University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Ideological shifts in portrayals of ethnic gangs and gangsters in New York novels and film adaptations

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Ideological shifts in portrayals of ethnic gangs and gangsters in New York novels and film adaptations

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Ideological Shifts in Portrayals of Ethnic Gangs and Gangsters
in New York Novels and Film Adaptations

by Brett Gordon

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUA TE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

May 2015

2
Table of Contents

Abstract 3

Introduction 6

Chapter I: The Jewish-American Gangster in
Modern American Myth: Harry Grey's The Hoods
and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America 27

Chapter II: African-American Street Gangs
and the Prospects of Revolution: Sol Yurick's The Warriors
and Walter Hill's The Warriors 79

Chapter III: “It’s Not Even New York. It’s Chinatown.”
American Tongs and Invasion Anxiety:
Robert Daley’s Year of the Dragon
and Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon 124

Conclusion 178

Notes 194

Bibliography 205

3
Abstract

This project examines portrayals of ethnic urban gangs and organized crime in
popular literature and cinema with a particular regional focus on New York City. I discuss
how three distinctive ethnic groups were identified as threats to American popular
security and how this influenced media representations of those groups. The chapters
trace the causes and genealogies of the participation of these ethnic groups in criminal
gangs, then discusses how the selected novels and their film adaptations treat the
interaction of those figures with America’s then-majority white Anglo-Protestant society.
Ethnic difference is a crucial element in how gang members are popularly conceived,
whether they are associated with organized crime or informal street gangs. It is what
alienates them, to varying degrees, from mainstream culture and represents a barrier
between themselves and conventional access to economic and social mobility.
The fictional gangs in the works covered here represent Jewish, black, and
Chinese ethnicities, and all have historically had distinct relationships to society and
public ideology. The first chapter, on Jewish gangs, focuses on a white ethnic gang that
utilizes crime as a means of improving its economic and social stature. While Jewish
people were stigmatized as criminals in the popular American imagination in the early
decades of the twentieth century, they had greater access to assimilation than non-white
ethnic groups (which ironically led to the later stereotyping of Jewish people as
fundamentally non-confrontational). The second chapter examines how black gangs,
while driven to crime largely because of social and economic disenfranchisement, were
traditionally excluded from such opportunities and faced greater barriers to assimilation
into larger society. Historically, they were, with few exceptions like Stephanie St. Clair
4
(who as a woman gangster was an even rarer figure) in the 1930s, denied entry into
sophisticated organized crime until the 1970s. Chinese gangs in America, the subject of
the third chapter, were placed in the peculiar position of being largely associated with
Chinatown neighborhoods, popularly seen as foreign enclaves located within American
cities. These gangs have been seen as establishing hegemonic dominance over an
alternative community, separated from but still threatening to larger society.
While gangs are often associated with ethnic difference, it is important to
establish that no ethnic group possesses inherent qualities that mark it as more susceptible
to criminal behavior than any other. Nor do all gangs have the same relationship to the
larger culture and ideology. The novels discussed in these chapters were published in
different periods of the twentieth century. Harry Grey’s The Hoods was published in
1953; Sol Yurick’s The Warriors was published in 1965; and Robert Daley’s Year of the
Dragon came out in 1981. Yet the film adaptations of these works; Sergio Leone’s Once
Upon a Time in America (1984), Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979), and Michael
Cimino’s Year of the Dragon (1985); were all released between 1979 and 1985. This
particular moment in American history was characterized, in part, by a public move
towards multicultural awareness, which had emerged in the wake of the Civil Rights
Movement. The multiculturalism debates, broadly speaking, were between those who
demanded widespread recognition and appreciation of diversity in such areas as race
(arguably the most prominently discussed of these issues), class, gender, and language
among the many people who made up American society and the influence those
differences had American culture; and those who believed that focusing on such
differences endangered American identity. The films, released during this time, can be
5
seen as part of a larger cultural push towards engaging with questions regarding ethnic
and minority difference.

6

Introduction

This project examines portrayals of ethnic urban gangs and organized crime in
popular literature and cinema with a particular regional focus on New York City. I discuss
how three distinctive ethnic groups were identified as threats to American popular
security and how this influenced media representations of those groups. The chapters
trace the causes and genealogies of the participation of these ethnic groups in criminal
gangs, then discusses how the selected novels and their film adaptations treat the
interaction of those figures with America’s then-majority white Anglo-Protestant society.
Ethnic difference is a crucial element in how gang members are popularly conceived,
whether they are associated with organized crime or informal street gangs. It is what
alienates them, to varying degrees, from mainstream culture and represents a barrier
between themselves and conventional access to economic and social mobility.
While gangs are often associated with ethnic difference, it is important to
establish that no ethnic group possesses inherent qualities that mark it as more susceptible
to criminal behavior than any other. Nor do all ethnic gangs have the same relationship to
the larger culture and ideology. The fictional gangs in the works covered here represent
Jewish, black, and Chinese ethnicities, and all have historically had distinct relationships
to society and public ideology. The first chapter, on Jewish gangs, focuses on a white
ethnic gang that utilizes crime as a means of improving its economic and social stature.
While Jewish people were stigmatized as criminals in the popular American imagination
in the early decades of the twentieth century, they had greater access to assimilation than
7
non-white ethnic groups (which ironically led to the later stereotyping of Jewish people
as fundamentally non-confrontational). The second chapter examines how black gangs,
while driven to crime largely because of social and economic disenfranchisement, were
traditionally excluded from such opportunities and faced greater barriers to assimilation
into larger society. Historically, they were, with few exceptions like Stephanie St. Clair
(who as a woman gangster was an even rarer figure) in the 1930s, denied entry into
sophisticated organized crime until the 1970s. Chinese gangs in America, the subject of
the third chapter, were placed in the peculiar position of being largely associated with
Chinatown neighborhoods, popularly seen as foreign enclaves located within American
cities. These gangs have been seen as establishing hegemonic dominance over an
alternative community, separated from but still threatening to larger society.
The novels discussed in these chapters were published in different periods of the
twentieth century. Harry Grey’s The Hoods was published in 1953; Sol Yurick’s The
Warriors was published in 1965; and Robert Daley’s Year of the Dragon came out in
1981. Yet the film adaptations of these works; Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in
America (1984), Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979), and Michael Cimino’s Year of the
Dragon (1985); were all released between 1979 and 1985. This particular moment in
American history was characterized, in part, by a public move towards multicultural
awareness, which had emerged in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. The
multiculturalism debates, broadly speaking, were between those who demanded
widespread recognition and appreciation of diversity in such areas as race (arguably the
most prominently discussed of these issues), class, gender, and language among the many
people who made up American society and the influence those differences had American
8
culture; and those who believed that focusing on such differences endangered American
identity. Ethnic Studies programs had been introduced into the university system in the
1960s and 1970s and the discussion of multiculturalism had developed and transitioned
into the public sphere by the late 1970s and 1980s, as Latino and Asian immigration
increased and gay rights became a more visible issue.
1
The films, released during this
time, can be seen as part of a larger cultural push towards engaging with questions
regarding ethnic and minority difference.
Popular cultural productions, such as novels or films, can participate in the
development of public ideology and can contribute to the cultural and ideological
regulations of changing societies and their demographics. The novels and films under
discussion in this project engage with these questions of ethnic or minority difference,
though not always in the same ways. Ultimately, it must be concluded that popular
cultural work, such as film, is neither inherently normalizing nor radicalizing when it
comes to ideology, but can be adapted to both purposes. It can reaffirm generally held
perceptions, seek to challenge them, or even perform both functions at the same time.
Popular culture has a massive influence on the public consciousness. It has
become so pervasive in contemporary American society that one might scarcely
recognize when one is confronted with it or its influence. As Nachbar and Lause, affirm
“we tend to overlook the omnipresence of popular culture precisely because it is such a
familiar part of our everyday environment.”
2
It is designed to appeal to us, to engage us,
without our needing to make any effort in pursuing it. As Nachbar and Lause suggest,
producers of popular culture will generally “mold their products to reflect audience
beliefs and values”
3
which gradually change over time. Yet those same producers are not
9
merely interested in reflecting the public’s desires or anxieties; they also wish to “instill
values and beliefs likely to ensure their success.”
4

