Dreams & Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film.(Book Review)

Dreams & Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film. Jack Shadoian. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

We can now read the second edition (the subtitle has been changed from the 1977 edition's The American Gangster/Crime Film) of one of the first book-length studies of the gangster movie. This reflects the burgeoning interest in genre studies and structuralism that arose in part to counter the auteur-dominated criticism of the 1960s. It fast became a standard reference work in the field. This original study, reprinted virtually unchanged here as Chapters 1-6, analyzes the American gangster film from its sound beginnings (Little Caesar, 1930, and Public Enemy, 1931) to the 1960s (represented by Bonnie and Clyde and Point Blank, 1967) and the 1970s (by the first two films in the Godfather trilogy, 1972, 1975). Many of the eighteen films that Shadoian discusses received their first sustained critical notice here.

Little has changed apart from a new subtitle and a transitional phrase or two. The bibliography is updated (the latest reference is from 1999) with additional material reflecting recent or continuing topics of theoretical interest: film noir, feminism, cultural studies, and genre theory. However, Shadoian's original readings stand substantially intact. He has added new material, though, with a new two-part introduction revalidating the texts chosen for his original study, and then by drawing lines of descent from the classical gangster film through to the present. In a new Chapter 7 and in Appendix 1, he offers close readings of two more recent gangster films--Once Upon a Time in America (1984) and Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995)--and redirects critical attention to Criss Cross (1949). Things to Do was a new find for me, and Shadoian's thoroughly satisfying discussion of it gives gravity to a film--indeed, to a genre--that may strike some viewers as distinctly over the top. More important, his reading substantiates the argument ...