Crime and Gangster Films are developed around the sinister actions of criminals or gangsters, particularly bankrobbers, underworld figures, or ruthless hoodlums who operate outside the law, stealing and murdering their way through life.

Criminal and gangster films are often categorized as film noir or mystery films, or they are related to detective films - because of underlying similarities between these cinematic forms.

Crime stories in this genre often highlight or glorify the rise and fall of a particular criminal(s), gang, bank robber, murderer or lawbreakers in personal power struggles or conflict with law and order figures, an underling or competitive colleague, or a rival gang. Headline-grabbing situations, real-life gangsters, or crime reports have often been used in crime films.

Rivalry with other criminals in gangster warfare is often a significant plot characteristic.
Crime plots also include questions such as how the criminal will be apprehended by police, private eyes, special agents or lawful authorities, or mysteries such as who stole the valued object.

Gangster films are morality tales, Horatio Alger success stories turned upside down in which criminals live in an inverted dream world of success and wealth.

Although they are doomed to failure and inevitable death, criminals are portrayed as the victims of circumstance, because the stories are told from their point of view - all other "normal" avenues to the top are unavailable to them.

Film gangsters are usually materialistic, street-smart, immoral, meglo-maniacal, and self-destructive.They rise to power with a tough cruel facade while showing an ambitious desire for success and recognition, but underneath they can express sensitivity and gentleness.

Gangster/crime films are usually set in large, crowded cities in the secret world of the criminal: dark nightclubs or streets with lurid neon signs, fast cars, sleazy bars, seedy living quarters or rooming houses.

Exotic locales for crimes often add an element of adventure and wealth. Writers dreamed up appropriate gangland jargon for the tales, such as "tommy guns" or "molls."
Criminal/gangster films date back to the early days of film during the silent era. One of the first to mark the start of the gangster/crime genre was D. W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912).

Two of the most influential films that helped to launch the entire genre in the 1930s were German director Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (Parts I and II) (1922-1923) - a two-part crime melodrama about an evil, criminal boss capable of disguise and tremendous hypnotic powers, and Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927) - a film with many of the crime film's standard conventions and shot from the gangster's point of view. The latter film won the Best Story Award for Ben Hecht - the first Oscar ever awarded for an original screenplay. Lewis Milestone's The Racket (1928), a Howard Hughes-produced film, concentrated on big-city corruption and a municipality controlled by the mob.

Rouben Mamoulian's City Streets (1931), was a story penned by Dashiell Hammett and reportedly was Al Capone's favorite film, starring Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sydney as two lovers trapped by gangland connections.

Tay Garnett's violent Bad Company (1931) was the first picture to feature the gangland massacre on St. Valentine's Day.

It wasn't until the sound era that gangster films became an entertaining, popular way to attract viewers to the theatres during the Depression Era and the Prohibition Era Dbetween 1930 and 1932, when contemporary organized crime was on the rise.

The talkies era accounted for the rise of crime films, because these films couldn't come to life without sound (machine gun fire, screeching brakes, screams, chases through city streets and squealing car tires).

The perfection of sound technology and mobile cameras also aided their spread. Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and George Raft were the major early stars, establishing and defining their careers in this genre.

The screen flaunted the archetypal exploits of swaggering, cruel, wily, tough, and law-defying bootleggers and urban gangsters.

The allied rackets of bootlegging, gambling and prostitution brought these mobsters to folk hero status in the newspapers' headlines.

Audiences during that time vicariously participated in the gangster's rise to power and wealth.

The first "100% all-talking" picture and, of course, the first sound gangster film was The Lights of New York (1928) - it enhanced the urban crime dramas of the time with crackling dialogue and exciting sound effects of squealing getaway car tires and gunshots.

Three great classical gangster films (among the first of the talkies) marked the genre's popular acceptance and started the wave of gangster films in the 1930s in the sound era. The first two were released almost simultaneously by Warner Bros. (considered the gangster studio par excellence). All three leading men/criminals, bootleg racketeers of the Prohibition era, met their doom in the final scenes of these films, as if they were receiving retribution for their crimes:

(1) Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar (1930) starred Edward G. Robinson as a gritty, coarse and ruthless killer named Caesar Enrico Bandello (a flimsy disguise for a characterization of Al Capone.)

(2) William Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931) starred James Cagney (in his first film) as a cocky, nasty, and brutal criminal - most memorable in a vicious scene where the snarling gangster pressed a half grapefruit into the face of his moll girlfriend (Mae Clarke). [The same stars were reunited in another Pre-Code quasi-gangster/comedy film, Lady Killer (1933).]

(3) Howard Hawks' raw Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932) from UA starred Paul Muni as a power-mad, beastly hood (the characterization of Tony Camonte was loosely based on Chicago's brutal, murderous racketeer Al Capone), George Raft (as his coin-flipping emotion-less, right-hand killer), and Ann Dvorak (as Tony's sister Cesca). The ultra-violent, landmark film in the depiction of gangsters included twenty-eight deaths, and the first use of a machine gun by a gangster.
In tribute over fifty years later, Brian de Palma remade the film with Al Pacino in the title role (Scarface (1983).

One way the studios quieted some of the protest and uproar over "America's shame" was to shift the emphasis from the criminal to the racket-busting federal agents, private detectives, or "good guys."

