Formal Film Study: Gangster/Crime Films

The three Gangster/Crime films that I chose are Goodfellas(1990), Scarface(1983), and The Godfather(1972).  Crime and murder are major themes in all three of these movies but Scarface differs from the other two in the type of crime.  Considering crime is one of my favorite genres, these were three movies that I needed to see and this project was the perfect opportunity cross some movies off of my must-see list.  Although Scarface doesn't focus around the Italian mafia, it still is based around organized crime.  I have found that there are a lot of similarities in these movies that relate two of them but are not present in the third movie.  However, that third movie is not always the same one.

One of the most noticeable things that brings these films together is the violence.  The violence is not just murder; it is very brutal and violent killing.  Not that I am an expert on organized crime, but I think this violence was necessary to truly portray what happens in real life.  With exception to war movies, there were more deaths in these three movies than I have ever seen.  I think that the deaths in the Godfather and Goodfellas were more meaningful overall because most of those deaths were big characters and I was truly surprised to see them die. For example, when James Caan's character is ambushed when he is on his way to get more revenge on Carlo for abusing his sister. There were many meaningful deaths in Scarface such as when Manny dies or when Tony Montana kills frank but a lot of the deaths in the movie were of character you never really got to know.  Such as the ending scene in the movie when Tony is fighting off of all the men in his house and he kills dozens of meaningless characters.  There is a lot of killing go on, but the deaths are insignificant.  

Even though Scarface seems like the third wheel to the three movies that I chose, there were some instances where The Godfather and Goodfellas were on the outside as well.  For example, in Goodfellas and Scarface the main character's uncontrollable want for more eventually led to there demise.  Although Henry does not die at the end of Goodfellas, he essentially does because he loses everything he once had besides his family.  His greediness with the money from the cocaine business eventually led to him doing the one thing that Jimmy Conway told him never to do; rat on his own guys.  Then he ends up in the witness protection program living like just an average guy when he, at one point, had it all.  Tony Montana on the other hand was little more aggressive and a little less subtle with his goal to," Own the whole world and everything in it".  In his case, you could tell the whole movie that he was out of control and he would eventually pay for his reckless behavior in the end.  Even though cocaine was the thing that ultimately led to both of their downfalls, the two stories are developed in different ways focusing on different aspects of their lives.  With Scarface,  there were a lot of times when the screen would just say 1 month later and you would just kind of infer what happened because the focus was not so much on how he was gaining the power specifically, but more on how he was handling the growing amount of power.  Goodfellas goes into a lot more detail of exactly what kind of crime is going on and how it is being done.  I think this is partially due to the fact that Goodfellas had the main character as the narrator and he was able to explain the ins and outs of their crime.  For example, he explains how the mob would rob trucks and the airports whenever they needed money, then later he explains every detail of how they are moving the cocaine.

All three movies are historically accurate for the most part.  The Godfather and Goodfellas both take place in the late 40s and 50s and that is when gangsters were big.  Scarface takes place in the 80s during the cocaine boom.  Personally, I thought that the way that director Brian De Palma fit Tony Montana right into such an interesting part of American history was just awesome.  Similar to how Forrest Gump is slipped into several major events in America's history, Tony Montana plays a very realistic role of a strong willed immigrant who works his way up through the cocaine business.  I have seen some documentaries on the cocaine boom of the 80s and Scarface is actually pretty accurate in the way that Tony Montana lives with all of the money that he is making.  The Godfather and Goodfellas portray the Italian Mafia and Italian families in general.  Both films stress how important and close knit Italian families are.  Scarface on the other hand doesn't introduce Tony Montana's family until at least an hour into the movie.

There were a lot of really interesting uses of camera angles in all three of these movies.  One of my personal favorites is pretty much every scene with Marlon Brando in the Godfather.  They use a lot of cross lighting, thus creating a lot of shadows on his face.  This lighting did the perfect job in further portraying him as the wise and mysterious "Godfather".  The use of lighting in Scarface is very different.  I found that the most frequent type of lighting was a lot of light on Tony's face and sometimes body, but a dark background.  I think that the director just really wanted Tony to be the center of attention in every scene that he was in.