A significant element of this project involves the consideration of the adaptation
of novels into films. There is no question that the reputations of each of the novels
discussed here have been eclipsed by their subsequent adaptations. In fact, it could be
argued that the films are the prime reason that these novels have remained in print. Yet,
these novels also offer useful commentary on how these ethnic gangs interact with
popular ideology. The films present variations on those initial perspectives, sometimes in
ways that clash dramatically with the source material, sometimes in ways that expand on
and elaborate the themes of the original. It is well-established that film adaptations never
completely recreate the original work; the question of the importance of fidelity is
considered by the most prominent adaptation theorists to be the most significant obstacle
to the development of that particular school of theory.
5
The changes that inevitably
accompany a narrative’s transition from book to film can be motivated by any number of
reasons; one of the chief among these is the desire to “correct” the ideology of an original
text to one more attuned to either a particular filmmaker’s personal beliefs or to the
public taste. As Robert Stam suggests: “The question becomes whether an adaptation
pushes the novel to the ‘right,’ by naturalizing and justifying social hierarchies based on
class, race, sexuality, gender, region and national belonging, or to the ‘left’ by
interrogating or leveling hierarchies in an egalitarian manner.”
6

There are also cases where moves to both the ‘right’ and ‘left’ may be seen on
different issues within the same adaptation. A film may demonstrate a leftist approach to
class issues, while retaining a rightist perspective towards race or gender.
7
Furthermore, a
10
film adaptation may endeavor to “correct” a problematic aspect of an original text. Ted
Kotcheff’s First Blood (1982), for instance, softens the protagonist John Rambo in David
Morrell’s 1972 novel from a psychotic Vietnam veteran whose PTSD has led him to
becoming a mass murderer of innocents into a sympathetic and heroic figure haunted by
the lack of appreciation his country showed him after the war; the new version of the
character was so appealing to Reagan-era America that it inspired an enormously popular
cinematic franchise.
8
In the present project, one may read “corrections” into how Walter
Hill’s adaptation of Sol Yurick’s The Warriors alters the original’s pessimistic inquiry into
the plight of the young black underclass into a triumphant expression of multi-racial
solidarity. By contrast, Michael Cimino’s filming of Robert Daley’s Year of the Dragon
intensifies the original’s xenophobic perspective towards Asian culture and amplifies it,
by conflating it with America’s Vietnam War anxieties. Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a
Time in America critiques Harry Grey’s project in The Hoods of re-asserting Jewish
masculinity in the face of cultural stereotypes and transforms the narrative into a lament
for the loss of key qualities of cultural identity due to assimilation. Each of these moves
alters the source’s engagement with the issue of ethnic difference and raises further
questions about the relationship between ethnic gangs and American society.
Gangs have been a fixture in American popular culture for over a century.
Representations of violence-seeking groups of (usually) men appear in scores of films,
novels, and other cultural works and used for various functions. At times, the gang may
be envisioned as a threat to America’s moral fabric and ideology, a destructive force to
arouse fear in the hearts and minds of average citizens. In other contexts, the gang may
represent an adventurous and subversive challenge to the indignities of mundane life.
11
The fact remains, though, that they have remained a charismatic mainstay in American
popular culture, especially since the years of the Great Depression. Dime and pulp novels
had delved into the topic of criminal groups prior to that era. It is in film, though, that the
gangster’s legacy as a popular figure in American culture has been most firmly
established. The first gangster film is considered to be D.W. Griffith’s silent short film
The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), which featured the charismatic gangster character
Snapper Kid whose criminal involvement sparks a gang war. This was soon followed by
Raoul Walsh’s Regeneration (1915), which was the first feature length gangster film. The
popular actor Lon Chaney, a fixture of classic horror films like The Hunchback of Notre
Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), starred in a number of silent
gangster films, including The Penalty (1920) and The Unholy Three (1925).
9
Josef V on
Sternberg’s Underworld (1927) was an enormous popular success and even earned Ben
Hecht an Academy Award for his original story.
10

Jonathan Mundy has observed that most of the silent gangster films tended to
reaffirm white middle class values, by “demoniz(ing) the ethnic underclass.”
11

The classic era of the gangster film, though, would emerge in the early 1930s, towards
the end of Prohibition and in the immediate wake of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and
the subsequent Great Depression. Films like William Wellman’s The Public Enemy
(1931), Mervyn Leroy’s Little Caesar (1931), and Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932)
followed the struggles of “ethnic urban rebels”
12
as they clashed with rivals in other
gangs and the police. The typical narrative followed the protagonist’s violent rise from
humble beginnings up the ladder of criminality to a position of power, then traced his
quick and equally violent downfall. These films, despite their occasional gestures towards
12
conventional morality, have often been viewed as forms of protest against a corrupt and
restrictive economic and social order that, amid the upheaval of the Depression, appeared
to be faltering. As Mundy suggests, the ethnic gangster “directly confronted the key
moral and economic precepts associated with an ailing nativist order.”
13
Their anti-heroic
protagonists can be viewed as representing a challenge to the view that optimistically
contended that the American Dream of economic stability could be achieved through hard
work and playing by the rules of society. This perspective, famously espoused by Robert
Warshow in his classic essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” has had considerable
influence over the decades. For Warshow, the gangster “speaks for us, expressing that
part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life,
which rejects ‘Americanism’ itself.”
14
As Mundy contends, though, the popularity of
these films only further exacerbated the moral panic in some circles that corrupt
immigrants were threatening the fabric of Anglo-Protestant culture; these fears were
factors in the implementation of the Hays Code, which limited any film content that was
considered to cross the boundaries of moral decency.
15

