Sean Penn as Mickey Cohen in Gangster Squad (2013). Photo by Wilson Webb/Warner Bros.

Imagine Mickey Cohen. West Coast gangster kingpin, 1940s and ’50s. Gambler. Tax cheat. Mob enforcer. Major racketeer, with hands in prostitution and dope. Volcanic temper. Not the kind of guy you’d want to chat with over the backyard fence.

And nasty as all get out is how Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen in Gangster Squad, opening in January, about Los Angeles police chief William Parker (Nick Nolte) and his elite squad (including Ryan Gosling and Josh Brolin) whose mission is to keep the West Coast mob, as represented by Cohen and his minions, out of the city. It’s a standard plotline—cops vs. hoods—but the release of the movie is just the latest proof that when it comes to screen portrayals of mobsters, real or imagined, Americans enjoy wallowing in all that anti-social behavior. Gangsters are individualists on steroids, and we can’t get enough of them.

“There’s something enticing about the world [gangsters] live in,” says Gangster Squad director Ruben Fleischer. “It’s this forbidden existence; they live life on their own terms. Gangster films make the bad guys the good guys.”

“We like people who have more power, more id, less super ego,” adds Stuart Fischoff, senior editor of the Journal of Media Psychology. “There’s a bit of a gangster in all of us. We can vicariously identify [with them], live out our fantasies.”

Guess what? It didn’t take filmmakers very long to recognize this. As early as 1912, D.W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley showed a fascination with organized crime on New York’s Lower East Side, and allegedly used real street gang members as extras. But it was the Great Depression, and the gangster films of that era, which really jump-started the genre: Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar. James Cagney in The Public Enemy. Paul Muni as Scarface and Humphrey Bogart as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. Snarling nasty guys with their guns, molls, Prohibition-era chicanery, and personal charisma. All of which came out of a specific cultural and political context. Desperate times created desperate characters, and the collapse of the worldwide economic system caused many people to question the viability of the capitalist system—and their place in it.

Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar. Photo courtesy www.doctormacro.com.

“The early gangster films reflected the crisis of individualism in the Depression,” says film critic Dave Kehr of davekehr.com. “If you wanted to rise above, you had to go outside the law. Gangster films parody capitalism, they highlight class distinctions. It’s the anti-American dream.”

“If you go back to the 1930s, America was becoming more urban, there was the Great Depression, and Americans felt the economic system had failed them, so people like John Dillinger became folk heroes,” adds Glen Macnow, co-author of The Ultimate Book of Gangster Movies.

“The film audience was ethnic and urban,” he adds, “so Warner Brothers started the genre by giving the urban immigrants something they liked, with pictures featuring urban ethnic criminals like Scarface and Little Caesar. You had this perfect formula for success.”

Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway star as Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Photo courtesy Warner Bros./Seven Arts/Photofest.

And that’s pretty much how the gangster film played out over the next few decades. The bad boys remained individualists involved in all sorts of rackets, and as the Depression waned, the genre shifted into the bleak moral atmosphere of film noir, where, says Macnow, “the gangsters are less gunmen than businessmen running corrupt businesses.” Every once in a while there’d be a psychological take on the genre—James Cagney’s psychopathic mama’s boy in 1949’s White Heat—or, in the case of 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, a film that startled with its violence and sociological insight.

“You got into the psychology of those people,” says Fischoff of Bonnie and Clyde. He explains how this particular twist on the gangster flick delved with Freudian insight into the roots of the characters’ pathology. The message was that “people weren’t born villains.”

Then came one of those great breaks from the past, as significant in cinematic terms as when dinosaurs seemed to disappear from the planet almost overnight. 1972. The Godfather. On one level, you can think of it as the heartwarming tale of an Army vet who goes into the family business. On another, it’s the tragedy of an honest son who evolves into a ruthless crime boss. All told in a groundbreaking, operatic style that took a trash novel and turned it into cinematic high art.

Marlon Brando in The Godfather (1972). Photo courtesy Paramount Pictures/Photofest.

Director Francis Ford Coppola’s classic film also represented a major shift in the underlying theme of the gangster flick. The game changed from “radical individualism to the pleasure of belonging to a group with special privileges,” says Kehr. “These were the guys excluded from society, constructing their parallel world where they’re safe and empowered.”

“The Godfather was an epic, a family saga, a Shakespearean tragedy,” adds Macnow. “It turned the Mob from a bunch of nasty thugs and turned them into a modern view of Roman royalty. It’s about family and honor and code.”

