Films and Social Attitude
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Films from a given period reflect the social attitudes of that time, no matter when they may be set in time. Thus, a science fiction film may exist in an imaginary future, but the attitudes are those of the time in which the film is made. The gangster film has a particular history of reflecting social and political concepts of the time when the film is made because of the effort to show the way society may cause crime and the effect crime in turn has on society. An interesting way of analyzing this is to examine the same story filmed in two different periods, such as the two versions of Scarface (1932 and 1983). Each takes an overt stance to the issue of the relationship between crime and society even as each also reflects different ideas of how the criminal is formed by his psychology. The two Scarfaces are motivated largely by a desire to get ahead in the American context. Each is also an immigrant. Each in some way reflects attitudes toward the America dream, immigration, and feeding public dependencies, in the first instance on alcohol, in the second on drugs. Analysis shows that while societal attitudes toward crime have changed in some degree, underlying both films is a similar dynamic and a similar belief that the criminal will ultimately fail and lose his battle for success in the process. The gangster film is a staple in the American cinema and has developed a number of icons, characters, and images that recur from one film to the next and that not only id
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s 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).
This description fits both versions of Scarface, and the films share a number of other characteristics. Both have heroes who are clearly "men with guns," and both men fondle those guns as much as they fire them. Scarface Camonte in the 1932 film is a man on the rise because of his brutality, and the way that brutality was depicted included the use of
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Approximate Word count = 1820
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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