Hoppenstand
and Charles Derry have mapped out a broad range of
crime-related fiction and films without giving any one
kind priority over the others. Hoppenstand surveys a
spectrum of mystery fiction from supernatural horror tales
like Psycho (1959, filmed 1960), which places the greatest
emphasis on forces of evil and chaos beyond the heroes’
ability to understand or control, through a series of formulas
that show evil gradually receding before the power
of rational thought: fiction noir like The Postman Always
Rings Twice (1934, filmed 1946 and 1981), gangster
stories like The Godfather (1969, filmed 1972), stories of
professional thieves like A. J. Raffles (The Amateur
Cracksman, 1899, filmed 1930), spy thrillers like Dr. No
(1958, filmed 1962), and detective stories like ‘‘The
Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ (1841, filmed 1914, 1932,
1971, and 1986), in which the detective hero’s analytical
intelligence triumphs over the forces of darkness.
Derry begins instead with a triangular model of
crime films, in which the films are distinguished by their
emphasis on one of three parties involved in every crime:
the victim, the criminal, and the avenging detective. He
then arranges one series of crime films along the line from
detective to criminal: classical detective films like The Thin
Man (1934), hard-boiled private-eye films like Murder,
My Sweet (1944), police procedurals like Serpico (1974),
gangster films like Mean Streets (1973), bandit films
about romantic lovers on the lam like Bonnie and Clyde,
and caper films like The Anderson Tapes (1971). He
arranges a second series along the line from criminal to
victim: thrillers about murderous passions like Body
Heat (1981), political thrillers like The Manchurian
Candidate (1962), films of assumed identity like The
Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), psychotraumatic thrillers like
Vertigo, films of moral confrontation like Blue Velvet
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 401