Shanghai gangster films and the politics of change

In this paper through a very close textual reading I will show the ideological differences between two films based on the life of Shanghai gangster Du Yuesheng (1888, Pudong – 1951, Hong Kong) through close formal and narrative analysis. Du was already a celebrity in his day in the Republican era and is still a con-troversial figure in Greater China. However, there are only two films based on the life of the French Con-cession opium kingpin, the recent Hong Kong/PRC co-production The Last Tycoon (Da Shang Hai, Wong Jing, 2012) and the epic two part Lord of the East China Sea I & II (Shang Hai huang di zhi: Sui yue feng yun & Shang Hai huang di zhi: Xiong ba tia xia, Hong Kong, Poon Man-kit 1993). I show how these films reflect HK's and China's politico-economic changes focusing on the representation of social class and the subject, depiction of internal migration and immigration, and nationalism. The films will be discussed in their relation to changes in the Hong Kong film industry, Chinese and world cinema and the transnational gangster genre, showing how local and global cinemas have affected these films.

Gangsters and Genre

While there are multiple possible definitions of what makes a gangster film, ranging from the simple inclusion of a villainous gangster in a film to those that follow outlaws on the run, the classic definition of a gangster film has revolved around the rise and inevitable fall of an immigrant gangster protagonist, a career criminal with whom audiences are expected to identify. Yet this classic definition has been expanded by evolving theoretical and methodological considerations of film genre. From the outset, gangster films were one of the first film genres to be considered by early genre criticism. Based on structural and formal analyses of the so-called Big Three Hollywood gangster films from the 1930s—namely, Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface—early scholars argued that the gangster genre reflected the ideological tensions that underlay the American Dream of material success. Interpreted as modern tragic figures, gun-toting gangsters in these films were trapped in dangerous cities characterized by anonymity, violence, and death. More recently, genre criticism of gangster films has not only shifted emphasis away from the classic gangster narrative, but also paid far greater attention to institutional intertexts that have highly influenced the production and historical reception of these films. By highlighting variability, contingency, mutability, and flexibility, scholars now speak of genre in terms of specific cycles of production, where each cycle produces different gangster figures to mediate changing societal concerns and public discourses around issues of criminality, class, gender, and race. More contemporary and culturally-specific extensions, adaptations, or articulations of the gangster genre can also be read as thematic explorations of blackness in the following two ways. First, the cycle of ghetto-centric American “hood” films in the 1990s, a cycle that helped to launch hip-hop cinema, points to a continuity between the mythic figure of the gangster and African-American self-representations as “gangsta.” Secondly, while the gangster genre has been defined as a distinctly and explicitly American genre, owing much to critics’ primary emphasis on examining Hollywood films, the genre has also played a significant role in revitalizing and popularizing Hong Kong cinema in the late 1980s and 1990s. Referred to as hak bong dianying (“black gang films”), Cantonese-language Hong Kong gangster films are part of the fabric of local Hong Kong culture, revealing the moral implications of joining “black society” (the Cantonese-language concept for triad) and the “black paths” that members take.

Bound Together

While many recent male-directed lesbian-couplefocused films contain murdering or violent lesbians, the dyke mob thriller Bound stands apart. This study analyzes the film in terms of three issues—the presentation of the female body and lesbian sex, stereotyping, and a caricature of the gangster genre—and shows how Bound avoids selling out to or alienating the mass audience while successfully providing a needed space for polyvalent identification and pleasure.

Waddaya Lookin' At?: Re-reading the Gangster Genre Through "The Sopranos"

"Waddaya Lookin' At?" challenges both current thinking about the genre of the gangster film and simplistic moralizing about "The Sopranos." Establishing the gangster genre as one of five discrete categories of crime entertainment, Nochimson proposes that "The Sopranos" brings to the surface the moral dilemmas and emotional melodrama of the screen mobster that have hitherto been masked because of Production Code restrictions and macho evasions. Far from glamorizing gangsters and/or insulting Italian Americans, the series is founded on a sophisticated exploration of the gangster's charm. It provokes audiences to exchange their unquestioning delight in intense and spontaneous energy and immediate solutions for a mature form of ethics.

Zhang Yimou's Shanghai Triad

Just when it seemed as if every variety of the gangster genre had been played out, Mainland Chinese director Zhang Yimou sprang a pleasant surprise with his film Shanghai Triad (Yao a yao yao dao wai po qiao, 1995). The film is probably the last collaboration between the director and Gong Li, the leading actress in all his previous films(1) and his off-screen partner until the completion of this film. Few gangster movies have been made in recent years that equal the film in its freshness, style, intelligence, sensual and lyrical beauty. However, in his interview with Zhang at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, Nigel Andrews reported that Zhang's latest film had been indifferently received by critics who thought no more of it than "just a gangster film" and a mere waste of the director's talent(2). Though under-appreciated as a gangster film, Shanghai Triad's merit has not been totally ignored....

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

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.