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Dreams & Dead Ends
JACK SHADOIAN

SECOND EDITION
Dreams
& Dead Ends
THE AMERICAN GANGSTER FILM

1
2003
1
Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai
Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto
Copyright © 2003 by Oxford University Press
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
www.oup.com
This volume is a revised edition of Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/Crime Film
published 1977 by MIT Press.
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Stills courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc., Miramax Films, Paramount Pictures Corporation,
Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, United Artists Corporation, Universal Pictures, Warner
Bros., Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shadoian, Jack.
Dreams and dead ends : the American gangster film / Jack Shadoian.— 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 0-19-514291-8; 0-19-514292-6 (pbk.)
1. Gangster films—United States—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN1995.9.G3 S5 2001
791.43'655—dc21 2001035081

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
To Christopher and Jessica,

in whom the passion

for film lives on

This page intentionally left blank
 Preface to the First Edition

A large percentage of feature films are genre films. Filmmakers do not nor-
mally proceed without an awareness of the kind of film their time and money
is being used to create. The decision they arrive at becomes a basic controlling
factor for the film. Viewers use genres to help themselves determine the kind
of evening they would prefer to spend at the movies. Critics use genre as a
method of organization, as a term and a concept that serves their discourse and
allows for particular kinds of discoveries. Since genre considerations figure so
importantly in the production and the viewing of so many films, the direction
for critical thought that genre supplies is central to the attempt at understand-
ing them.
Criticism of film genres has largely been concerned with systematizing
what most filmgoers haphazardly discern, with placing and classifying films on
the evidence of descriptive definition. This is of course necessary, but both
classification and description are open to dispute, despite claims to objectivity.
More to the point, however, is that thinking about film genres should go be-
yond stressing their repetitive iconographical, situational, and narrative ele-
ments. Genres persist, change, and overlap, and we must ask questions about
both their persistence and their evolution. If they persist, they must be useful,
but useful for what? Observation must be incorporated into argument, into
theory and interpretation. We must ponder the meaning of genres.
In dealing with the American gangster/crime film, I have posed to myself
this question: What does the genre do that can’t be done as well elsewhere?
This seems to me the large question necessary to genre definition. What does
the framework of any particular genre allow the expression of? I think, also,
that we are well aware that the bare bones of generic description do not ade-
quately account for the complexities of any given film, that infinite qualifica-
tions as to how generic elements function are required before our perception
and experience of the film can proceed toward a criticism capable of exploring
the film’s value, meaning, and impact. Resemblances are often enough super-
ficial and/or merely serviceable. It goes without saying that a genre critic is
obliged to see a great number of films before attempting discriminations of
kind, likeness, similarity. However, it is not enough to see a sufficient number
of films. The critic is also obliged to think them through, if only to make clas-
sification, and designation of patterns and qualities, reasonably accurate.1
Even genre criticism that is predicated upon an intellectual grasp of a distinct
and distinguishable body of work must ultimately rise to the challenge of un-
derstanding specific works, not only because a film addresses us in its totality
but also to ensure the flexibility and credibility of its generalizations.
The gangster/crime genre is an involved system of family relationships.
 Specific films tend to violate, extend, adapt, and sometimes dismiss the con-
ventions that in part color and motor them even as they are evoked and put
into play. Paring down the complexity of the genre is no solution, whatever the
advantage to critical convenience and efficiency. A theory of the genre that
does it justice should be capable of elucidating its most complex manifesta-
tions as they occur in individual films. Whatever general ideas and implica-
tions can be drawn from the films of the genre, they must be shown to emerge
from the films themselves. My discussion, therefore, centers on key, represen-
tative films, from which theory is derived and developed. Undertaking theory
and close analysis in conjunction will, I hope, prevent theory from limiting
and misrepresenting the films and advance criticism of the genre toward a
complex consideration of works in relation to their informing structures. An
activity it has been reluctant to perform.
Genres are cultural metaphors and psychic mirrors. We don’t know of