The Godfather led directly to Goodfellas, in which mobsters are family surrogates for Henry Hill, the lead character. And to The Sopranos, the groundbreaking blend of suburban psychoanalytic angst with the conventions of the mobster story. Even the Al Pacino classic, Scarface, certainly one of the most florid and over-the-top gangster movies ever made, dabbled in family dynamics.

These are our top-rated films documenting true-to-life nasties.

Click image to enlarge infographic.

So what’s left? The gangster film has been around for 100 years, morphing from stylized Depression-era tales of social consciousness to contemporary stories owing their popularity as much to family doings and the analyst’s couch as “going to the mattresses” and contract killings. In some ways, it seems the genre has exhausted itself, and contemporary audiences are more interested in tales of super heroes and alien slime things.

Which in some ways makes Gangster Squad a bit of a throwback, a nostalgia piece about the days when mobsters were predominantly Italian or Jewish—at one time the underdog, immigrant groups of a bygone era. But crime is ever resourceful, and so are our filmmakers. And as American demographics continue to evolve, its criminals will reflect that evolution. Which means that changing demographics have affected what kinds of villains we’re seeing onscreen, because the audience has changed. Now there’s plenty of room for films about Cuban dope dealers (Scarface), African-American drug masterminds (American Gangster), Russian crime families (Eastern Promises), and streets gangs of various ethnicities and races (Boyz n the Hood, Colors).

Can the movies about Nigerian, Albanian, and Chinese crime lords be far behind?

“We have always been fascinated with the guy who chooses to live his life on his own terms,” says Macnow, “We all want to believe we’re rebels, so when we root for the gangster, we get that vicarious thrill.”

Adds Fleischer: “America is a place that embraces liberty, and the right to live life on your own terms. People have looked up to these bad guys who are not following the rules. It’s safer to do that in movie form than reality.”

Mob Love The Saturday Evening Post

It was one of hundreds of murders that occurred that year in San Francisco, but it prompted an army of 3,000 armed vigilantes to seize power, and threatened to topple the state government of California.

San Franciscans had become accustomed to shootings, but King’s death was intolerable. The editor had earned a reputation in the city for his relentless attacks on government corruption and inaction. One of his targets was James Casey whom King had revealed as a former inmate at Sing Sing Penitentiary.

King’s followers expected Casey’s corrupt friends in the city government to secure his release from jail and protect him from prosecution. Consequently, they revived the Vigilance Committee, which had been inactive since 1853. The Post of June 21, 1856, picks up the story:

“On the 16th, Mr. King died, and the whole city became a scene of excitement. The old Vigilance Committee called a meeting, and placards of an inflammatory nature were posted up, calling upon the citizens to take the law in their own hands… On Saturday, the 18th, an organized force of 3,000 citizens, divided into division and companies, marched from the Committee’s rooms and took possession of the jail. They took from thence Casey and a gambler named Cory, the murderer of Colonel Richardson, and carried them to the Committee rooms, where they remained strongly guarded. … Both the prisoners, it is supposed, would be hung.”

This headquarters of the Vigilance Committee, San Francisco, is situated on Sacramento street.

Which they were. The Vigilance Committee held a swift trial of both men and, five days later, hung them before a large crowd.

The Committee did not disband after this execution, but proceeded to arm itself, arrest questionable characters, and try them, completely ignoring the city’s police and courts. Fearing the governor would disband them by force, the Committee members fortified their offices and gathered weapons. Meanwhile, the governor’s political machine, calling itself The Law and Order Party, attempted to obtain weapons from Federal arsenals.

In August, a Committee member named Sterling Hopkins, attempted to arrest Rube Maloney, who was trying to secure Federal rifles from the local armory. David S. Terry, a judge on the state supreme court, and a man loyal to the state administration, was present. According to the Post of August 2,

“Judge Terry… interfered to protect Maloney, and, together with others, formed an armed party to escort Maloney to the [weapons at the] Dupont Street armory. Hopkins collected assistance, and attacked the other party in the streets. A struggle ensued, in the course of which Terry stabbed Hopkins with a Bowie knife.

“The news of the melee was communicated to the Executive Committee, who were in session, and the great bell was sounded for the rally of the Committee’s troops. In fifteen minutes a regiment of infantry, two companies of cavalry, and five companies of artillery were in motion.

“Maloney and his friends had taken refuge in a brick building, well guarded and fortified. This building was invaded on all sides by the Committee’s troops, and the inmates ordered to surrender. They obeyed without hesitation, and Maloney and Terry were… conveyed as prisoners to the headquarters of the Committee.”

