Word: gangsters
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...ruling cliché in writing about crime bosses - "the gangster as tragic hero" - was coined in 1948 by Robert Warshow, an extremely intelligent cultural critic, whose premature passing in 1955 robbed us of an invaluable voice. Warshow held that the classic movie mobsters (Little Caesar, The Public Enemy) were, in their essence, classic Americans forced by their status as the sons of immigrants to seek success and status outside the law, even though their style and motives were not so very different from the robber barons who found their riches in more respectable industries. The difference between the gangsters...
...been 59 years since Warshow wrote, and it seems to me that studies of the modern criminal have not advanced very much in that time. As evidence we might consider Ridley Scott's American Gangster, which is based on the true story of a drug lord named Frank Lucas, who in the 1970s cornered the Harlem heroin market and thereby made millions upon millions. He is a black man, no less a member of a struggling underclass than his Italian and Irish movie predecessors, and he has a couple of gimmicks that they (who were never drug dealers) didn...
...real shock when he must off a competitor or a betrayer. And we enjoy seeing him enjoy his success - the gigantic mansion in which he installs his formerly dirt-poor family, his trophy wife, the celebrity that comes to him. There has never been much point in deploring a gangster's rise; it's his demise that we fear - the notion that the American go-getter must inevitably be gotten. "Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?" Robinson moans at the end of Little Ceasar -as surprised as we are by a death that may be tragically ordained...
...security forces' being distracted by the protracted battle against Islamist radicals holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp, to plant another of the Bekaa's fabled crops: hashish. Hashish farming threatens to gobble up land that could be used for vineyards, and creates a get-rich-quick gangster culture that's at odds with the patient investment necessary to produce wine...
...Handling. "And when you're young you're attracted to the magic of horror and action. So Midnight Madness is an excellent festival recruiting tool not only for young audiences but also for young directors." The section thus makes room for low-budget horror films, extreme action epics, foreign gangster movies - what are known, affectionately or derisively, as genre films...