The ethnicity of the classic movie gangster tended towards white ethnic types, of
generally either an Irish-American or Italian-American identification, though the 1930s
non-Hollywood subgenre known as “race films” did feature black gangster anti-heroes
(as I discuss in Chapter 2). Black and Latino gangster protagonists would become more
familiar in the 1970s and 80s, with films like Larry Cohen’s blaxploitation drama Black
Caesar (1973), a remake of Little Caesar, and Brian DePalma’s Scarface (1983), which
reimagined the Italian-American hoodlum of Howard Hawks’ original as a Cuban refugee
in Miami. In the decades since, black and Latino gangster protagonists have become
13
common in films, such as Edward James Olmos’ American Me (1992) and Ridley Scott’s
American Gangster (2007) (though, as I discuss in my third chapter, Asian-American
gangster antiheroes have proven hard to find on American screens).
The most iconic treatment of street gangs in American popular culture is
undoubtedly West Side Story. Based on Romeo and Juliet, the story originated as a 1957
Broadway musical with music by Leonard Bernstein, a libretto by Stephen Sondheim,
and choreography by Jerome Robbins, but its most celebrated form is the in the 1961 film
treatment co-directed by Robert Wise and Robbins. The film version was a major box
office success and won ten Academy Awards, including the one for Best Picture. The
story traces the doomed romance in Manhattan’s Lincoln Square between Tony, a former
member of the Caucasian Jets gang, and Maria, whose brother Bernardo leads the Sharks
gang, the Puerto Rican enemies of the Jets. Tony and Maria meet at a dance and fall in
love. Eventually, Tony arrives at a fight between the Jets and Sharks with the intent of
stopping it, but kills Bernardo in a fit of anger over the slaying of his friend Riff. Tony is
ultimately shot dead by Maria’s other suitor and Sharks member, Chino, and dies in her
arms. West Side Story does manage to address certain concerns regarding immigration
and ethnicity, including the famed song, “America,” in which the Puerto Rican-born
character Anita sings in celebration of her new home in the United States, while
Bernardo, her boyfriend, cynically criticizes it as a land of prejudice and crime. The
film’s popularity, though, has most likely had less to do with the elements of social
commentary, than it has with the songs, choreography, colorful (and decidedly
unrealistic) portrayal of New York City, and the sentimental allure of its central love
story. It is intended, despite the tragic ending, as an entertainment.
14
The reason that New York City was selected as the regional focus of this project is
its central positioning (along with Chicago) in the history of American gangs and
organized crime, and the fictional works that have reproduced those topics. Not so
coincidentally, New York City has also been the American city most associated with
patterns of immigration, as scores of European families sailed there in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries in search of tolerance and financial opportunity. Many
immigrants would settle in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As Herbert Asbury’s seminal
The Gangs of New York (1928) established, criminal gang activity has been firmly
entrenched in New York since the 1820s when ethnic groups of mostly, but not
exclusively, men began to turn to communal acts of crime. Gangs, of some sorts, had
been observed in New York for a few decades prior and consisted largely of people of
English and German descent, but those groups rarely resorted to crime and were largely
social groups for young men.
16
The emergence of these groups coincided with a period of
a high rate of immigration. The earliest “serious” New York gangs were Irish in ethnic
character, followed eventually by Italian and Jewish groups, especially during and after
the 1880s.
17
The Irish-American Forty Thieves are generally considered “the first
important and decisively dangerous gang of the quarter [century].”
18
Some of these gangs
grew to considerable size, such as the Five Points Gang, who numbered 1,500 members
in the early years of the twentieth century.
19
From the middle of the nineteenth century to
World War I, gangs were heavily involved in New York political life, hiring themselves
out as muscle to Tammany Hall to be used to influence the political landscape. Until
WWI, gangs were mostly “errand boys” for the politicians; afterwards, certain gangs,
particularly Jewish and Italian ones, began to work for their own leverage in the political
15
scene and expanded the scope and complexity of their operations into extortion,
racketeering, gambling, and prostitution.
20
From there organized crime began to expand
in New York City (though informal street gangs have always maintained a presence),
both in terms of geography and the races involved.
It is useful to consider the definitios of “organized crime.” These can vary
considerably, as does that of street gangs. Early attempts to define organized crime by
official government sources were compromised by an ethnic focus on Italian-Americans.
In 1969, Donald Cressey, who was associated with the Task Force on Organized Crime,
proposed the once influential view that “if one understands the Cosa Nostra, he
understands organized crime in the United States.”
21
Cressey’s view, which was subjected
to criticism not long after, suggested that only a particular ethnicity was oriented towards
organized crime and that the Mafia was the only manifestation of the phenomenon.
Howard Abadinsky, in his textbook Organized Crime (1985), established one of the more
reliable and foundational definitions. For Abadinsky, a criminal group must satisfy eight
key criteria in order to qualify as an organized crime apparatus; it must be non-
ideological (a crucial factor in distinguishing them from terrorist groups), hierarchical,
limited or exclusive in membership, perpetuitous, organized through specialization or
division of labor, monopolistic, and governed by rules and regulations.
22
Jay Albanese, in
1996, contrasted over a dozen different definitions from the previous three decades,
including Abadinsky’s, and united them into the following: “Organized crime is a
continuing criminal enterprise that rationally works to profit from illicit activities that are
often in great public demand. Its continuing existence is maintained through the use of
force, threats, monopoly control and/or the corruption of public officials.”
23
As
16
Abadinsky, Albanese, and most other scholars on the topic acknowledge, however,
certain groups that appear to fit the label of organized crime, may not ultimately satisfy
all of the criteria. The amount of variability among criminal groups is surprisingly wide.
The relationship between organized crime groups and youth (or street) gangs is
also a subject of some focus in this project, since it pertains in varying degrees to each of
the works covered. A loosely organized street gang is actually the focus of the second
chapter. The distinction between street gangs and organized crime can be ambiguous,
because groups of the former category will occasionally transition into the latter category
(as is the case with the fictional gang in the first chapter), and there are even times when
there is virtually no difference between groups of either category. This distinction will be
covered in more detail in my second chapter. The third chapter which investigates some
portrayals of Chinese-American tongs is partly concerned with the relationship between
those groups and the loosely affiliated street gangs they employ to handle tasks involving
violence and intimidation.
The wide degree of variance in gang terminology means that there are a vast
number of gangland narratives, most of which carry some kind of ideological agenda.
The particular texts selected for this project were chosen both because they addressed the
topic of ethnic gangs in New York from some particularly nuanced perspective, and
because their initial ideological vision was deemed simultaneously worthy of adaptation,
but in need of adjustment. The unique backgrounds of each of the authors: alleged ex-
gangster, Harry Grey; social worker and Marxist activist, Sol Yurick; and ex-Deputy
Police Commissioner, Robert Daley; informs their attitudes towards crime and gangs. For
example, Daley views the gang of his novel as a wholly negative influence on society;
17
while there is some recognition of the social factors that lead to the gang’s formation,
those elements are marginalized and the lead gangster figure is an unrelieved villain. The
first two authors are far more sympathetic to their characters and consistently reaffirm the
institutional causes for their heroes’ descents into crime and gang life. The peculiar
tensions between the original written work and the subsequent cinematic adaptation
makes them ripe for investigation.
The first chapter, “The Jewish-American Gangster in Modern American Myth:
Harry Grey's The Hoods and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America,” addresses
Jewish-American gangs as featured in Harry Grey’s 1953 novel The Hoods and Sergio
Leone’s 1984 film adaptation. Among the most prominent themes in these works are the
considerations of Jewish masculinity, American Jewish identity’s relationship to the
Jewish-American criminal tradition, and the proximity of organized crime to the halls of
American law and officialdom. As white ethnic figures, Jewish criminals had easier
access to the possibilities of developing close relationships to agents of state power and to
assimilation into greater society. While Jewish-American criminals are a fundamental
part of the history of American organized crime, they have been largely marginalized in
the American public consciousness for reasons that I examine in the chapter. One of the
consequences of this has been the stereotyping of Jewish men as weak and docile. Both
of these works concern the fortunes of a small group of Jewish hoodlums from the Lower
East Side of Manhattan during the 1910s to the 1930s, as they kill, steal, and intimidate
their way from impoverished street gang members to feared soldiers in a complex and
highly organized criminal ring. Lead characters Noodles and Max remain best friends
from youth to adulthood. When Max develops a delusional sense of personal
18
invulnerability, Noodles betrays him to the police, ultimately resulting in the deaths of his
friends and comrades. Leone’s work continues the story some thirty-five years into the
future and suggests that Max has faked in his own death as part of a long-in-the-making
betrayal of his old friend. Both men have abandoned their Jewish identities to complete
the process of assimilation that began when their criminal careers brought them closer to
“respectability.”
The Hoods, as a work unto itself, has largely been swept into the margins of
Jewish-American literature; what interest it yet stimulates is largely owed to its status as
the source text for Leone’s magnum opus. Once Upon a Time in America is the most
comprehensive and ambitious cinematic attempt to engage with the subject of Jewish
crime and the complexities of its relationship to Jewish identity. Yet Grey’s work is still
worthy of investigation, both because of his own attempts to write against the Jewish
stereotypes and the ways in which Leone uses that as a springboard into a more nuanced
and critical view of the relationship between crime, identity, and assimilation. Leone’s
film is in a dialogue with the earlier work’s treatment of masculinity and cultural identity.
As opposed to the film, The Hoods actually presents a more sustained and detailed
engagement with both Jewish interaction with other ethnic criminal traditions and the
secret complicity between gangsters and American ideological institutions. The cynical
philosophy espoused by Grey’s protagonist Noodles, that everyone is “illegit” and ripe
for corruption, is a summing up of the general ethos of many organized crime narratives.
In the novel, Noodles pointedly and repeatedly voices his contempt for American values
and ideals, all of which merely underscore the hypocrisy of the system. In Grey’s world,
criminal behavior was the only path out of impoverishment and humility.
19
Another of Grey’s missions in The Hoods is the challenging of the stereotype of
Jewish male weakness. Grey’s novel deliberately emphasizes the swaggering