what until we study the films that comprise them. In varying degrees, each
film genre offers an account of the life we lead, wish to lead, or ought to lead.
To study a sequence of films that use similar frameworks allows us to think
about the utility and potential of those frameworks. The sequence should be
chronological so that changes may be perceived in their proper relation to so-
cial/historical factors and advances in the medium itself and, more funda-
mentally, because films must be understood as standing in a line of influence.
There remains the problem of which films belong in which genres. We all
make hurried, though generally pretty reliable, distinctions—we know, more
or less. what musicals, westerns, gangster films, soap operas, horror films, and
war films are. (Comedy is notoriously amorphous and is not really a genre at
all but a sensibility, a way of looking at the world.) In the five years or so that I
have applied concentrated (as opposed to random) thought to the gangster/
crime film, several writers have charted out some possibilities and there seems
to be a general consensus as to the outer limits of what films can be included.
I stand indebted to all those writers—Lawrence Alloway, John Baxter, John Ga-
bree, Stuart Kaminsky, and Colin McArthur, in particular—for their thoughts
on the matter, although my personal sense of the continuity of the genre ap-
proximates Baxter’s and McArthur’s most closely. That is to say. my view of the
genre is rather a wide one: it embraces a great many films. In terms of their
purpose, and their visual-iconic organization, the genre includes not only
those works obviously concerned with the character and fate of the gangster
hero but also certain films noirs, policiers, juvenile delinquent films, private
eye films, and syndicate films.
The film critic operates under some disadvantages. He must depend too
Preface to the often on memory, he does not have a vast body of knowledge to support him,
First Edition existing methodologies offer only minimal entry into the subject, and the com-
viii
plex factors of moviemaking are inhospitable to critical security. (A picture
may be proverbially worth a thousand words, but our ability to read it, taken for
granted, remains practically and theoretically underdeveloped in an icon-
dominated culture.) Everything in a film is there because somebody wanted
it there, although it is often hard to know why or even who that somebody was.
There is far too much in any single film for a critic to discover on his own;
moreover, some factors operate invisibly, and the critic may simply be blind to
yet others. Movie “magic” is the result of the effective combination of numer-
ous elements, and critical pursuit of these combinations is quite frustrating. An
art director might have an idea about this or that, which may end up only half
realized in the finished film, or even inverted. Meanings are never stable. No
filmmaker can ever be certain that what he intends is what is communicated,
and movies come and go so fast that there is little time or opportunity to arrive
at a knowledgeable consensus. And then, watching movies is one thing, writ-
ing about them another. We are too quick, too self-protective in arranging ex-
perience into abstractions. Films have been both damned and praised because
of the emotional force of their images, their immediate, nonverbal impact.
Given how movies work, the call to demystify them is at once romantic,
impertinent, and necessary. Criticism has not progressed very far in account-
ing for how we are “spellbound in darkness,” for how movies exert their con-
trol. Even at mundane, nonphilosophical levels, we operate in a half-light. We
have no means to describe long-term rhythms, for example, nor are we clear
about such simple matters as what “establishing shots” establish or what is sig-
nified by camera movements from the periphery of a location to the center—
as in the conclusion of The Line-Up—or vice versa. Moreover, modern scien-
tific and aesthetic theory points to the delusory nature of objective systems, and
films themselves are beginning to work with the assumption that it is impossi-
ble to define anything as distinct from our perception of it 2 (what the Cubists
incorporated into their paintings over six decades ago). This obviously puts
into question the idea of critical “proof.”
Assuming that criticism cannot hope to “prove” anything, it is still a formal
and refined version of a natural human tendency to be curious about the works
of art one has been affected by, and, to be manageable, criticism must, to some
extent, be reductive. One cannot hope to say everything one feels and knows
about a subject all at once, in one book. Nor can one risk being despotically
conclusive about so young a field of inquiry and practice as film. No one critic
can be the measure of any film, and certainly not of a cycle of films. The elu-
cidation of films must proceed on as many fronts as possible, but in a mea-
sured, cautious, tentative, provisional way. The closing of any subject is always
premature, and the desire that would have it so always pernicious. There isn’t Preface to the
any aspect of film that doesn’t require further opening up. Given the vast First Edition

