High Sierra and the Evolution of the Doomed Gangster
The “gangster film” is a true American creation. There were of course many early foreign films with elements of “crime” in them (Feuillade’s Les Vampires, or Lang’s Dr. Mabuse to name just a few), but the European crime films seemed more preoccupied with secret societies and grand Bond-villain-like master plans. American gangster films were all about one man’s rise to power (and subsequent fall) through crime, something which they merely saw as a “left handed form of human endeavor”.
The seeds of the American Gangster film can be found in the seminal crime films from the teens: The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and Regeneration (1915) (even perhaps the hold up in The Great Train Robbery (1903) which gave audiences their first thrill at the excitement of crime). But I would say it wasn’t until Sternberg’s 1927 film Underworld that the first real “gangster” film was made. This was of course because it wasn’t until prohibition and the “Roaring Twenties” that organized crime (the backbone of the American gangster film) really rose to power.
By 1931, the huge successes of Public Enemy and Little Caeser (in addition to the even more impressive Scarface the following year) ensured that the 1930′s would be a decade full of many fine examples of the genre. The main character was usually portrayed as a product of the social conditions he lived in, and his quick and ruthless rise to power was nothing less than a subverted version of the American dream. Eventually he would rise too high and his empire would come crashing down in an obligatory last stand shootout with the police. The public ate it up since “the highwayman” has always been more exciting than the “do-gooder”. The censors hemmed and hawed about the glorification of violence and crime, but so long as the title character met (often bloody) justice at the end there wasn’t a lot more they could do about it in the face of the public’s ravenous appetite for these films.
But by 1941, with the film High Sierra, Raoul Walsh (perhaps the most important gangster film director with such fine films as Regeneration, The Roaring Twenties and White Heat to his name) signalled a new direction for the American Gangster film. It was not merely the introduction of Noir elements, it was more his modification of what it meant to be a “doomed gangster”. (more…)