masculinities of his Jewish lead characters Noodles and Max, as well as their partners-in-
crime. Sergio Leone’s film adaptation operates partly as a critique of Grey’s focus on
Jewish masculinity. While Grey celebrated the expressions of violence and sexual
dynamism of his characters, Leone focused on the unpleasantness of those patterns of
behavior. Leone, who in his popular Westerns sought to subvert American generic
cliches, also intends a comment on traditional gangster films’ emphasis on violence
against women. When James Cagney roughed up women in a film like Public Enemy, it
was generally treated as a part of his charismatic package; when Leone’s hoods abuse
women, it is intended to drive the viewer’s sympathies away from them.
While Grey’s characters are ambivalent about the institutions of family, culture,
and religion, this enables them to easily leave the Lower East Side behind to intermingle
with agents of state power and with other ethnic groups. They leave their old lives
behind. Leone confronts and complicates how these attitudes relate to Jewish ethnicity
and crime. Leone’s addition of the sequences where Max and Noodles resurface decades
later suggests that their conscious abandonment of their Jewish origins returns to haunt
them in the future. They have completed their assimilation by hiding under Gentile
identities; the ease with which they do so poses questions about the true nature of Jewish
identity. Leone underscores this by casting non-Jewish actors in the lead roles; this is an
ironic reversal of the Hollywood gangster tradition of Jewish actors playing gangsters of
other ethnicities. Ideologically, Leone’s film complicated the cinematic legacy of Jewish
gangsters in a manner beyond the scope of any previous Hollywood treatments.
20
The second chapter, “African-American Street Gangs and the Prospects of
Revolution: Sol Yurick's The Warriors and Walter Hill's The Warriors,” focuses on an
ethnic gang that is largely seen as barred from assimilation into larger society or to the
more organized and sophisticated manifestations of crime that enable interaction with
“respectable” ideological institutions. Street gangs have been racialized in different ways
than organized crime outfits, which are generally associated with white ethnic gangsters
in the popular imagination. Street gang members are generally portrayed as black or
Latino, representations that often associate the particular racial makeup of such gangs
with the fact that they are disorganized and informal. Since one of the functions of gangs,
though, is to present a rebellious and subversive challenge to dominant culture, there has
been some speculation about the potential for them to propel revolutionary agendas. This
chapter concerns an adaptation situation in which a bleak and highly political novel was
“corrected” into a fast-paced, largely apolitical action film. In the case of The Warriors,
the change was very successful in luring an audience that had mostly stayed away from
the original. Sol Yurick’s novel The Warriors, which directly addresses the possibility of
gang revolution, remains in print mostly because of the popularity of its adaptation; yet,
the novel does present a nuanced (though potentially problematic) vision of the lives of
alienated ethnic youth. The fact that this narrative was able to be appropriated into a film
that thirty-five years later remains one of the definitive films about street gangs in
American popular culture makes the process of transition particularly crucial.
Both versions of The Warriors, a modernized take on Xenophon’s epic Anabasis,
concern the efforts of a street gang to journey from the site of a peace summit-turned-riot
in the Bronx all the way to their home territory of Coney Island. The path home is lined
21
with potential enemies, from the police to the scores of rival gangs that have staked out
neighborhoods throughout the city. The gangs endure a series of tense confrontations
along the way, but some (though not all) of the members return safely. In the transition
from page to screen, certain major changes were made. Sol Yurick’s novel, written during
the heights of the Civil Rights and the Black Power movements, has a heavy social and
political slant and is designed as an examination of the plight of the young black male
underclass. For Yurick, it was an attempt to comprehend why disenfranchised young
black men did not fight back against the racist social system that had marginalized and
emasculated them. Yurick risks reaffirming stereotypes by making his characters seem
inarticulate and, in his own words, “primitive.” Visionary gang leader Ismael Rivera
seeks to use the summit to rally all the youth gangs of the city into an army to fight
external forces. Yet, the hopes for organization and revolution fail, because the gang
members can not look past their petty rivalries and short-sighted desires for instant
gratification; they cannot override the societal conditioning that largely keeps them down.
They are compromised by the defensiveness of their masculinity; they have become so
sensitive that they waste their energies responding to minor slights; the idea that there are
larger ideological threats to their manhood is beyond them.The novel critiques the gang
members themselves, but reserves its most pointed criticism for the oppressive
ideological forces that control them.
The film version, created fourteen years later in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate
era characterized by economic recession and political malaise, sidestepped the
revolutionary concerns of the original and changed the racial identification of the gang
from black to multi-racial (due to a studio mandate that was against the wishes of director
22
Walter Hill). This actually serves the purpose of implying a more subtly optimistic racial
vision, in which the different ethnic groups work together to survive and achieve victory.
Hill is less interested in conveying the misery of the young underclasses or the societal
reasons for their marginalization, than he is in presenting a vision of triumphant
masculinity. Hill’s film struck a nerve with young audiences and was one of the action
films that launched a subsequent wave of films that celebrated multi-ethnic expressions
of masculinity, such as Hill’s own 48 Hrs. (1982) and Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon
(1987).
In the third chapter, “’It’s not even New York. It’s Chinatown.’ American Tongs
and Invasion Anxiety: Robert Daley’s Year of the Dragon and Michael Cimino’s Year of
the Dragon,” I consider a situation where popular works reiterate popular stereotypes by
addressing the portrayal of Chinese gangsters in Robert Daley’s novel Year of the Dragon
(1981), and the film adaptation by Michael Cimino (1985). Year of the Dragon is still the
most visible and prominent treatment of Chinese organized crime in the United States.
Both versions treat the story of a white veteran police officer who, upon being newly
appointed to leadership of the precinct in Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown, finds himself
confronted with the threat of the tongs, Chinese merchant associations that often engage
in complicated criminal activities and can serve as foreign offshoots of the famed triads,
the secret societies that dominate organized crime in China itself.
I consider the history of Orientalist perspectives towards the Far East (adjusted
from Edward Said’s usage of the term to describe Western views towards the Middle
East) and discuss how those have been perpetuated in mass culture. I reference the older
notion of the “yellow peril” and the invasion anxieties and fear of Eastern domination
23
associated with that concept. In keeping with this tradition, Year of the Dragon conveys a
generally xenophobic attitude towards the presence of the Chinese in New York. The
story, in both versions, becomes a modern American twist on the story of the white
defender who seeks to protect the Western lands; it is akin to the struggle portrayed in
Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels where a Scotland Yard detective fights desperately to
fend off the alien machinations of a dreaded Chinese master criminal. The villains in Year
of The Dragon wish to expand criminal operations outside of Chinatown, throughout the
city and beyond. As in the works of the previous chapters, the ideological institutions
that govern American society are complicit to a degree in the development of this gang’s
criminal activities. In this case, City Hall and the NYPD allow the tongs to control
Chinatown, since they donate generously to politicians and generally seem interested in
preying only upon their own people. The inability to understand Chinese culture makes
the authorities even more desirous of ignoring the problem.
Asian America has not been afforded an iconic gangster anti-hero, in contrast to
most other ethnicities in America. Year of the Dragon, despite being the most ambitious
treatment of Chinese gangsters in America, similarly does not allow for such a possibility.
The film’s antagonist’s rise to criminal power actually follows the classic gangster
tradition; he comes to New York as a poor immigrant, then forces his way to the top.
However, the viewer is only permitted to view this narrative through the perspective of
white American law enforcement. A level of distance is maintained, and the villain is
always presented as alien in nature.
In the film, the xenophobic elements of Robert Daley’s original book are
highlighted and exaggerated. Racist attitudes towards Asians were at a height in 1980s
24
America, due to anxieties about trade relations and fears that Japan’s gains in finance
were indicative of a looming inclination to economically dominate America.
Furthermore, Americans still suffered from the traumatic effects of the Vietnam War.
Cimino’s film is an attempt to conflate the East-West tensions apparent in the novel and
conflate them with America’s troubled memories of Vietnam. The hero considers the
Chinese and Vietnamese to be virtually identical and he continually reiterates his racial
contempt for Asians. Unlike his predecessor, Arthur Powers, Cimino’s Stanley White
does not really attempt to understand his enemy His quest to defeat the tongs is a
restaging in his mind of the war; he sees this mission as way of avenging and correcting
America’s loss.
Cimino does add a critical perspective towards the hero, as other characters
occasionally upbraid him for his racist tendencies. The narrative is intended to reflect the
process of his transformation from a figure who rejects Asians to one who accepts and,
possibly, even respects them. However, Cimino undercuts his own project by overrelying
on Orientalist stereotypes in the depictions of Chinese people, and by ultimately
validating the protagonist’s suspicions about the Chinese. The film’s few positively
depicted Asian characters serve only to underscore the film’s Orientalist philosophy. Of
particular interest is the Chinese-American love interest, Tracy Tzu, whose body becomes
a battleground between the white hero and the Chinese villain, and serves as a metaphor
for their struggle for dominance over the geographical territory of the neighborhood. In
spite of anti-Asian cinematic trends, the film was a popular failure. The racist elements
may have been too overt and the criticism directed at the hero too direct. In fact, these
25
elements likely proved too discomforting for viewers whose ideological attitudes towards
Asians may have veered dangerously close to Stanley White’s.
Gangs can fulfill many functions in popular culture. Each individual work
articulates a particular attitude about the gang’s relationship to the larger sphere of New
York City life. The tensions between the original books and the filmic treatment
demonstrate the ideological work implicit in both gangland narratives and adaptation, in
general. None of these works follows completely in the tradition of the classic gangster
narrative. The first book and film combination treated is also the one that most emulates
classic tropes. Unsurprisingly, these are the narratives that focus on white ethnic
gangsters; non-white gangsters are traditionally not afforded the same narrative. Harry
Grey’s The Hoods and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, for the way they
interact with the gangster genre and with one another, present a useful entry point into
this conversation.