ix
 amount of work to be done, the following chapters may best be regarded as
only a beginning. If the book is successful, it will provoke other critics to take
up where I have left off.
Film criticism is in a primitive stage because we know very little about
film—very little about the intricacies of intent and reception for any given
film. It is in a primitive stage because the medium itself makes evident the ob-
solescence of our critical language. The history of film theory is a catalog of
conflicting intellectual misadventures, and there is no secure and shared sense
about when film criticism is actually talking about its subject matter and when
not. In general, a relaxed, intelligent speculation that takes its time and weighs
changes in the medium and new information into its consideration has not
been the rule. Rather, there has been a rage for order, a hurry to nail things
down, an urgent, sometimes desperate invasion of other disciplines for their
methodologies. We should before we make dubious alignments to any critical
or scholarly system, patiently discuss with each other and inform each other of
what we have seen on the screen and provide different kinds of ordered pre-
sentations of the thoughts our experience has induced. In writing and thinking
about film, we must be content to make slow, small, and partial gains. We must
proceed using what we know, but with a healthy awareness also of all that we
don’t know.
I have voiced these (perhaps unnecessary) admonitions to ensure that
these pages not be misunderstood in spirit. A pessimism about critical lan-
guage—and the nature of the film medium gives it plenty of fuel—may on oc-
casion seek to overcompensate by aggression and assertion. The same may be
said for one’s enthusiasm—which film also can provoke to excess. If I err in ei-
ther direction, it is not from a wish to compel authority but to compel attention
to the importance of the subject, to make the reader want to see or resee the
films and think about them so that he or she, in turn, may provide new ways by
which a viewer’s receptivity to the medium and its works can be increased.
One dilemma of film criticism is that the immediacy of films is often too mat-
ter-of-factly put aside in the interests of manageability. One’s discontent with
the detachment that accompanies any orderly critical investigation may, how-
ever, be tempered by the belief that there is a genuine, if limited, relation be-
tween our preconceptual, quirky, individualized apprehension of films and the
reasoned discourse we apply to them.
The gangster/crime film is difficult to write about, to hold in view as a
unity, because it shifts gears so frequently. Perhaps a small army of film critics
is ultimately what is required to come fully to terms with it. My study must in-
evitably fall short of raising all the issues and questions pertinent to an exami-
Preface to the nation of the genre and obviously cannot conduct analyses of all its films. If
First Edition what I have written will hasten badly needed studies of films like The Big
x
House, Quick Millions, The Secret Six, T-Men, Raw Deal, Criss-Cross, Brute
Force, Machine-Gun Kelly, Angels with Dirty Faces, The Line-Up, Bloody
Mama, Dillinger, The Roaring Twenties, Party Girl, The Enforcer, Mean
Streets, He Walked by Night, and many others, it will in large part have fulfilled
its aim. Further insight into the genre is seriously hampered by the almost
utter absence of responsible attention to films such as these. Whether the care-
ful study of such films will produce evidence that confirms, alters, or negates
the conceptual apparatus I provide remains to be seen.
The gangster crime genre is of course not exclusive to film. Film does not
exist in isolation from other media. My interest, though, is in following the
drift of the genre in film, a large enough task for one book. To attempt to in-
clude, say, the hard-boiled school of fiction or the enormous number of crime
comics in the discussion would be to complicate matters unduly and nearly
double the length of the book. (Moreover, access to the relevant pulp fiction
and comic books is by no means easy.) This material is complementary and
would no doubt prove mutually illuminating, but it merits a separate inquiry.
The protean, unruly nature of the genre, besides, is never more apparent than
when we observe its treatment in various media. It conforms to both appropri-
ate and necessary contexts of production, materials, audience, and morality.
Thus, to take one example for illustration, the depiction given of Pretty
Boy Floyd as a brutal psychopath reveling in sadistic violence in the Fawcett
Publications’ 1948 comic book one-shot entitled On the Spot could not then
have been the attitude adopted by a movie biography of Floyd. It would have
been modified and softened considerably, the violence kept proportionately in
balance with a characterization developed through social/personal relation-
ships. Interestingly enough, the 1970 movie A Bullet for Pretty Boy and the
1974 made-for-TV movie Pretty Boy Floyd show the figure as a warmhearted,
misunderstood boy forced reluctantly into crime. One cannot study the minu-
tiae of these interrelationships idly or parenthetically. It is not from lack of in-
terest that they are excluded from this book. To limit oneself to a perception
of a genre as it evolves in one medium and cohabits with the mores, speech,
feelings, and general concerns of a society through several decades of time is
a necessary confinement if one hopes to get anything done at all.
In preparing the bibliography, I was surprised to find that so little has been
written about so important a body of films and that individual films, especially,
have been neglected to such a sad degree. Discounting a stray paragraph or
sentence here and there, my writing is the only sustained work done on The
Public Enemy, High Sierra, Kiss of Death, Force of Evil, D.O.A., White Heat,
99 River Street, and The Brothers Rico. Several of the other films I treat are rep-
resented by one sometimes inadequate essay apiece. The lack of critical ac- Preface to the
knowledgment of so many rich films helped determine my focus, but that still First Edition
xi
 left me with the problem of which films could best serve as paradigms of the
genre’s range and achievement. The genre is, of course, more diversified than
my small selection of films for analysis may unwittingly imply. Nonetheless,
my choices followed from a desire to show the genre’s variety and versatility in
its curvy, bumpy route over half a century of time. A films and B films, films
celebrated and films maudit, classic films that had to be written on and cu-
riosities that otherwise seemed destined to a premature oblivion, each a ser-
viceable index to the directions the genre was taking at the time of its release,
and each proving substantial upon reviewing.
I’d like first to thank—if it can be done unfacetiously—the city of New
York, whose many theaters and movie-saturated TV programming allowed for
a youth (some would say) misspent gorging happily on these films and count-
less others. I’d also like to thank everyone who has done his bit to keep me hon-
est on this subject: several of my English Department colleagues at the Uni-
versity of Massachusetts, Amherst, and mainly my students, who provided the
interest, support, and intellectual challenges that made this study possible.
Special thanks to Professor Charles Eidsvik for ideas on D.O.A. and to Les
Perlman for spotting additional Christological references in Kiss of Death. To
my wife Carol I owe many debts—intellectual and otherwise—that go beyond
what words can say.

