ative system. Its significance is immediately evident to those who produce and consume it (Schatz 16).
The gangster genre, Schatz notes, has a built-in ambiguity in terms of its value system, which in time worked its way into American culture (Schatz 95). The screen gangster came not from literature but from headlines as "Hollywood exploited the notoriety and social significance of their real-world counterparts while it adjusted their character and environment to the peculiar demands of Hollywood narrativity" (Schatz 82).
Robert Warshow in his article "Movie Chronicle: The Westerner" offers an interesting example of genre criticism as he finds relationships between what he calls the "two most successful creations of American movies," the gangster and the Westerner, "men with guns" (Warshow 469). When he wrote this article in 1954, he said that the gangster movie no longer existed in its classical form. However, our awareness of the parameters of the classical form still infuses how we watch a gangster film from any time period, and both the gangster film and the Western share the mantle of being essentially American genres--much imitated, but still basically American genres. One of the aspects of genre that is apparent from Warshow's discussion is that a genre is defined by the inclusion of certain
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