26

27

Chapter I

The Jewish-American Gangster in Modern American Myth: Harry
Grey's The Hoods and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America

In the first half of the twentieth century, the myth of the gangster as a populist
rebel hero began to take hold of the American consciousness. This view held that the
American gangster figure stood in opposition to authority and was a modern continuation
of the idealized figure of the rugged frontiersman who had challenged nature and enabled
the growth of a mighty nation. This mythic individual personified the freedom and
individualism that are often held to be the foundations of what is sometimes dubbed “the
American spirit.” The particular romantic attachment to the gangster myth has him as a
keeper of the individualist flame in the face of a dominant ideological system which, as it
progressed into modernity, came to seem more and more like a monolithic and limiting
influence on the treasured potential for personal agency.
The “myth and symbol” school of American studies, generally traced back to
Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950),
contended that Americans have imposed a level of moral significance onto such
phenomenon as the journey westward into the frontier and the stature of the “rugged
individualists” who undertook such trials. The American fixation on such narratives, then,
has carried forward into the future and formed the foundation of the American identity.
These notions of Smith and his adherents actually resemble a form of American
Exceptionalism, the notion that America is unique among the nations of the world,
untethered to Old World traditions and possessed of a fundamental adherence to codes of
equality, freedom, and individualism.
28
Daniel Bell, while not generally viewed as an official “member” of this school,
did apply a similar perspective to the role of the gangster in the modern city in his much-
cited essay “Crime as an American Way of Life.” (1953) He proposed that crime, and
organized crime in particular, represents a “queer form of social mobility” in the United
States.
24
He suggests that it represents a distorted reflection of mainstream values, since
the end goal of financial and social stability is constant through all segments of American
life. Bell, whose position is that the American hero has always been “the man with the
gun”
25
, aligns the urban gangster figure with the romantic tradition of the individualistic
frontiersman as one who succeeds based on “personal merit” and whose conflict with the
law and society represents “the morality par excellence: the gangster with whom rides
our own illicit desires, and the prosecutor, representing final judgement and the force of
the law.”
26
Yet, Bell tends to over-emphasize the “American-ness” of this phenomenon.
He ignores the fact that crime has served a similar function historically across the
international landscape and that criminal figures, both historical and fictional, have
achieved iconic status for millennia. His focus on the popular allure of the criminal as a
figure who represents a desire for independence may hold credence if one does not over-
emphasize a nationalistic approach. One only has to look at non-American figures like
Robin Hood, Jack Sheppard, or Salvatore Giuliano to see the problems with Bell's limited
scope.
Appreciations of criminals in modern society have placed the gangster in an
unusual position of being both admired and condemned. The gangster may be a predator,
but he is often popularly seen embodying a particular striving for individual agency. In
this way, the public can occupy a moral highground in regard to the sordid activities of
29
the gangster, while simultaneously relishing the anti-authoritarian stance of this enemy of
conformity. This signifies a fundamental level of double consciousness in regard to
popular perspectives regarding the gangster. For example, Hays Office censors forced
Howard Hawks to give his classic gangster film, Scarface (1932), the subtitle The Shame
of the Nation, as well as introductory text that begins: “This picture is an indictment of
gang rule in America and of the callous indifference of the government to this constantly
increasing menace to our safety and our liberty....” and ends with challenges to the
government and the public to take action.
27
A later interlude during the film (in a scene
not filmed by Hawks) features an argument in a newspaper publishing office, where the
publisher is accused of glorifying gangsters by featuring them on the front page. The
publisher's response is that he is raising awareness and that ignoring the problem only
makes it worse. These parts of the film seemingly promote a condemnatory agenda,
suggesting that gangs are a pox on society and that those elements who do not actively
fight them are a part of the problem. Indeed, only socially-conscious journalists (and the
Hays Office) appear willing to combat the problem. Yet, these elements do not appear to
sincerely jibe with the film's celebration of the violent and humorous antics of Tony
“Scarface” Camonte as he kills his way up the criminal ladder. Camonte is a charismatic
creation, a good deal more fun than the more respectable characters. The condemnatory
moments serve as the filmmakers' wink or secret handshake to the audience: “we'll
pretend to loathe these guys, if you will!”
In order for the gangster myth to have enduring power, it would seem necessary
for the gangster figure to exist outside of and in opposition to the law's sphere of
influence. Yet, even a cursory glance at histories of organized crime in America reveal
30
that these two seeming enemies have commingled quite closely since at least the middle
of the nineteenth century. Herbert Absury's The Gangs of New York (1928), while largely
reliant on urban folklore, lays out how the political machinery of that city relied on the
strongarm tactics of gangs like the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits to coerce voters
and intimidate rivals since before the American Civil War. Employing the dangerous
skills of underworld agents could ensure desired political results in a quicker and more
convenient manner than would have been possible otherwise. For a twentieth-century
example, one could cite Franklin Delano Roosevelt's reliance on organized crime figures
to assist in allaying potentially-debilitating harbor strikes during the Second World War.
28