Preface to the

First Edition
xii
 Preface to the Second Edition

Back in 1973, around the time pursuit of theory was promising a purge of our
critical sins—privileged interpretations, unacknowledged subjectivity, a tooth-
less pluralism, watery logic, myopic burrowing, and a naive indolence in track-
ing the inevitable presence and diffusion of cultural forces—was when I first
began writing about these “underworld” films that seemed, by and large, to be
of a piece, often telling the same story for the same purpose with different “re-
placement” surfaces. I did so with some trepidation, as the rising young stars of
academia were busy “getting at” works and movements and history with some
new and critically glittering artillery—a cadre of young, excitable Turks bran-
dishing procedures and assumptions like cutlasses; the uninitiated, at best
uninstructed and at worst recalcitrant, remained, thanks to tenure, immovably
there, identifiably dowdy and frumpy, clutching frayed manila folders, inside
which lay a lifetime of now discredited notions fading and flaking. And so, feel-
ing unprepared to launch an entire book without the rudiments of what cur-
rently was being embraced as the last words in critical sophistication, I set
about getting some of the material under my belt. By the time I thought to
bring it as far up as my brain, I had decided that under my belt was probably
the best place for it. Well-meaning advocacy from disparate sites couldn’t dis-
pel my accelerating fear that those continental waters were too murky and
chilly to swim in. I didn’t see any point in trying my hand at writing so rapt as
to forego being understood and which manufactured additional obfuscating
jargon whenever it pleased, as though showing off a nimble intellect was what
this newfangled logorrhea was all about. Writing is hard enough, and mine
faulty enough, not to need assistance toward a more thorough incomprehen-
sibility—plenty of that had gushed forth already, and even the “good” writing
was so formidably arcane that I couldn’t see any pedagogical payoff either. The
initial concern over exposing professional shortsightedness and imprecision
has, not surprisingly, subsided, and the zealous rainbow visions of a critical
promised land have turned disappointingly monochrome. For a while, it
seemed like a matter of life and death for the critical arriere-garde (or, at the
least, some ill-conceived hiring and firing). Here was a fresh horde of barbar-
ians at the gate; there was headhunting and caterwauling, and there were
bench-clearing brawls. All that seems on the wane and critical writing is once
again less severe and more versatile, and that is good, though irate professors
can be very entertaining.
Dreams and Dead Ends, in that context, was surprisingly well received.
There was some chiding of its limitations—critical looseness, a shying away
from theoretical challenges, leaky categories, indiscreet enthusiasms—though
many reviews didn’t seem to mind any of that. (If there were some things
 wrong with the book, there must also have been more than a few things right
with it—hence its current resurrection.) One expected point of debate was
over the accommodatingly huge umbrella I had constructed for the genre.
The definition was too broad, letting in all sorts of questionable films. I had
foisted too many illegitimate children on the mother genre, more than she
could handle. The reader was forced to proceed bereft of that most welcome
of critical companions, clarity. In 1973, it now becomes clear, I was struck by
all the similarities, even the most far-flung, between the gangster, cop, and noir
cycles, all the ways in which they touched base and seemed to be expressing
mutual (if different-natured) critiques of society and its institutions. Of late, it
is the differences that strike me as perhaps more interesting, and I’ll let that un-
expected “fact” serve as a starting point for this reissue.
I’m not talking a turnaround here that negates what I wrote in 1973. If any-
thing, these unshared qualities make for even more thoroughly cemented
“connections,” in the sense that the heads and tails of coins have remarkable
differences, yet are strongly bonded materially and symbolically. If the ease
with which we travel and “click in” to links on the Internet has shown us any-
thing it is that everything is, or could be, connected, and that isolated disci-
