ften featured in melodrama, science fiction, horror, the detective film, the police drama, and so on.
Warshow considers the nature of the gangster film and finds that it "is a story of enterprise and success ending in precipitate failure" (Warshow 469). The gangster genre is an urban genre, and success for the gangster is a form of evil. The genre has to be defined by the central character around whom all the action is shaped:
The peculiarity of the gangster is his unceasing, nervous activity. The exact nature of his enterprises may remain vague, but his commitment to enterprise is always clear, and all the more clear because he operates outside the field of utility (Warshow 469).
Warshow defines the character as being "without culture, without manners, without leisure" (Warshow 470). He notes that the gangster is lonely and melancholy:
He is wide open and defenseless, incomplete because unable to accept any limits or come to terms with his own nature, fearful, loveless (Warshow 470).
Warshow then contrasts the gangster with the Western her, a figure that exists in repose. Warshow finds some resemblance between the Westerner and the gangster in that each is lonely and melancholy. The melancholy of the Westerner derives from a different psychological level, though, not from a self-imposed inauthenticity,
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