Manhattan Melodrama's “Art of the Weak”: Telling History from the Other Side in the 1930s Talking Gangster Film (original) (raw)

Journal of American Studies, 1996

Abstract

Ever since gangsters first appeared on the American screen (officially with D. W. Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley, in 1912) they have been involved in a prolonged battle with the forces of “legitimate” culture. Having fought their fights from the wrong side of the street gangsters have continually drawn attention to the line which separates legitimate from illegitimate Americans. This has raised problems in accounting for the gangster genre's significance. In stigmatizing the ethnic urban poor as criminal, the gangster genre betrays its origins in a nativist discourse which sought to cast “hyphenated” Americans as “un-American” and in need of “ Americanization. ” Yet, as perhaps the most powerful vehicle for the nationalization and popularization of ethnic urban American life, the gangster genre overturned many aspects of its iniquitous origin, playing an important part in the re-writing of American history from the perspective (and, as I shall demonstrate, quite literally in the voice) of the ethnic urban lower class.This contradiction is characteristic of the dynamic and changing role American popular culture artifacts play in the mediation of the nation's history. Regardless of the poetic and ideological licence gangster fictions take with the very real socio-historical problems of the ethnic urban poor, the central conflict which informs these narratives remains the question of social, economic, and cultural exclusion.

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