plines can supply only a frail account of the meaning, range, and effect of
whatever it is they may be holding under scrutiny. Not until all the disciplines
have established their way of understanding text and context of any given work
can we really feel how much elasticity, how much stretch, can be brought into
play. These, then, are additional remarks not aiming to expunge the blunders
of my youth, nor to expose the lazy contradictions of floppy-minded dotage. I
aim merely to get the coin, lying flat so many years, turning again. Reissues
cannot help being reconsiderations.1
If we say reissues are opportunities to present material that has been re-
considered, it sounds like something hardly worth saying. But in preparing this
edition, I realized it was an important distinction to make. The 1977 Dreams
and Dead Ends grew out of what seemed like considerations triggered by con-
versations with colleagues, friends and family, and countless students (who
weren’t shy about telling me which films still had plenty of pop to them and
what that pop consisted of) over years of teaching. This time around was
clearly different: I was having conversations with myself, that other, younger
(and probably more foolish) person who wrote this book. It was a strange feel-
ing to write as if I were interpreting, explaining, cautioning, commiserating, or
otherwise chatting with the author, noting what ideas and opinions we still had
in common or what needed refining or correcting or dumping. Conversations
with myself is what the new writing I’ve added felt like, anyway, whatever its
Preface to the value might be for another reader. So if certain pages sometimes seem to be
Second Edition going over the same material, that’s just my attempt to clarify or expand what
xiv
was left too sketchy in my original comments. For the record, the additional
material generally supports the positions taken twenty-plus years ago. Some
quibbling, yes, some instances of “I beg to differ” but hardly any of “get out of
town,” and nothing requiring a prior tarring and feathering. The films de-
scribed and assessed and evaluated remain as compelling as ever.
Assessment and evaluation both are two-way streets. The films of the last
twenty-nine or so years shed light on their predecessors, and they in turn help
clarify our contemporary fare. There is change but also continuity. Some em-
phases are dictated by technological advances in the medium (no film looks
like those exemplary productions of the past). What is curious to see in the
gangster/crime film is that most of its key scenes and pivots and formal patterns
have survived, but only because they have withstood increasing intensifica-
tions.
The early gangster-crime films display, until the encroachment of noir,
with its more variegated criminal types and societies, an easily readable curve.
The gangster’s life is noisy but short. As soon as he gets to the top, he gets to
confront an inexplicable (to him) death. Then G-men and the like chase him
and destroy him. By the late 1930s he becomes something of an endangered
species and we grow a bit misty-eyed at his extinction, but we understand that
he understands the nobility of gestures that make him our superior—in
essence, if not earthly fortune. Transformed, he rises to a better place than our
mean earth. And that’s it. The figure is keyed exactly to our social history, most
tightly to Prohibition, and the arrival and departure of the Depression. As the
economy rebounds in preparation for the war against fascism, the gangster is
forgiven, his brutal skills suddenly assets in a unified patriotic fervor, ready to
use any means to preserve the zenith of civilized government—a cherished
democracy. In war, it’s pretty easy to know what to do; peace, on the other
hand, can easily be a worrisome, now-what-do-I-do? state, especially if you’re
out of work, there’s a recession, and the girl you used to date has your old job.
With noir, the branching begins, and with it, surfaces and depths more diffi-
cult to read. And it never eases up, for as more and more films continue to ar-
ticulate the milieu, iconography, and obligatory emphases of this genre, a
thick, complex layering results, strange attitudes evolve, and unpredictable
qualities enter into the mix. The final chapter tries to get a grip on all that, but
for now, at points embarrassingly intact, here is Dreams and Dead Ends (fol-
lowing two new short essays), as it first came out in 1977.

