Outside Society, Outside the Gang: the Alienated Noir Gangster

Abstract

The period of the 1940s and 1950s is testimony to fact that the gangster genre cannot be understood solely in terms of either a stable set of generic conventions or a fixed iconography as these are represented by the classic gangster narrative and its persistence as a generic narrative dominant.¹ Even in the ‘death of the big shot’ variation, which is closest to the classic cycle of the early 1930s, there are too many variations to be able to understand this genre solely as a product of the genre’s earlier conventions. The ‘death of the big shot’ cycle, most notably, does not follow the classic rise and fall of the gangster because it only shows his fall, nor do the films in this cycle share the same tragic scope that Warshow (1977: 127–33) attributes to the gangster genre not least because the gangster has already lost his ‘big shot’ status at the start. It is when turning to the variations outside the ‘death of the big shot’ formula, however, that the flexibility and mutability of the genre becomes clear and its reduction to the conventions and iconography established in the classic cycle becomes untenable. This is obvious, first of all, by the range of gangster sub-genres that came into existence in this period including gangster noir, the syndicate film, the heist narrative, the rogue cop, the development of the undercover and G-Man formulae, the exposé, and the one-managainst-the-mob narrative.