Thus, the facts surrounding the gangster's role in society do not generally support the
notion that he and the halls of official power stand on opposite sides of a social and
economic conflict. In the United States, both entities would have capitalistic aims.
Indeed, the central irony of many, if not most, gangland narratives from Little
Caesar (1931) to The Godfather (1972) is that as the protagonists delve deeper and
advance further into the criminal lifestyle, they simultaneously draw nearer in proximity
to the representatives of the prevailing institutions of state and industry. Their skills in
violence, racketeering, and the like make them particularly attractive to otherwise
respectable citizens who admire the results of their methods of “cheating,” yet don’t want
to risk the tarnishing of their own reputations.
Sociologist Robert K. Merton in his seminal essay “Social Structure and Anomie”
(1938) posited that crime is a logical means for socially- and economically-deprived
individuals to achieve universally-desired ends. Merton was writing in the shadow of
both Prohibition, which saw an increase in organized crime due to the public demand for
31
alcohol, which could then only be acquired illegally, and The Great Depression, when the
economic collapse led to widespread unemployment and economic anxieties. Merton’s
views then are reflective of the desperation of his era. Anomie occurs when an
individuals drives and desires are “not adequately restrained by social control.”
29
While
the pressure exerted by social structures may instill in an individual a desire for certain
ends such as financial stability, the means to achieve those same ends may be limited by
what Merton dubs “institutional norms.”
30
This leads to behavior that is nonconformist in
relation to socially acceptable behavior, which, in this case, then leads to criminal
activity. Merton utilizes the analogy of competitive athletics as an example, when
“winning the game” takes precedent over “winning through circumscribed modes of
activity.”
31
Tactics that would be generally deemed “unsportsmanlike” by the relevant
institutions are employed to gain a competitive edge when one participant is naturally
disadvantaged. It is this notion of acquiring the competitive edge that can make the
cunning and force of the criminal so desirable for political machines to employ.
Organized crime in the United States is popularly and inevitably tied to questions
of ethnicity and immigration. When Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants began to arrive
in America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they usually found themselves
placed in situations of tremendous social and economic disadvantage. Unsurprisingly,
numerous members of such groups did turn to crime to improve their lot relative to the
nation at large, in a manner consistent with Merton's anomie theory. As the decades wore
on, some ethnic groups maintained a visible presence in organized crime activity, with
Italian-Americans being the one most closely identified in the public consciousness.
There were, however, certain groups who, upon gaining a certain amount of acceptance
32
in American society generally strove to escape their underworld heritage. Perhaps the
most dramatic example of this latter phenomenon is the case of Jewish-Americans and
their relationship to organized crime. Jews occupied a significant presence in the
American underworld beginning in the nineteenth century when such figures as Monk
Eastman helped Tammany Hall politicians by intimidating voters at polling booths and
strong-arming their rivals.
An examination of American organized crime in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries reveals a perhaps surprising number of Jewish mob bosses and
enforcers. Figures like Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel worked closely with
Charles “Lucky” Luciano in transforming the mob into a big business. Lansky as
Luciano’s right-hand man became the architect of “The Commission”, a Board of
Directors for the nation’s chief mob bosses and Siegel is generally credited as the
visionary behind the development of Las Vegas. Arnold Rothstein, who preceded and
mentored them, famously fixed the 1919 World Series in what became known as the
“Black Sox Scandal.” Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer was one of the most violent
and feared criminals of his day. “Murder, Inc.,” a notorious assassin’s guild was founded
by a Jew, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, and was largely populated by Jewish killers. These
men, among others, had an enormous influence on the development of organized crime in
America. Furthermore, there was an intense cross-cultural intermingling between Jews
and Italians in criminal groups in cities like New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, and
Philadelphia. When Luciano needed reliable help during the infamous Castellammarese
Mafia War, he enlisted his Jewish friends to gain an edge. Part of the reason for this
ethnic intermingling was that Jewish and Italian enclaves were often located just next to
33
one another in the poor neighborhoods where fresh immigrants initially came to live in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is curious though how the mob
became so overwhelmingly associated with Italian America while the “contributions” of
Jews have been for the most part lost to memory.
This absence is attributable to their exclusion from major Hollywood productions
and their dwindling presence in American organized crime since the mid-twentieth
century. It has been argued that, unlike certain segments of Italian America, American
Jews loathed their criminals, because they made life harder for the rest of the Jewish
population in assimilating themselves into the country, “ruining the name of [their]
people."
32
As Jenna Weisman Joselit describes in Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New
York Jewish Community, 1900-1940 (1983), American Jews in New York City prior to the
early twentieth century took considerable pride in the fact that there did not intitally seem
to be a large number of their ethnic brethren engaged in the criminal behavior that
permeated the city. This allowed community leaders to vocally promote an emphasis on
living the “pure life.”
33
Only when members of the press and certain anti-immigration
proponents from outside their community began, in the late 19th-century, to increasingly
draw attention to accounts of Jewish criminals, did members of the community begin to
acknowledge the issue. The responses were ones of shock, disbelief, and shame.
34

