The Godfather to The Departed. The genre that lets American cinema talk about America's actual social structure without flinching.
The gangster film is one of the foundational American genres. From Scarface (1932) through the Coppola-Scorsese-De Palma run of the 1970s and '80s and into the contemporary period (the Coen brothers, David Chase's Sopranos in television, the current Coppola progeny in Sofia and Roman), the form has consistently been where American cinema thinks most-seriously about American capitalism.
Our picks across nine decades.
Martin Scorsese has directed at least seven films that fit the gangster category — Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), The Departed (2006), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Irishman (2019). The throughline is, in part, that the genre lets him examine the social structures he grew up inside — the Italian-American working-class neighbourhoods of New York — at the level of moral and economic seriousness those neighbourhoods deserved and rarely got from Hollywood.
The genre also lets American cinema think about what 'making it' costs in the United States. The protagonist of a gangster film is always trying to climb a social ladder; the film's tragedy is always that the ladder is rotten or that the climb costs more than the destination. This is, structurally, the central American question, and the gangster genre is the form in which American cinema has thought about it most-clearly.