The Gangster Genre - Essay Example

The main storyline of the film is Dick Tracy's efforts to bring down Big Boy Caprice's gangster empire and the search for a mysterious assassin known as The Blank. A secondary storyline follows Tracy's romances with Tess Trueheart and Breathless Mahoney. The third sub-plot is Tracy's rescuing a young orphan boy, The Kid, who looks up to Tracy as a father figure. All this becomes quickly tangled when Tracy finds himself framed for the murder of Chicago's beloved (although corrupt) District Attorney, and Caprice's empire begins to take over the city itself.

Classical Hollywood cinema has traditionally presented its viewer with a unified narrative. The Untouchables a perfect example of this. The film's narrative deals with Treasury Officer Elliot Ness's quest to get criminal Al Capone behind bars. This is a goal that is clearly and explicitly delineated from the start, and most scenes follow the protagonist's actions from that point on. At first, he tries to achieve this goal by himself, which leads to failure when he finds out that the rest of the police force is corrupt.

As he walks home, depressed about his embarrassing failure, the character of Maloneis introduced. The death of Malone not only has the plot function of strengthening Ness's resolve to catch Capone, but it also functions structurally as reinforcement of the audience's sympathy for his quest.C. AudienceWhen comparing these two texts together and placing them in the gangster genre that they belong, it is apparent that they are both very similar, narratively, and generically. The fact that the genre itself has a cult audience following (which begun with films such as The Godfather, and even the 1930's Dick Tracy), signifies this even more.

The audiences over generations have grown up with these types of films, and it is certainly a type that audiences are still interested in considering gangster films are still made today. The audience knows that when they go to see a gangster film, they will be involved with a film that contains guns, high-speed chases, and usually a few crooked cops. Audiences are attracted to films like this because they know they will receive a 'closed ending' which in turn gives them a sense of closure and satisfaction by the end.D. GenreWhile the gangster genre plays a predominant role as the main generic element of these texts, they are apart of a much larger genre, drama.

The gangster genre itself is really just another breed of drama, and each text is consistent with this fact. As noted before, gangster films are constant in producing high levels of drama that keep people coming back to them, which is why the genre itself has been so successful throughout film history.