David Singer in his “The Jewish Gangster: Crime as Unzer Shtik” (1974)
described the unusual placement of criminals of Jewish descent in the framework of
American culture. Singer contended that the Jewish gangster had been all but erased
from the collective memory, attributing this phenomenon to generations of Jewish-
34
Americans, having been well-schooled in the ways of anti-Semitism both in the United
States and abroad, attempting to shield their culture from further antagonism.
While such a strategem had a certain degree of effectiveness, Singer’s view is that
this cultural elision from America’s criminal history came with a cost. “American Jews
have been systematically denied any awareness of a vitally important part of their history.
Whereas, however, in the case of Blacks and other groups, the suppression of the true
historical record has been due to outside influences, the censoring of the American Jewish
past to eliminate any mention of Jewish crime has resulted from pressure within the
Jewish community.”
35
Singer suggests that Jews have not only possessed the desire but
also certain of the means required to “censor” the more unsavory aspects of the American
Jewish experience. Singer attributes this to lingering fears of anti-Semitism and the desire
to project the image of the “good Jewish boy.” These anxieties have led to “self-
congratulatory” accounts of Jewish-American history from within the community. In
Singer's view, while the tendency to follow such an agenda was understandable prior to
1945, the continued practice of “Jewish self-censorship... makes a mockery of the claim
that the American Jewish community is maturing.” It reveals, he contends, “a
fundamental lack of security and self-respect.”
36
In addition it precludes a full conception
of American-Jewish identity, at least among males, and has, it is implied, led to a sort of
cultural neutering.
Some decades later, Rich Cohen in his study of the cultural impact of Jews in
organized crime, Tough Jews (1998), similarly lamented the passing of such figures from
the broader American consciousness and approached the topic as a type of reclamation
project. As with Singer, Cohen estimated that an important characteristic had been
35
amputated from Jewish-American identity, resulting in a popular image of Jewish people
as cowardly and docile. Cohen suggests that a knowledge of Jewish gangland activity can
be a liberating experience for Jews who are sensitive about the common stereotyping of
their people as inherently passive. He demonstrates a profound lament regarding the loss
of the Jewish gangster from American cultural memory. Those prevailing modern
stereotypes regarding Jews have inspired an appreciation for the violent activities of these
people. If the Jewish gangster is acknowledged in popular culture, it is generally as some
kind of money-handler for the mob, not as a tough or a heavy. In Cohen’s view, the
escapades of Semitic hoods were a breakthrough for the Jewish identity which had
suffered through the pogroms and persecutions of Europe and Russia.

People don’t believe in Jewish gangsters because Jewish
gangsters fall outside stereotype, thwart the expectations so
many people have of Jews. The Jewish gangsters were
among the first Jews to scrap the notion of Jewish
exceptionalism, to set Jews adrift in a world of killers and
thieves, to set them free. When [notorious assassin Abe]
Reles took a mark, he was not just ending a life; he was
expressing the essential freedom of the Jew in America.
37

As Cohen observes, in a continuation of Singer's view, Jewish gangsters faded
from view, in part, due to their own complicity in obscuring their legacy. “For Jewish
gangsters, crime was not a way out of the system; it was a way in…. For these men, the
greatest dream, the dream they reserved for their children, was to be a successful, law-
36
abiding American.”
38
After opening up the system upon accumulating certain amounts of
power, these men sought to assimilate themselves, to fade into the fabric of the nation, to
belong. Cohen tells the story of how Meyer Lansky grew infuriated with a friend who had
named his child, Meyer Lansky II. Lansky objected to the branding of the child with a
criminal name that ostensibly could hold him back in life.
39
The gangster project was not
an experiment that was meant to last through the generations.
The act of reclamation is an acknowledgement that some crucial thing has been
lost. The Jewish gangster appears to have returned from the margins many years later to
compel writers like Cohen to bring their legacy to light. Whether there is a shame implicit
in the forgetting of a culture’s criminal element is certainly a subject for debate. Yet, this
lost knowledge can serve to dispel Jewish stereotypes both in the minds of Gentiles and,
perhaps more importantly, those Jews who tacitly accept society’s views of them as
people who can not defend themselves.
The absence of the Jewish gangster from classic Hollywood stories is also largely
a result of Jewish intervention. The Golden Age of gangster films occurred during the
early 1930’s when mob violence was prevalent throughout many of the nation’s major
cities. Of the scores of gangland productions of the time, there were three that loomed
largest of all: William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931), Mervyn LeRoy’s Little
Caesar (1931), and Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932). The first of these starred James
Cagney as Irish-American Tom Powers, but the latter two both featured Jewish actors as
Italian-Americans. Edward G. Robinson (a Romanian whose real name was Emmanuel
Goldberg) played “Cesare Enrico Bandello” in Little Caesar and Paul Muni (a Ukrainian
whose real name was Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund) played “Tony Camonte” in
37
Scarface. Both of these men were Jewish immigrants whose performances as Italian
immigrants brought them instant fame. It has been suggested that the primary reasons
behind this cloaking of Jewish identity was due to the number of Jews in high-ranking
positions in the Hollywood studios. Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn,
William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers were all first- or second-
generation Jewish immigrants who played major parts in the development of Hollywood
and the studio system. Considering the powerfully anti-Semitic sentiments that a great
many Jewish immigrants had fled from in Europe and Russia, it was felt that depictions
of Jewish gangsters in film could only serve to perpetuate negative stereotypes in society.
“[I]n disseminating and to some extent creating ‘the American Dream’, the moguls
submerged their ethnic identity and avoided subjects that could in any way arouse
prejudice against them. Their families had experienced enough of that in Europe…. For
obvious reasons, Jewish gangsters were out.”
40
The presence of Jews in Hollywood
would itself lead to a great deal of anti-Semitic backlash over the years. Jews were
closely aligned with Communism by both the public and certain elements of the
government even as far back as the 1930's.
41
Prior to the American engagement in World
War II, Nazi sympathizers in league with the American government, such as Joseph P.
Kennedy, threatened certain high-ranking Jewish executives in Hollywood to keep away
from anti-Nazi sentiments in the films they produced.
42
These kinds of sentiments kept
the Hollywood Jews (as Neal Gabler has dubbed them) in a place where they had to be in
constant fear of clashes between their ethnic backgrounds and the ideologies of the nation
they called home.
38
Certainly at the time of the Golden Age of gangster films, real-life Jewish
criminals had already become demonized in the public eye in many cities. An article in
The Minneapolis Press in 1927, using information offered by a non-Jewish hood, went so
far as to accuse Jewish gangsters of having committed “ninety percent of the crimes
against society in this city.”
43
By having actors like Robinson and Muni portray Italians,
it became possible to watch Jews onscreen in powerful roles, taking on the world and
challenging society, without feeding into feelings of anti-Semitism. Watching Jews in
tough roles would have had a liberating effect on the Jewish viewer whose arrival to
America had not spared them from the shame of suspicion and derision. (It is an
unfortunate side effect that the vicious behavior and, especially in the case of Muni,
broadly exaggerated mannerisms implicit in the performances in these films actually
played a significant part in spreading certain stereotypes of Italian-Americans that persist
to this day.) Yet, it is already possible to see in this phenomenon an elusive element of the
Jewish identity. Many audience members who didn’t know the truth would have likely
assumed that Robinson and Muni were Italian. These men were not externally marked as
Jews; thus, with a mere change of name, they could don the mask of a Gentile.
Such situations allude to a dramatic tension between the poles of assimilation and
“doing [one's] own ethnic thing.”
44
The ambivalence that can arise from this conundrum
forms a crucial component of many Jewish gangster narratives. In particular, the novel
The Hoods (1953) by Harry Grey and Italian director Sergio Leone's film adaptation
Once Upon a Time in America (1984) address this ambivalence in certain highly critical
ways. In these works, the protagonists, through their roles in violent criminal
organizations, struggle to defy the stereotypes of their people, yet find their own cultural
39
identities in danger of dissolution as they seek social and financial power. In these works
can be found an intersection of the role of Jewish-Americans in national gangster
mythology and the complexities of American authority-organized crime relationships.
Modern depictions of the Jewish-American gangster in literature begin in earnest
with the figure of Meyer Wolfsheim in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), a
character clearly based on Arnold Rothstein.
45
Fitzgerald's portrayal of Wolfsheim is
emblematic of an anti-Semitic stance that was quite common in that era. Though
Wolfsheim only appears in a single scene, his presence as Jay Gatsby's shady underworld
connection is intended as a clear indication that Gatsby's rise to wealth has involved
ethically dubious activities. Wolfsheim famously wears human molars as cuff links, a
characteristic that marks him as a sort of predatory cannibal or vampire who preys on his
fellow men. He is described as physically unattractive in a stereotypical manner (“ a
small, flat-nosed Jew”
46
) and speaks with a caricatured foreign accent (He pronounces
the word “connections” as “gonnegtions.”). Rachel Rubin has observed how the
exaggerated “foreignness” of Wolfsheim is consistent with then-contemporary sentiments
espoused by the likes of Henry Ford and former New York police commisioner Theodore
Bingham (who, in 1908, published a soon-to-be-discredited report estimated that half the
criminals in his city were of Jewish ethnicity) that Jewish immigrants had a poisonous
influence on American culture.
47

