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Crime film is a film belonging to the crime fiction genre. Films of this genre generally involve various aspects of crime and fiction. Stylistically, the genre may overlap and combine with many other genres, such as drama or gangster film, but also include Comedy film, and, in turn, is divided into many sub-genres, such as Mystery film, suspense or Film noir.
Screenwriter and scholar Eric R. Williams identified crime film as one of eleven super-genres in his Screenwriters Taxonomy, claiming that all feature-length can be classified by these super-genres. The other ten super-genres are action, fantasy, horror, romance, science fiction, slice of life, sports, thriller, war and western.Williams, Eric R. (2017). The screenwriters taxonomy : a roadmap to collaborative storytelling. New York, NY: Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice. . . P. 21 Williams identifies drama in a broader category called "film type", mystery and suspense as "macro-genres", and film noir as a "screenwriter's pathway" explaining that these categories are additive rather than exclusionary. Chinatown would be an example of a film that is a drama (film type) crime film (super-genre) that is also a noir (pathway) mystery (macro-genre).
The criminal acts in every film in the genre represents a larger critique of either social or institutional order from the perspective of a character or from the film's narrative at large. The films also depend on the audience ambivalence towards crime. Master criminals are portrayed as immoral but glamorous while maverick police officers break the law to capture criminals. Leitch defined this as a critical to the film as the films are about the continual breakdown and re-establishment of borders among criminals, crime solvers and victims, concluding that "this paradox is at the heart of all crime films." Rafter echoed these statements, saying crime films should be defined on the basis of their relationship with society.
Leitch writes that crime films reinforce popular social beliefs of their audience, such as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the law is above individuals, and that crime does not pay. The genre also generally has endings that confirm the moral absolutes that an innocent victim, a menacing criminal, and detective and their own morals that inspire them by questioning their heroic or pathetic status, their moral authority of the justice system, or by presenting innocent characters who seem guilty and vice versa.
Crime films includes all films that focus on any of the three parties to a crime: criminal, victims, and avengers and explores what one party's relation to the other two. This allows the crime film to encompass films as wide as Wall Street (1987); caper films like The Asphalt Jungle (1950); and prison films ranging from Brute Force (1947) to The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Crime films are not definable by their mise-en-scene such as the Western film as they lack both the instantly recognizable or the unique intent of other genres such as parody films.
Leitch and Rafter both write that it would be impractical to call every film in which a crime produces the central dramatic situation a crime film. Leitch gave an example that most Westerns from The Great Train Robbery (1903) to Unforgiven (1992) often have narratives about crime and punishment, but are not generally described as crime films. Films with crime-and-punishment themes like Winchester 73 (1950) and Rancho Notorious (1952) are classified as Westerns rather than crime films because their setting takes precedence over their story. Alain Silver and James Ursini argued in A Companion to Crime Fiction (2020) that "unquestionably most Western films are crime films" but that their overriding generic identification is different just as crime are different than horror, science fiction and period drama films. Rafter also suggested that Westerns could be considered crime films, but that this perception would only be "muddying conceptual waters."
European films of the silent era differed radically from the Hollywood productions, reflecting the post-World War I continental culture. Drew Todd wrote that with this, Europeans tended to create darker stories and the audiences of these films were readier to accept these narratives. Several European silent films go much further in exploring the mystique of the criminal figures. These followed the success in France of Louis Feuillade's film serial Fantômas (1913).
The average budget for a Hollywood feature went from $20,000 in 1914 to $300,000 in 1924. Silver and Ursini stated that the earliest crime features were by Austrian émigré director Josef von Sternberg whose films like Underworld (1927) eliminated most of the causes for criminal behavior and focused on the criminal perpetrators themselves which would anticipate the popular gangster films of the 1930s.
Hollywood Studio heads were under such constant pressure from public-interest groups to tone down their portrayal of professional criminals that as early as 1931, Jack L. Warner announced that Warner Bros. would stop producing such films. Scarface itself was delayed for over a year as its director Howard Hughes talked with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America's Hays Code over the films violence and overtones of incest. A new wave of crime films that began in 1934 were made that had law enforcers as glamorous and as charismatic as the criminals. J. Edgar Hoover, director the Bureau of Investigation (renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1935), promoted bigger budgets and wider press for his organization and himself through a well-publicized crusade against such real world gangsters as Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger. Hoover's fictionalized exploits were glorified in future films such as G Men (1935). Through the 1930s, American films view of criminals were predominantly glamorized, but as the decade ended, the attitudes Hollywood productions had towards fictional criminals grew less straightforward and more conflicted. In 1935, Humphrey Bogart played Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936), a role Leitch described as the "first of Hollywood's overtly metaphorical gangsters." Bogart would appear in films in the later thirties: Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and The Roaring Twenties (1939). Unlike actor James Cagney, whose appeal as described by Leitch "direct, physical, and extroverted", Bogart characters and acting suggested "depths of worldly disillusionment beneath a crooked shell" and portrayed gangsters who showcased the "romantic mystique of the doomed criminal."
Filmmakers from this period were fleeing Europe due to the rise of Nazism. These directors such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, and Billy Wilder would make crime films in the late 1930s and 1940s that were later described as film noir by French critics. Several films from 1944 like The Woman in the Window, Laura, Murder, My Sweet and Double Indemnity ushered in this film cycle. These works continued into the mid-1950s. A reaction to film noir came with films with a more semi-documentary approach pioneered by the thriller The House on 92nd Street (1945). This led to crime films taking a more realistic approach like Kiss of Death (1947) and The Naked City (1948).
