Video Essays

Me: Here's a 15 minute video on silent movies.

Neverending: Ugh. Why waste our time with this garbage?

Also Neverending: Here's 90 minutes on X-Men comics.

Since people seemed to like it the last time I talked about Sergio Leone, let's talk about how he killed gangster movies.



This video offers a history of gangster films in America and analyzes how Once Upon a Time in America builds on genre cliches to explore the cruelty and violence inherent to the genre.

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That may well be, but did Neverending have to attack silent movies first? No. No he did not.

That music does rip.

Very well made video Coop, not sure I'm entirely convinced by the argument though, at least not the cause and effect hook.  

It would seem to me that the fact that those rise and fall gangster movies mainly became less prevalent because of The Godfather films' status as a towering achievements in cinema made trying to top them seemed kind of impossible and then when Scarface and OUATIA tried to take a stab at it they both ended up being critical and financial failures upon release and no one tried again, especially during the Spielbergian blockbuster ethos of the 80s. 

It could also be argued that this is simply a function of gangsters of the traditional mafioso variety becoming less prevalent in American society.  Violent kingpins probably still exist to some extent but they keep a lower profile or they operate south of the border.  It could also be argued that the genre simply moved to television, where there's more time to show a rise and a fall.  The Sopranos plays a bigger part in this all this than the video implies and Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, and Narcos also come to mind.  

I don't know, the characters in The Sopranos might not wear flashy suits all the time but I wouldn't necessarily call Tony a workaday gangster.  He lives in a big mansion, he's more or less the figure in charge, and he lives by most of the usual codes of the gangster.  The big difference is that he's living in the 90s rather than the 20s, and he basically inherited his position in an enterprise whose glory days might be on the way out and he also has to deal with more mundane family situations like taking his daughter on college tours.  Also he rather notably doesn't (seem) to go out in a blaze of glory at the end.

Quite the hot take - although highly debatable since most people in North America didn’t see the full version of the movie till 2003.

What killed the “classic mob movie”? The camp of Scarface, the re-focusing of Untouchables and the depiction of lower-level gangsters in Goodfellas. Plus the fact that the mafia isn’t as high-profile in society as it used to be. The culmination of all this is depicted in the long-forgotten Donnie Brasco starring Johnny Depp and Al Pacino. Your video should have centered on that. From the heights of Godfather to the audience indifference of Donnie Brasco and how more modern movies like The Departed are outliers.

No discussion of the mob can ever be complete without at least a passing reference to Fat Tony.

Hang ye head in shame.

BTW, if you ever find yourself expanding on this idea you might want to watch New Jack City. Not a great movie, but it's sort of a combination of the "hood" movie, the Scarface rise and fall, and also that "equal focus on the cops" thing.

The real Donnie Brasco was instrumental in the investigation that led to New York bringing down the Five Families and thus ending the era of the mafia as a superpower, which leads to your thesis of mafia movies losing their glamour in pop culture. You can’t really talk about one without acknowledging the other. By the 80’s people just didn’t give fuck anymore.

Also, as Dracula stated, by the 80’s & 90’s the inner-city gangster became more prominent in media as that was dominating the news due to the drug wars. Movies like Scarface and New Jack City capitalized on that as well as traditional mob movies like Goodfellas and Godfather III which featured drugs as a plot point. And let’s not forget the countless action movies that pitted cops against drug dealers, which Untouchables is arguably part of.

Not saying OUATIA isn’t a great topic but your video was arguing two completely things. That movie being the last old school mob movie had little bearing on the genre itself. That shift was happening regardless of whether the movie existed or not.

By the way, you mentioned the ending, that could be your next video if you wanna whip out something quick. Some versions do end with Old Man Noodles which would support your thesis. You can talk about how that’s a superior conclusion than returning to the opium den.

When I first saw the movie in the 1990’s it didn’t have the opium ending so I wasn’t exposed to the whole “it was a dream” theory till the 2003 DVD. I was fine with the Old Man Noodles ending so I don’t really disagree with you but the “it was a dream ending” is good too , I guess. Persuade me to take a side.