Film Analysis: Public Enemies and The Godfather

Crime Films
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Crime Films
The films Public Enemies and The Godfather detail the orchestration of organized crime expressed through their exploitation of American societal foundations and values like family, friendship, love, and law & order. Although set during and using different time and storylines, they both highlight how the depicted crime coherence was built on the functionality of these premises. This article covers how the crime narratives support and/or undermine the authority and autonomy of these institutions and values.
In the movie Public Enemies, the gangsters use institutions of law and order (prisons and police departments) to show their ineffectiveness in realizing their objectives i.e., to rehabilitate prisoners as they break out to commit another crime. The subsequent scene shows law enforcement agents led by Purvis gunning down a criminal (Floyd) and the final and, in the end, kills Dillinger indicating police’s actuation of fighting crime. Their (police) effectiveness in fighting crime is negated when another officer (Zarkovich) abates Dillinger, who just broke other prisoners out of prison) by sheltering him. In The Godfather, criminal-police collusion is revealed in the hospital scene where a police captain McCluskey works with a Sollozzo led gang. Another scene in the movie where Don Corleone converses with Sollozzo over importation and distribution of heroin reveals that even judges and politicians collude with criminals to provide political and legal shields against the law.
The Godfather brings out the essential depiction of the family institution an...