By the end of the decade, American critics such as Parker Tyler and Robert Warshow regarded Hollywood itself as a stage for repressed American cultural anxieties following World War II. This can be seen in films such as Brute Force, a prison film where the prison is an existential social metaphor for a what Leitch described as a "meaningless, tragically unjust round of activities."
The Asphalt Jungle (1950) consolidated a tendency to define criminal subculture as a mirror of American culture. The cycle of Heist film were foreshadowed by films like The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949) to later examples like The Killing (1956) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). Leitch wrote that these films used the planning and action of a robbery to dramatize the "irreducible unreasonableness of life." The themes of existential despair made these films popular with European filmmakers, who would make their own heist films like Rififi (1955) and Il bidone (1955). Filmmakers of the coming French New Wave movement would expand on these crime films into complex mixtures of nostalgia and critique with later pictures like Elevator to the Gallows (1958), Breathless (1960) and Shoot the Piano Player (1960).
As college students at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University demonstrated against racial injustice and the Vietnam, Hollywood generally ignored the war in narratives, with exceptions of film like The Green Berets (1968). The crime film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) revived the gangster film genre and captured the antiestablishment tone and set new standards for onscreen violence in film with its themes of demonizing American institution to attack the moral injustice of draft. This increase of violence was reflected in other crime films such as Point Blank (1967).
Leitch found the growing rage against the establishment spilled into portrayal police themselves with films like Bullitt (1968) about a police officer caught between mob killers and ruthless politicians while In the Heat of the Night (1967) which called for racial equality and became the first crime film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture.
Dirty Harry (1971) create a new form of police film, where Clint Eastwood's performance as Inspector Callahan which critic Pauline Kael described as an "emotionless hero, who lives and kills as affectlessly as a psychopathic personality." Drew Todd in Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society described the character as different than films featuring rebellious characters from the 1940s and 1950s, with a character whose anger is directed against the state, mixed with fantasies of vigilante justice. Films like Dirty Harry, The French Connection and Straw Dogs (1971) that presented a violent vigilante as a savior. By the mid-1970s, a traditional lead with good looks, brawn and bravery was replaced with characters who Todd described as a "pathological outcast, embittered and impulsively violent."
Hollywood productions began courting films produced and marketed by white Americans for the purpose of trying to attract a new audience with blaxploitation film. These films were almost exclusively crime films following the success of Shaft (1971) which led to studios rushing to follow its popularity with films like Super Fly (1972), Black Caesar (1973), Coffy (1973) and The Black Godfather (1974) The films were often derivations of earlier films such as Cool Breeze (1972), a remake of The Asphalt Jungle, Hit Man (1972) a remake of Get Carter (1971), and Black Mama, White Mama (1973) a remake of The Defiant Ones (1958). The cycle generally slowed down by the mid-1970s.
Prison films closely followed the formulas of films of the past while having an increased level of profanity, violence and sex. Cool Hand Luke (1967) inaugurated the revival and was followed into the 1970s with films like Papillon (1973), Midnight Express (1978) and Escape from Alcatraz (1979).
While films about serial killers existed in earlier films such as M (1931) and Peeping Tom (1960), the 1980s had an emphasis on the serial nature of their crimes with a larger number of films focusing on the repetitive nature of some murders. While many of these films were teen-oriented pictures, they also included films like Dressed to Kill (1980) and (1986) and continued into the 2000s with films like Seven (1995), Kiss the Girls (1997), and American Psycho (2000).
In an article by John G. Cawelti titled " Chinatown and Generic Transformations in Recent American Films" (1979), Cawleti noticed a change signaled by films like Chinatown (1974) and The Wild Bunch (1969) noting that older genres were being transformed through cultivation of nostalgia and a critique of the myths cultivated by their respective genres. Todd found that this found its way into crime films of the 1980s with films that could be labeled as post-modern, in which he felt that "genres blur, pastiche prevails, and once-fixed ideals, such as time and meaning, are subverted and destabilized". This would apply to the American crime film which began rejecting linear storytelling and distinctions between right and wrong with works from directors like Brian de Palma with Dressed to Kill and Scarface and works from The Coen Brothers and David Lynch whose had Todd described as having "stylized yet gritty and dryly humorous pictures evoking dream states" with films like Blood Simple (1984) and Blue Velvet (1986) and would continue into the 1990s with films like Wild at Heart (1990). Quentin Tarantino would continue this trend in the 1990s with films where violence and crime is treated lightly such as Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Natural Born Killers (1994) while Lynch and the Coens would continue with Fargo (1996) and Lost Highway (1997). Other directors such as Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet would continue to more traditional crime films Goodfellas, Prince of the City (1980), Q & A (1990), and Casino (1995).
Other trends of the 1990s extended boundaries of crime films, ranging from main characters who were female or Minority groups with films like Thelma and Louise (1991), Swoon (1991), Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Bound (1996) and Dolores Claiborne (1996).
The archetypal gangster film was the Hollywood production Little Caesar (1931). A moral panic followed the release of the early gangster films following Little Caesar, which led to the 1935 Production Code Administration in 1935 ending its first major cycle. As early as 1939, the traditional gangster was already a nostalgic figure as seen in films like The Roaring Twenties (1939). American productions about career criminals became possible through the relaxation of the code in the 1950s and its abolition in 1966. While not the only or first gangster film following the fall of the production code, The Godfather (1972) was the most popular and launched a major revival of the style. The film followed the themes of the genres past while adding new emphasis on the intricate world of the mafia and its scale and seriousness that established new parameters for the genre.
The genre is sometimes used interchangeable with the term "caper". The term was used for the more dramatic films of the 1950s, while in the 1960s, it had stronger elements of romantic comedy with more playful elements as seen in films like The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) and Topkapi (1964).
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