Preface to the

Second Edition
xv
This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgments

First, a deep-breath release of thanks to the merry-go-round of editors who

helped give this work new life—Elissa Morris and Jeremy Lewis above all,
both of whom put me on a less zig-zag course and prevented additional way-
wardness. Jeremy Lewis, in particular, kept close watch on an admittedly over-
eager style, one that required some timely chastening. I, of course, must take
the blame for any incorrigibly unexpungeable blemishes remaining, either
from having gone undetected or by obdurate override. Thanks also to Chris-
tine Sanmartin at MIT Press for her tireless responses to my mostly dumb
questions and for engineering a smooth and gracious transfer of rights to OUP.
Prompt last-minute help in procuring stills and permissions was provided by
Mary Corliss, curator of the Film Stills Archive at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York City.
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Introduction 3

1 The Golden Age The “Classic” Gangster Film 29

Little Caesar (1930) 36
The Public Enemy (1931) 50

2 Dark Transformations The Descent into Noir 62

High Sierra (1941) 68
The Killers (1946) 80

3 The Genre’s “Enlightenment” The Stress and Strain for Affirmation 104
Kiss of Death (1947) 108
Force of Evil (1948) 119
Gun Crazy (1949) 131

4 Going Gray and Going Crazy Disequilibrium and Change at Midcentury 145
D.O.A. (1949) 150
White Heat (1949) 163

5 Focus on Feeling “Seeing” through the Fifties 176

Pickup on South Street (1953) 186
99 River Street (1953), The Phenix City Story (1955),
The Brothers Rico (1957) 196
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) 220

6 Contemporary Colorations The Modernist Perspective 236

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) 244
Point Blank (1967) 254
The Godfather (1972), The Godfather II (1975),
and After 268

7 Toward the 21st Century Frenzies and Despairs 276

Once upon a Time in America (1984) 285
Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995)
293

Appendix 1 Criss Cross: One to “Watch Over and Over” 307

Appendix 2 Gangster/Crime/Noir/ Post-Noir: The Top 14 323
Appendix 3 50 Post-Godfather Crime/Noir Films
Worth a Look 328
Appendix 4 Aging Well: 50 Vintage Gangster/Crime/Noir
Films 329
Notes 337
Selected Bibliography 355
Index 361
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