In William Keighley's G-Men (1935), the best example of this new 'gangster-as-cop' sub-genre, screen tough guy James Cagney starred as a ruthless, impulsive, violent FBI agent to infiltrate criminal gangs.

Although he was on the side of the law and undercover, he was just as cynical, brutal, and arrogant as he had been in his earliest gangster films. Edward G. Robinson became a lawman in Bullets or Ballots (1936).

Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947) explored the similarities between Treasury Department agents and the counterfeiting criminals they pursued, and emphasized how villains were caught by semi-documentary style crime detection procedures (lineups, fingerprinting analysis, lab work, etc.).

Another developing 'Cain-and-Abel' sub-genre emphasized that crime didn't pay, in films such as Manhattan Melodrama (1934) with childhood friends William Powell and Clark Gable choosing two diametrically opposed lifestyles - prosecuting attorney and gambler/racketeer, and Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) with two young slum kids, James Cagney and Pat O'Brien, following two different paths - a criminal lifestyle and the priesthood.

Warner Bros. found itself in the late 1930s with three tremendous talents - James Cagney, director Raoul Walsh, and a new actor named Humphrey Bogart. Bogart was catapulted to fame by playing escaped killer Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936). In various combinations, this trio made three memorable gangster films: the realistic saga of the Prohibition Era, The Roaring Twenties (1939) with Cagney and Bogart in remarkable roles; the dramatic cult classic They Drive By Night (1940); and Bogart in a more sympathetic role as aging criminal Roy Earle in High Sierra (1941).

In the 50s, gangsterism was portrayed with organized crime organizations taking over (the Mob), accompanied by tense action, realistic settings, and rich characterizations.

In Fritz Lang's classic crime film noir The Big Heat (1953), Glenn Ford played a vengeful homicide detective in pursuit of a big crime operation and its crime lord to clean up the corruption with the aid of a gangster's moll (Gloria Grahame).

A gritty, grim view of New York's waterfront racketeering and corrupt union bosses was portrayed in the violently raw, documentary-style film titled On the Waterfront (1954), starring Marlon Brando as ex-fighter Terry Malloy and Rod Steiger as Malloy's brother and the union boss' crooked lawyer.

In an effective, classic film noir American crime film titled The Big Combo (1955), a gangster's ex-girlfriend helped half-crazed cop Cornel Wilde break a syndicated crime organization led by Richard Conte.

The caper film was a subgenre of the crime film that developed in the 1950s - John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) was a superb film-noirish example of the 'heist' picture, depicting a gang of assorted criminals conducting a carefully-planned caper - a jewel robbery.

In Stanley Kubrick's dark, sharp-edged The Killing (1956), Sterling Hayden led a group of criminals in a precisely-timed rip off of a racetrack. In both cases, things went awry with disastrous results.

Eventually, two of the most successful gangland 'Mafia' films ever made appeared in the 1970s with Francis Ford Coppola's direction of Mario Puzo's best-selling novel, The Godfather (1972), and The Godfather, Part II (1974).

Both were epic sagas of a violent, tightly-knit crime family superstructure from Sicily that had settled in New York and had become as powerful as government and big business.

The stunning Part II sequel was the first sequel ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Rarely before, in New York Confidential (1954), had the 'Mafia' been featured in a main-stream film.

Two other mob pictures of the 1990s were part of Martin Scorsese's crime trilogy.

The first film was Mean Streets (1973) about the lives of aspiring, small-time crooks in the Little Italy section of New York.

The other two films - both with the same scriptwriter Nicholas Pileggi - were GoodFellas (1990), which followed thirty years in the lethally-violent criminal careers of rising mobsters and was based on the life of actual ex-mobster Henry Hill, and Casino (1995), which examined a Mafia criminal dynasty that made its presence known in a brutal takeover of 1960s-70s Las Vegas.

Other 1970s films showed the untiring, violent counter tactics of detectives fighting crime including The French Connection (1971), with two narcotics detectives faced an international narcotics smuggling ring.

The first of Clint Eastwood's series as law-and-order maverick Detective "Dirty" Harry Callahan was Dirty Harry (1971), directed by Don Siegel.

The popular, but controversial film spawned four sequels with its star sometimes directing/producing: Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988).

In addition to his brilliant roles in The Godfather pictures, actor Al Pacino also starred in other crime classics, including Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) - a film with an award-winning screenplay, Brian DePalma's bloody remake of Scarface (1983), and Carlito's Way (1993).

Director Martin Scorsese also explored the theme of family ties being torn apart by unpredictable violence, in a world of losers, loners, outsiders and low-lifes.

His intense films, regularly starring actor Robert De Niro, include his third feature which established his reputation, Mean Streets (1973), followed by Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), GoodFellas (1990), and Cape Fear (1991).
In the early 90s, young screenwriter Quentin Tarantino made his debut film as writer and director. He turned toward directing his own scripts set in the unusual, volatile world of the criminal element.

His own directorial debut for a feature film, after having others direct his scripts for True Romance (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994), was for the ultra-violent crime thriller Reservoir Dogs (1992) in which six thieving strangers were assembled to conduct a diamont heist that unraveled rapidly in the aftermath. Afterwards, he perfected his mix of humor and ultra-violence in the popular, critically-acclaimed film Pulp Fiction (1994), a complex interweaving of three crime stories.