January 28, 1999

Announcements:  The first exam is Tuesday, Feb. 9.  There is a review session Feb. 5 from 1 - 2:30 and on Feb. 8 from 7-    8:30.  They are both in 113 Carnegie.  Dr. Jordan will be handing out a review sheet in class on Tuesday.

Lecture Notes:

I.  Pro-Social Gangster Movie

• This era began after emergence of Public Enemy, which romanticized the gangster as a self made man
• Motivated by the popularity of sensationalistic movies, the production code became a mandatory set of guidelines
• There are 3 different styles of movies:

• Attempts to offset negative influence of the primary character
• Clip:  Angels With Dirty Faces
• Story of Rocky, a lifetime criminal, and his childhood friend, the priest
• The priest wants Rocky to go straight
• In the end, the priest tells some neighborhood kids, who idolized Rocky, that Rocky had repented all of his sins.  Rocky didn't really do this, he was just trying to appease the priest.

• Example:  G-Men
• Cagney plays an FBI agent, which is a positive role model
• At the same time, he is a very dirty, violent, and vigilante agent

• Example:  Roaring 20's
• Cagney appears to play a classic gangster, but he falls in love with a woman who happens to be married to a fellow mob man
• She won't marry him until he gets out of the mob
• He ends up getting killed trying to avenge the death of her husband, who had also been murdered
• Cagney is in between the law and crime

II.  The Post World War II Era:  Film Noir

• The gangster movie was a critique of class hurdles to achieve upward mobility
• The film noir suggests that upward mobility is relatively easy to attain
• Affluence has it's price, though:
• It strips people of their past, traditions
• People sell out and conform to the middle class culture, which leads to personal moral downfall
• Families are broken apart due to the lack of tradition to fall back on
• The film noir detective:
• Catered to audience's fascination of urban corruption
• He rejects conventional forms of success, unlike gangsters
• He rejects middle class standards of materialism
• He acts under a self-imposed moral code of honor
• Clip:  The Maltese Falcon
• Story of Sam Spade, a hard-nosed detective, who convicts a woman (who he happens to be in love with) of conspiring to find this jeweled bird, the Maltese Falcon
• Even though he is in love with her, he adheres to his moral code of honor by convicting her
• This is the only way he keeps order in a corrupt city
• He operates selflessly for the larger good of society
• The production code restrained film noir from directly addressing immoral topics

III.  The Gangster's Epitath

• It became harder for people to believe in the rugged individualism represented by the gangster or film noir detective
• Clip:  White Heat
• The gangster is portrayed as a psychopath
• He falls outside the middle class norms of success, and therefore, is not romanticized
• Society takes no responsibility for his corruption
• It turns out his mom is his criminal mentor
• Shows dysfunctional family upbringing
• Sexual tension between mother and son
• This gangster is not representative of society
• 1949 marked the end of the gangster movie era