![]() With its slow and sad end for an old man hanging on to his last scraps of life, the film depicts a much less noble career in crime than some other examples, which at least offer glory before that precipitous fall. Heists, double-crosses, and arrests multiply as poor, increasingly drunk Eddie tries to negotiate with an ATF agent who expects him to work as an informer, without betraying the confidence of a local bar owner (Peter Boyle) who he doesn’t know has already betrayed him. This Peter Yates film follows the title character, an aging delivery truck driver (played by the great Robert Mitchum), as he attempts to satisfy his criminal bosses while avoiding a pending jail stretch that will almost certainly kill him. So many gangster stories are about low-level hoods and their attempts to navigate their way up the chain of command-to outsmart or outshoot people literally gunning for their job, or their stash. Meanwhile, the series’ violent landscapes track much more than a single gangster’s journey through an unforgiving criminal community, embracing and exploring the hierarchies, the power plays, and the bodies left behind the in the wake of the Yakuza’s march toward dominance-and perhaps self-destruction-at all costs. Inspired by a series of nonfiction magazine articles, Fukasaku aims not only for an artful interpretation of real events, but utilizes narration, newsreel data, and other techniques to give his storytelling a vivid sense of authenticity. It examines the evolution of warrior codes-from sword fights to gunfights-in a post-WWII Hiroshima. Technically, Battles Without Honor and Humanity is not just one film, but five shot by director Kinji Fukasaku in less than two years. These 20 films are proof that crime pays off handsomely onscreen-even if we wouldn’t necessarily want to follow in their footsteps. There are dozens of incredible heist movies, for example, and many others that study the criminal mindset without quite qualifying their characters as “gangsters.” But the films below explore the gangster as both a character and an idea at its fullest, most vivid, and most resounding. Making a list of the best gangster movies is tough, because there are lots of movies that overlap with this category without quite hitting the target. ![]() Where once they were gleefully flaunting society’s rules, some gangsters sought legitimate paths-only to discover that their opportunities for success demanded that they cut a few corners or make deals with unsavory types and some unsavory types upheld a certain code of honor that their supposedly law-abiding counterparts seemed to be challenging. When the Code lost its authority over film productions and stories about gangsters proliferated across the globe, portraits of their behavior, both good and bad, took on even more complex, ambiguous dimensions. That journey has endlessly fascinated viewers as a vicarious thrill, an escapist fantasy, or a truly primitive tale of good and evil. Their role was playing society’s outlaw, and their responsibility was to clash with its values to accomplish their own nefarious goals. But the popularity of their stories almost always owed more to the criminal exploits that led up to that moral reckoning, long after they’d won audiences’ admiration, envy, or even love. During the era of the Production Code, the heyday of the “gangster film,” Hollywood ensured that they were always brought to justice. Since the earliest days of cinema, gangsters have been the characters we’ve both loved and loved to hate.
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