Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Crime Films
Humphrey Bogart in the 1930s. EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
often love to love as well. Because the possibility of
criminal behavior by victims like Frank Bigelow in the
1950 D.O.A. and respected attorney George Simon in
Counsellor at Law (1933) is what gives both innocent
victims and pillars of institutional justice their dramatic
possibilities, the label ‘‘crime film’’ rightly gives pride of
place to the criminal.
The casting of key performers in the genre consistently
reveals the remarkable affinities between movie
victims and movie criminals, like the affinities Ruhm
and McCarty establish between movie gangsters and
movie detectives and indeed between criminals and characters
outside the crime genre. In M (Germany, 1931),
the murderous child molester Hans Beckert comes across
as tormented and ultimately pitiable. This is partly
because director Fritz Lang (1890–1976) keeps
Beckert’s heinous crimes off-camera, and partly because
the plot focuses instead on his pursuit and entrapment by
a criminal gang determined to get him off the streets so
that a reduced police presence will allow more breathing
room for their own activities. But it is the performance
by Peter Lorre (1904–1964) that most brings out the
anguish, and finally the agony, in every move the sweaty
little killer makes toward a new hiding place or a new
attempt to explain his crimes. In his first important film
role, Lorre makes the killer both monstrously evil and
monstrously banal. Similarly, the portrayal by the iconic
French actor Jean Gabin (1904–1976)—who specialized
in stoic Everymen in films such as Les Bas-fonds (The
Lower Depths, 1936) and La Grande Illusion (The Grand
Illusion, 1937)—of doomed killers in Pépé le Moko
(1937), La Bête humaine (The Human Beast, 1938),
and Le Jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939) imparts a weary
sense of honor and decency to characters who might
otherwise come across as simple criminals.
The Hollywood studios notoriously cast to type but
recognize that typecasting inevitably expands and complicates
the type. Although Paul Muni (1895–1967),
who played Tony Camonte in Scarface (1931), resisted
typecasting, two of the other preeminent screen gangsters,
James Cagney (1899–1986) and Edward G.
Robinson (1893–1973), played effectively within and
against their menacing types even though neither was
physically imposing. The appeal of Cagney and
Robinson was elemental. Whether or not they were playing
criminals, they were always riveting in their direct
appeal to the camera and the audience. Yet the third great
American star of crime films created a larger and more
enduringly complex set of heroes than either of them.
Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) was a moody, worldweary
figure hundreds of miles from a boyhood he could
never remember. Robinson is the American immigrant
on the make, Cagney the American innocent swept into
crime by primitive urges he can neither understand nor
control. Bogart is the American hero whose experience
has left him with no illusions about anyone, least of all
himself. His successors are the even more introverted
Alan Ladd (1913–1964) and John Garfield (1913–
1952). Ladd’s performance in This Gun for Hire (1942)
established him as the most noncommittal of all crimefilm
stars, the handsome hero whose dead eyes could
conceal any emotion or none at all. Garfield, by contrast,
specialized in wounded cubs, bruised boys who carried
a deep vein of emotional vulnerability beneath their
criminal portfolios in The Postman Always Rings Twice
and Force of Evil (1948).
These stars incarnate the American dialectic between
striving and disillusionment, limitless optimism and cynical
worldly wisdom at the heart of all crime films. After
the demise of the studio system, actors had a freer hand
in shaping their own career, but many of them followed
the same path of invoking a single powerful persona that
developed and deepened from film to film. Marlon
Brando (1924–2004), the Method actor who rose to
fame playing sensitive brutes under Elia Kazan’s direction
(A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951; On the Waterfront,
1954), seemed to bring all his complicated past to bear
on his performance as the honorable, aging gang lord
Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Kevin Spacey’s selfeffacing
monsters in Se7en (1995) and The Usual
Suspects (1995) darkened and deepened his equivocal
404 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM