Top 10 Greatest Gangster Movies

Infernal Affairs (2002)

So good, Scorsese remade it without bettering it. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s two-mole thriller inspired The Departed, but Tony Leung and Andy Lau’s cop-crook tango throws deeper, darker, deadlier shapes than Damon and DiCaprio’s double act.

Lau/Mak’s inspiration was Face/Off, but they ditch those Woo-vian bullet ballets for the psychological subterfuge of a stylish urban-existential thriller.

“There’s no redemption of any kind,” Scorsese reckoned, tapping the tragic tenor of this gripping psychodrama of duplicity.

Killer Scene: Time stands still for the rooftop face-off.

King Of New York (1990)

Dark and nihilistic, King Of New York sears into the memory. Walken’s Frank White is paper rich but spiritually bankrupt, a mob boss back from the Sing Sing grave to rebuild his drugs empire.

Roaming the streets of the Bronx in his stretch-limo hearse, White is New York’s Nosferatu, sucking the life from the city’s veins.

“To this day,” says Walken, “when I go to an airport, all the cops, that’s the movie they know.”

Killer Scene: Hiring subway muggers: “Come by the Plaza Hotel, I got work for you.”

Donnie Brasco (1997)

Pacino ditched the Don to be a goombah, his aging mafioso Lefty Ruggiero too blind to realise the guy he’s tutoring (Johnny Depp) is actually an undercover Fed.

Originally slated for Pacino and Tom Cruise, then shelved when GoodFellas went into production, Donnie Brasco was resurrected by an Englishman, Mike Newell.

The foreign ear explains the loving attention to detail as mafia lingo is deconstructed and a beautiful friendship turns out to be a fugazi.

Killer Scene: Lefty teaching Donnie how to dress, walk and talk like a wisegu

The Killing (1956)

Can’t do the time, don’t do the crime: Kubrick’s racetrack stick-up unfolds in flashbacks, storytelling fractured to nail the fatalistic theme.

“A crime film,” said the director, “is almost like a bullfight; it has a ritual and a pattern, which lays down that the criminal isn’t going to make it.”

Kubrick’s OCD-editing flits from Sterling Hayden’s perfectly planned heist to the aftermath as his cool professionalism’s undone by the gang of squealers and bunglers he’s working with.

Tarantino nicked ideas for Reservoir Dogs, boasting, “This movie is my The Killing.”

Killer Scene: Elisha Cook’s turned worm: “The jerk’s right here.”

Tokyo Drifter (1966)

“Inspired lunacy,” reckoned Time Out. They were right on both counts. Seijun Suzuki’s yakuza run-around is your average gang-warfare flickplot-wise, locked’n’loaded by a crime boss’ struggles to “go straight”.

Twists, though, include a fractured structure, freaky effects, impromptu songs, near-slapstick gags, Pop Art colour coding (our hero is frequently coordinated to correlate with the wallpaper) and a villain who pretty much always arrives on screen sunglasses first.

With logic sidelined, are we talking style over content? Not quite: Suzuki extravagantly, exuberantly amplifies style to crack open and unpick conventional crime-flick content.

Killer Scene: A burly brawl in the “Saloon Western”. Insolent, pointless, well cheeky.

The Big Heat (1953)

Predating Dirty Harry and Popeye Doyle by two decades, Glenn Ford is the tough cop hunting the ruthless mobster who blew up his wife in Fritz Lang’s brutal thriller.

Shockingly violent for its day, this hard-boiled noir paints a bleak universe steeped in the kind of endemic corruption that was being uncovered at the time by the Kefauver Committee.

What unsettles, though, is the way women – beaten, burned, scalded and tortured – become the story’s collateral damage: sacrificial lambs caught in the cross-fire of a vicious new order.

Killer Scene: Lee Marvin’s psychotic gangster Vince Stone throwing hot coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face.

Carlito’s Way (1993)

“What might have been if Carlito’s Way had forged new ground and not gone down smokin’ in the shadow of Scarface?” wondered Rolling Stone magazine about Brian De Palma’s mesmeric gangster flick.

These days you have to wonder what the Stone guys were smoking not to see the neo-noir clout in the tale of mobster Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino) and his struggle to carve out a law-abiding life for himself.

Even without Sean Penn’s turn as a coke-hoovering shyster, this is scintillating stuff, from its dying man’s voiceover to its bone-cracking violence.

Killer Scene: Carlito uses a pool trick to escape a trap.

Casque D’or (1953)

François Truffaut eulogised the “tenderness and violence” in Jacques Becker’s fable of fleeting love doomed by the mob. Manda’s (Serge Reggiani) an ex-con going straight, Marie (Simone Signoret) is a mobster’s moll.

Bad news for him when he claps eyes on her… The action oscillates between verdant riverside scenes viewed through love’s eyes and claustrophobic backstreets where death lurks.

Both feel lived-in, Becker substituting pastiche for the higher goal that captured Truffaut’s heart: truth.

Killer Scene: Manda and Marie wake from a night of love.

Get Carter (1971)

It’s grim up north. It’s even grimmer when East End gangster Jack Carter (Michael Caine) arrives in Newcastle looking for the bloke who killed his brother.

Get Carter injects the Brit-flick gangster movie with knuckle-scraping brutality. Caine loved the realism: “The idea was to show that in real life, each punch grinds some teeth in, and just one thrust of the knife can open someone’s heart.”

Killer Scene: Giving a tubby Tynesider a beating: “You’re a big man, but you’re outta shape.”

White Heat (1949)

The inspiration for this gangster epic’s blisteringly mad and bad lead character Cody Jarret was simple, says writer Ben Roberts: “We synthesised Ma Barker down to having one son instead of four and we put the evil of all four into one man.”

The genius move though was squeezing that malevolence into the pint-sized Jimmy Cagney, here making his first gangster flick since 1939’s
The Roaring Twenties.

As the mom-obsessed psycho bouncing between homicidal wit and shuddering rage, he’s still one of cinema’s most chilling nutjobs.

Killer Scene: Hearing that his mum’s dead, Jarret goes berserk in a prison canteen.

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