The Committee then entered the armory, seized the weapons, and arrested the state troops, but released them on parole.

“On the same  day Hopkins was stabbed, two vessels, freighted with arms for the State authorities were seized in the Bay by armed vessels, belonging to the Committee… [The] commander of one of these vessels, was arrested by the Federal officers, and held in $25,000 on the charge of piracy.”

The governor declared a state of insurrection and ordered a local banker and former artillery officer, William Tecumseh Sherman, to form a state militia. Sherman appealed to citizens to join his force, but gave it up after a week, when only a handful of men showed up.

The Committee tried Judge Terry but, to general surprise, acquitted him. Terry was freed, but resigned his judgeship in the state court.

In July, the Committee was roused to summary action again:

“Messrs. Hetherington & Randall, large real estate operators in San Francisco, doing business together, had a disagreement about pecuniary matters. They met on the 24th of July at the St. Nicholas bar. Hetherington commenced an assault upon Randall, and they fired simultaneously at one another—six shots being exchanged. Randall fell, mortally wounded. The regular police attempted to arrest Hetherington, but they were overpowered by the police of the Vigilance Committee, who hurried Hetherington away to their headquarters. Randall died the next day. Hetherington was tried by the Committee on the 26th, and hung on the 29th.

“Philander Brace, who committed a murder a year or two since, was hung at the same time. About fifteen thousand spectators witnessed the execution, and there were four thousand troops of the Committee present under arms. All the approaches to the place of execution were guarded by cannon.

“One of the most revolting scenes ever witnessed occurred at the execution. Hetherington proceeded to address the crowd, but was continually interrupted by the most disgusting profanity on the part of Brace, which at last proceeded so far, that it was deemed necessary to silence him by tying a handkerchief over his mouth.”

These executions seemed to dispel much of the passion for justice in the city. The Committee conducted an investigation of state corruption and, after publishing its findings, disbanded.

For all the weaponry it seized, the Committee’s action were generally bloodless. It executed only four prisoners and ordered over two dozen out of the state. Altogether, its actions were only a small part of the city’s mayhem: “There were 489 persons killed during the first 10 months of 1856,” the Committee reported. “Six of these were hanged by the Sheriff, and forty-six by the mobs, and the balance were killed by various means by the lawless element.”

In its earliest reporting, the Post was critical of the Vigilance Committee

“The Pacific State seems to be in a far from pacific condition. Two murders a day, we  see it stated, is about the average for the past year. Criminals escape through the meshes of the law, and [lynch law] has to be appealed to—which, even when it does justice, does it unjustly.” [June 21, 1856]

If the state had become lawless and corrupt, the article asked, who was ultimately responsible?

“Evidently the majority of the people. They must be lacking either in the ability or the desire to choose the right kind of judges. In either case they are proving themselves incapable of self-government.”

But later that summer, the Post had become more sympathetic to the vigilantes:

“When ruffians… [grew] audacious in their villainy, no longer… content with pillaging the city treasury, but, trusting to the fact that their cronies occupied high civil and even judicial positions, [they] began to believe that they could knock down, stab and shoot peaceable and orderly citizens with impunity

“The great masses of society, including nearly the whole of the powerful middle classes, began to grow alarmed. And when they found that these gamblers, rowdies, and cut-throats were not trusting in vain in their political friends in high civil and judicial stations—then, as practical and justice-loving men, they felt that the time for resistance had come.”

Seal used for the Vigilance Committee of San Francisco

Was it an insurrection, as the California governor claimed? Or the triumph of a law-abiding public? According to William T. Sherman, it was a pointless and dangerous exercise in mob thinking:

“As they controlled the press, [the Committee] wrote their own history, and the world generally gives them the credit of having purged San Francisco of rowdies and roughs; but their success has given great stimulus to a dangerous principle, that would at any time justify the mob in seizing all the power of government; and who is to say that the Vigilance Committee may not be composed of the worst, instead of the best, elements of a community? Indeed, in San Francisco, as soon as it was demonstrated that the real power had passed from the City Hall to the committee room, the same set of bailiffs, constables, and rowdies that had infested the City Hall were found in the employment of the  “Vigilantes;” and, after three months’ experience, the better class of people became tired of the midnight sessions and left the business and power of the committee in hands of a court.”

The Short, Noisy Life of the Vigilance Committee The Saturday Evening Post