PARTISAN REVIEW
For such a
type
to be successful means that its conventions have
imposed themselves upon the general consciousness and become the
accepted vehicles of a }!)articular set of attitudes and a particular aesthetic
effect. One goes to any individual example of the type with very definite
expectations, and originality is to be welcomed only in the degree that
it intensifies the expected experience without fundamentally altering it.
Moreover, the relationship between the conventions which go to make up
such a type and the real experience of its audience or the real facts
of whatever situation it pretends to describe is of only secondary im–
portance and does not determine its aesthetic force. It is only in an
ultimate sense that the type appeals to its audience's experience of
reality; much more immediately, it appeals to previous experience of
the type itself: it creates its own field of reference.
Thus the importance of the gangster film, and the nature and
intensity of its emotional and aesthetic impact, cannot be measured in
terms of the place of the gangster himself or the importance of the
problem of crime in American life. Those European movie-goers who
think there is a gangster on every corner in New York are certainly
deceived, but defenders of the "positive" side of American culture are
equally deceived if they think it relevant to point out that most Americans
have never seen a gangster. What matters is that the experience of the
gangster
as an experience of art
is universal to Americans. There is
almost nothing we understand better or react to more readily or with
quicker intelligence. The Western film, though it seems never to diminish
in popularity, is for most of us no more than the folklore of the past,
familiar and understandable only because it has been repeated so often.
The gangster film comes much closer. In ways that we do not easily or
willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the
American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern
life, which rejects "Americanism" itself.
The gangster is the man of the city, with the city's language and
knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring,
carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club. For everyone
else, there is at least the theoretical possibility of another world-in
that happier American culture which the gangster denies, the city does
not really exist; it is only a more crowded and more brightly lit country
-but for the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in
order to personify it: not the real city, but that dangerous and sad
city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the
modern world. And the gangster-though there are real gangsters-is
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