Watch: Closing the Door on the Gangster Genre | Little White Lies

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Watch: Clos­ing the Door on the Gang­ster Genre

11 May 2020

Words by Luís Azevedo

Man sitting in armchair in dimly lit room with lamp
Man sitting in armchair in dimly lit room with lamp
Is the Amer­i­can mob­ster movie des­tined to go the same way as the western?

In 1930, a stag­ger­ing 30 per cent of all Hol­ly­wood movies were musi­cals. Today it’s less than one per cent. Musi­cals had their time in the spot­light, but the genre’s pop­u­lar­i­ty waned over time.

Like musi­cals, the west­ern and the gang­ster film have been part of cin­e­ma his­to­ry since before sound. They were once the pin­na­cle of film­mak­ing, sta­ples of Amer­i­can cul­ture that have trav­elled far and wide, lay­ing roots around the globe. But the west­ern is, for the most part, dead.

There are three stages in the evo­lu­tion of a genre: in the first, the visu­al and nar­ra­tive con­ven­tions are estab­lished, to cre­ate a set of expec­ta­tions for the audi­ence; then there’s the Gold­en Age; and final­ly, the downfall.

In this new video essay, Luís Azeve­do argues that Mar­tin Scorsese’s The Irish­man will do for the gang­ster film what Unfor­giv­en did for the west­ern. Watch part one below and sub­scribe to our YouTube chan­nel for more.

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