The Gangster Film

The Western

A "story of enterprise and success ending in precipitate failure" (453).

A story of a man's struggle to retain his honor, even in defeat/

A romantic tragedy about a man "whose defeat springs with almost mechanical inevitability from the outrageous presumption of his demands: the gangster is bound to go on until he is killed" (458).

A classical tragedy based on a hero of virtue always prepared for defeat; need not end in the death of the hero.

A tale of the city.

A tale of the frontier.

The gangster is "without culture, without manners, without leisure" (453).

The Western hero is a figure of repose.

The gangster is "lonely and melancholy."

The Western hero is also lonely and melancholy, but out of a profound worldly wisdom," the 'simple' recognition that life is unavoidably serious."

The gangster is "expansive and noisy," not introspective.

The Western hero is "organically" introspective; he has to do what he has to do (457).

The gangster is violent in both his attractions and repulsions; he may lose control at any time.

The Western hero avoids violence at all cost; he is always in control.

The gangster is never satisfied; complacency is fatal to him.

The Western hero is complete within himself, self-contained.

The gangster is always trying to get ahead; always wanting to own something more, conquer some new territory.

The Western hero has no desire to get anywhere.

"Everyone wants to kill him and eventually someone will" (454).

The Western hero is also under customarily "under fire" but would avoid it if he could.

The gangster does not seem to need love in any traditional sense.

The Western hero does not seek love, is "prepared to accept it, but . . . never asks of it more than it can give"; love seems "at best an irrelevance"; the woman the Western hero loves (usually from the East) does not understand what he does and he is incapable of explaining it to her.

The gangster associates with prostitutes and "loose" women because of their "passive availability" and their "costliness."

The Western hero associates with prostitutes (like Miss Kitty) because they understand him.

The gangster's possessions are central to his being; he owns things in a gaudy, exhibitionistic way.

The Western hero owns nothing, or seems not to; money, possessions, a house, a regular place to sleep, all seem alien to him.

The gangster's death reveals his whole life to have been a mistake.

Even in death, the Western hero retains his honor.

A modern genre which "confronts industrial society on its own ground" (465).

Essentially "archaic" (466).