Movies

The gangster movie, along with the Western, the musical and the screwball comedy, is among the most enduring American movie genres.

It flowered in the '30s with the Big Three of Little Caesar, Scarface and The Public Enemy; got psychotically Freudian in the '40s with White Heat; and reached new heights in the '70s with The Godfather movies.

The tradition continues today with Public Enemies, Michael Mann's sumptuous if emotionally tepid portrait of Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger. Audiences love the gangster movie's bang-bang audacity and rise-and-fall story arc; critics, buffs and scholars see the genre as a roving capsule of the country's life and times.

The question is, which times: those that the movies depict, or those in which they're made?

Genres are enticingly malleable creatures that thrive on revising sets of rules and expectations. They readily bend to filmmakers' purposes and whims. They play with time as well as convention. So Public Enemies ' places – including meticulously re-created city streets and movie palaces – are of the '30s. So are its people, including the household names Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and, of course, John Dillinger, criminal celebrities all.

But the film's concerns are decidedly here and now, a point made not through Dillinger (the ever-charismatic Johnny Depp), but his pursuers in the BOI – that's FBI to anyone born after 1935. J. Edgar Hoover rules the Bureau with an iron hand; he doesn't just want to round up the usual suspects as vintage movie cops might. He also wants to haul in and harass their friends and families. He wants to grill anyone and everyone they may know.

And when his right hand Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) grows a bit queasy at the boss' strong-arm tactics, there's always someone else around to do the dirty work. As a frustrated fed (Christian Stolte) works over Dillinger's woman (Marion Cotillard), we're left with two thoughts. The first is that the feds didn't do this stuff in the gangster movies of old. The second is that Hoover's "war on crime" utilizes the same means as our equally hazy war on terror.

It seems every era gets the gangster films it deserves. Those '30s classics, for instance, were all about bootlegging. They were set in the '20s, at the dawn and the height of Prohibition. One hilarious montage in The Public Enemy features a run on the liquor stores on the last night of legal booze. Thirsty citizens crawl all over each other to fill bags, trunks, even a baby carriage with bottles of hooch.

It's fun to see the look on a young moviegoer's face when he hears that the original Scarface, from 1932, focused on Italian immigrants and illegal liquor, not Cuban immigrants and piles of cocaine.

But if the setting says Prohibition, the ethos is all Great Depression. Gangster movie fans of the 1930s admired the pluck and get-mine drive of their favorite antiheroes, much as a good chunk of the populace found something to cheer in the real-life Dillinger. (He was robbing those nasty banks, after all).

The '30s movie gangster had steady work. He didn't go on the dole. He even tapped into an ugly sort of sexism that infused so many emasculated, out-of-work men of the era. How else could James Cagney's Tom Powers get away with smashing a grapefruit in his girlfriend's face in The Public Enemy?

Then we have the first two Godfather movies. Set in the '40s and '50s, they carry a distinctly Nixonian whiff that places them firmly in the era of their filming, the early '70s. These are epics of paranoia, secrecy and shady backroom dealings that say "Keep Out," just like the door that Michael shuts on Kate at the end of the first film. Gordon Willis' cinematography buries the gangster's eyes in deep, dark shadows, the better to mask motive and intent.

Genre movies respond to each other over time, shifting themes and focus to match their eras. So yes, Hoover's G-men may have whaled on their sources. But the movies weren't about to show it back then. For one, the FBI (or BOI) would have freaked. Perhaps more important, the action wouldn't have the same cultural resonance as it does now.

Movie critic Chris Vognar has been on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University.