Gail's Media Studies Blog: Genre Study

1. Genre - Crime and Gangster

2. Genre Conventions: Content

Strong use of violence and drugs,
Commonly uses the mafia as a plot device
Protagonist is almost always a man protective of the women in his life
Takes place in a big city
Commonly ends with the main character being killed
Contains the entire rise and fall of the criminal empire, as opposed to a small, contained snippet of the story
Murders typically only take place in the dark of night with a minimal number of potential witnesses around
Obligatory trunk shot

3. Genre Conventions: Production

Extensive stunt work is done in order to create engaging fight scenes.
Heavy use of prosthetics and props in older productions, but since the creation of CGI, most special effects are computer generated.
Colour pallets are usually quite muted, usually consisting of washed-out colours or simple blacks and greys. To add to costume design, men in the film are often shown in formal wear, specifically suits.
Sets usually consist of tight, old houses, bland offices, or expansive outdoor spaces with no one except the characters exchanging dialogue around.

4. Institutional Conventions: Marketing - Crime or Gangster films are usually marketed towards a broad audience. They specifically target 30 to 50 year old men in the middle class, due to their gritty and overwhelmingly male-lead nature. Trailers for crime films are usually flashy and fast, sometimes taking a small snippet of a scene and cutting it three times to the beat of the high-paced trailer music to generate excitement and tension. There are also snippets of dialogue nearly haphazardly thrown in between scenes, where a character will joke about one thing and then cut to a shot of them actually performing that action.

5. The Irishman (2019) directed by Martin Scorsese is the textbook definition of a crime film. The main cast consists nearly entirely of men that not only have been in the movie industry for decades, but are all notorious for being in crime films. Not only that, but the film is directed by a man who's known for his crime movies, such as The Departed (2006) and Goodfellas (1990). The film centres around a trucker named Frank Sheeran who's been hired as a hitman in organised crime, and eventually climbs through the ranks with a trail of blood leaking behind him.

Jimmy Hoffa and others looking up at the American flag

6. Scarface (1983) directed by Brian de Palma is a unique character study within the crime genre. It centres around a Cuban immigrant, Tony Montana, who comes to Miami and immediately joins the organised crime and drug business, painstakingly climbing to the top while trying to keep his life together. The entire film is stapled with all the tell-tale signs of a gangster film, right down to the rampant drug use and violent deaths littered throughout.