These stories explore themes that trace the corrupting influence of money amongst people who are already, by most standards, wealthy.
These figures inflected their stories with a world-weary cynicism, derived from experience, about the motives and intentions of their clients and cases. In the 40s the genre was recast as film noir and reflected the hardboiled crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.įor Hammett and Chandler the main protagonists were the private detectives Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. The historical development of the gangster genre can be traced back to the films of James Cagney during the 30s, such as The Public Enemy (1931) and the original Scarface (1932) by Howard Hawks. Nowhere was this more successfully realised than in the re-interpretation of the American gangster genre. A significant element in this process was the renewed engagement, by Hollywood, with the historical legacy of American cinema.
We've already looked at how Hollywood managed to re-invent itself, after the moribund decade of the 1960s, by connecting with the energy and themes of independent and new wave film making.
