The Age Demanded an Image: The Gangster as American

Abstract

Jack Shadoian. Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/ Crime Film. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977. 366 pp. Popular arts have a way of taking the pulse of a nation — witness the bawdy, participatory English music-hall tradition, the anguished recitative of the isolated French chanteuse, the dizzying alterations of lyricism and violence in the Kabuki, the decadent eroticism of the German cabaret. And, in America, the genre movie has, for over fifty years, documented a national obsession in the celebration of fierce individualism. The dogged persistence of a self-made man, who defeats or goes down fighting against social constraint, the "system," is seen almost everywhere—in war films, westerns, gangster movies, even musicals. Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt in From Here to Eternity insists at the cost of his own life that "if a man don't go his own way, he's nothing"; John Wayne as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach is compelled to avenge blood murder and is then permitted to escape across the border, "safe from the blessings of civilization," according to Doc Boone; and in Little Caesar, the narrative unfolds only when Caesar Enrico Bandello seizes the day, boldly heading "back East, where things break big."