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Godfather scarface poster4/28/2024 ![]() De Palma returned to explore themes of violent gangsterism in The Untouchables (1987), which includes a visual reference to Potemkin's famous Odesssa steps sequence (link to previous article), and Carlitto's Way (1993). Scarface, a reworking of an earlier Hollywood masterpiece, cemented de Palma's place as a member of the new Hollywood generation of directors. His first success was the horror genre Carrie (1976). In fact, the political film making pioneered by Godard in Europe never successfully crossed the Atlantic and turned out, in the end, to have been something of an impasse.ĭe Palma subsequently turned his attention to a more fruitful process of deconstructing the conventions of Hollywood genre storytelling. Indeed, during the 60s de Palma he declared his intention of becoming the American Jean-Luc Godard. This is a hangover of de Palma's beginnings as a film maker in the New York avant-garde. The stories, effects and conceits deployed by De Palma accentuate, and draw attention to, the illusionistic effects of film in contrast to the verisimilitude of traditional mainstream film. De Palma has consistently made films that draw attention to their status as films. De Palmaīrian de Palma began film making during the 60s and was instrumental in the discovery of Robert De Niro. This provides the starting point for Brian de Palma's Scarface. Finally, the cocaine boom of the 1970s draws Latin and Italian syndicates towards a final showdown. Protection, guns, liquor and gambling follow in historical progression. The evolution of the gangster is derived from the traditional American quarrel over territory and control. ![]() ![]() Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995) all provide a continuous thread through Scorsese's career and position the director's work into the social circumstances of his upbringing. Jack Nicholson reappeared in Polanski's Chinatown (1974) with Faye Dunaway, and Coppola embarked on the epic Godfather series (1972 and onwards).Īnother personality who emerged from Roger Corman's indie scene was Martin Scorsese. The success of the film encouraged others to follow. The first mainstream example of the gangster revival was Bonnie and Clyde (1967) by Arthur Penn and featuring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the title roles. The films introduced the varied talents of Jack Nicholson and Francis Ford Coppola, amongst other, to the feature film industry. These characteristics were re-packaged, with contemporary irony, through a series of Roger Corman films. The urban setting, car-chase and random violence of the genre made it appropriate for the post-industrial society being conceptualized at the time. Gangsters rebornĪt the end of the 1960s, the gangster genre was re-discovered. The combination of violence and material wealth, implicit in the gangster's social trajectory, undermined the steady moral ethos of the American dream for ordinary hard working families. In contrast, the main characters of the gangster genre were usually drawn from the violent underclass of migrant communities and expressed through first-person narratives of moral disintegration that combine personal wealth and moral ruin. The fierce independence of the private investigator helped provide him with an oblique and morally uncompromised perspective on events. The purpose of this system was implicitly understood to be as much about maintaining social and economic advantage as about anything else. The role of the local police services, and of law-and-order in general, was increasingly called into question and shown to be a system of social control whose corrupted officers played to a gallery of media interests. 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.
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