Essays on Gangster Films

(Student’s Full Name) The name of the film that is being reviewed is Goodfellas (1990), which was directed by Martin Scorsese. The movie’s symbolic value lies in the fact that the movie is about the main character’s desire to pursue the “mythos of glamour, power, and money” regardless of the means that are required (Friedman, Desser, Kozloff, Nochismon & Prince, 2014, p. 420). In Goodfellas (1990) is a “late-twentieth-century” gangster film, which subverts elements of other gangster film genre conventions that preceded it (Friedman, Desser, Kozloff, Nochismon & Prince, 2014, p. 420). Firstly, it sought to subvert the ...

(Student’s Full Name)

The Gangster Movie: Questions and Answers

1. VIDEO CLIP 1: Identify two classical conventions of gangster genre (e.g. theme, plot device, character type, and/or stylistic device) present in this image and briefly explain the significance of each one. (2 points) The two classical conventions of Gangster Genre present in the first video are theme and character type. The theme that is being explored in the video clip is the immigrant criminal, who has been left to die in humiliation and as a comic, as required by the Production Code Administration (PCA). The character type is the gangster, who has dark, ethnic ...

The essay of Robert Warshow entitled “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” depicts the character of a gangster in a film as a protagonist, who holds admirable qualities such as grace, confidence, self-belief and individualism in the American culture. However, his tragedy begins when he goes beyond the acceptable and social norms to express himself to the public. The tragic fall of a gangster cannot be solely attributed to his own behavior since society is also partly responsible in denying him the opportunity of self-expression. The prospects that society offers to a gangster are limited in such a way that struggling and aggressive male individuals, ...