Yet, not all depictions of Jewish gangsters in this era were as sensationalistic and
bigoted as Fitzgerald's. Possibly the most crucial of these alternate versions is Michael
Gold's (a pen name for Communist activist Itzok Granich) bestselling novel, Jews
Without Money, published in 1930, just a few years after The Great Gatsby. Gold's
40
autobiographical novel, identified by Michael Denning as a quintessential example of
what he dubbed the “ghetto pastoral,” follows the impoverished upbringing of young
protagonist Mikey in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Gold was highly active in leftist
politics and his novel is a testament to the travails of the ethnic working classes who
endure the machinations of “America, the thief.” Mikey, the son of a Romanian father
and a Hungarian mother, is continually faced with anti-Semitic sentiments and the ever-
present spectre of poverty. When his father, Herman, loses his job as a painter, the family
sinks into abject despair. Gold's novel continually evokes a sense of hopelessness for
immigrants in America. Mikey's experiences bring him in touch with a pair of future
gangsters, Nigger and Louis One Eye. For the impressionable Mikey, the rebellious and
rage-fueled Nigger (whose real name is revealed at one point to be Abie, a curious
reference to both the father of Judaism and, perhaps, to Abraham Lincoln) represents a
heroically masculine version of Jewish masculinity. Nigger punches a grade school
teacher who calls Mikey a “little kike” and eludes bullying policemen by “leap(ing) gaps
between the tenements like a mountain goat.”
48
He eventually creates a gang, the “Young
Avengers” who defend Jewish children from anti-Semites. Louis beats up a trio of
Italians who tug on the beard of a terrified old Jewish man “who had wandered like
ourselves into that Christian land.”
49
Gold's assessment of Jewish gangsters is contrary to
the propositions of “Klu Klux moralizers” who contend that the gangster system was
brought to America by “'low class' European immigrants.” Nigger and Louie are clearly
products of their environment. “[I]t is America that has taught the sons of tubercular
Jewish tailors how to kill.”
50
Louis is a more clearly despicable gangster character; he
attempts to rape Mikey's Aunt Lena and later coerces Nigger's sister Lily into a life of
41
prostitution (a crime for which he will be murdered some years later after she dies of
syphilis). Yet, Louis himself has been victimized by America. After killing his abusive
father, he is sent to a reformatory where sadistic guards ruin his eye. “There the State
“reformed” him by carefully teaching him to be a criminal.”
51

Gold's treatment of the Jewish community often crosses into ambivalence, though
Mikey never doubts his identity and never turns away from his religion. A fear of
Christians comes to suffuse him, partly as a result from the anxieties of his mother who
had grown up with Old World anti-Semitism. While clashes between Jews and Christians
abound throughout the novel, Gold also portrays the proliferation of “Jew on Jew”
violence. Louis is as likely to assault fellow Jews as he is Gentiles. A group of atheist
Jews are sent to a hospital after mocking religious Jews outside the synagogue on Yom
Kippur.
52
A highly devout group disrupts the funeral of a woman who had converted to
Catholicism after marrying an Italian. “Religion was a fervent state of affairs on the East
Side,” muses Mikey. “Every persecuted race becomes a race of fanatics.”
53
It should be
noted that Gold does not portray other immigrant peoples of the East Side as being any
less impoverished or desperate. Even Mikey's mother, who frequently vocalizes her fear
of and disgust for Christians, is continually moved to compassionate acts in the aid of her
non-Semitic neighbors.
While the majority of the novel traces Mikey from ages five to seven, Gold later
follows him through adolescence and into young adulthood. When his younger sister is
violently killed in a street accident, any trace of Mikey's innocence appears to die as well.
Mikey experiences firsthand the difficulties of joining the work force after having
watched his father do the same in his childhood. The masculinity of Nigger that Mikey
42
once idolized from afar becomes for him a curse as he matures. He notes miserably how
work, sex, tough company, and “desperate stimulants” become the scourge of his life. “It
went on for years. I don't want to remember it all; the years of my adolescence.”
54
The
closing words of the novel find Mikey praying for deliverance in the form of a worker's
revolution, “the true Messiah,” that will “destroy the East Side” and “build there a garden
for the human spirit.”
55
Mikey is relegated to the role of a sort of prophet of the
apocalypse.
Gold's project, which Rachel Rubin contends serves in part as a rebuttal of
caricatures like Fitzgerald's Meyer Wolfsheim,
56
lays the ground for alternative portrayals
of Jewish people and, more specifically, Jewish gangsters. Nigger and Louis are victims
as much as they are transgressors. The anger that they unleash towards anti-Semitic
bullies represents to Mikey a rejection of their proscribed positions as secondary citizens.
As Mikey finds himself being drawn towards a similarly desperate and violent lifestyle as
he matures, Gold's vision becomes clearer. Such transitions are almost inevitable for poor
Jewish males in the greedy, prejudicial American landscape. “America is so rich and fat,
because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants.”
57
The gangster figures
generally occupy the periphery of the novel, yet their employment of violence, while
disdained by the majority of the Jewish community, provides a means of profound
defiance. In this way, it is a valuable precursor to Harry Grey's The Hoods. However,
while Gold focuses on the childhood of his protagonist and speeds through adolescence
and young adulthood, Grey's novel begins with his characters as already-disillusioned
adolescents and spends much of the work engaging with those same factors of maturation
and adulthood that Mikey wishes to forget. Grey’s novel avoids the political commitment
43
that drives Gold’s narrative. The Marxist perspective that fueled Gold in 1930 finds no
echo in Grey’s post-World War II narrative.
Grey's The Hoods was part of a wave of post-World War II novels that featured
nuanced depictions of Jewish criminals. Irving Schulman found great popular success
with his 1948 novel, The Amboy Dukes, in which membership in the titular street gang is
portrayed as an outlet for the poor and disenfranchised Jewish youth of the Brownsville
neighborhood of Brooklyn. None of the Dukes are portrayed in a stereotypical manner;
they are neither the vile influence on American culture suggested by Fitzgerald nor the
“good Jewish boys” model promoted within the Jewish community. They may be
frequently unpleasant (even protagonist Frank Goldfarb is ethically compromised), but
Schulman makes it clear that there is no escape for them from dismal lives of poverty and
limited possibilities for mobility. The fact that the Dukes are themselves hated by the
general Jewish populace of Brownsville for their tendencies towards violence and
debauchery marks them as out of place even within their own ethnic community. The
pivotal moment that advances the plot is when Frank and his friend, Black Benny, murder
one of their teachers during an argument in detention. As with Michael Gold's earlier
novel and Grey's later one, interactions between young Jews and their schoolteachers are
tense, antagonistic, and often violent.
A few years later, Harold Robbins publishes A Stone for Danny Fisher (1952),
which features a charismatic and talented Jewish protagonist whose aspirations are
repeatedly stymied by his association with the vicious gangster Maxie Fields. The
character of Fields is actually more in line with the depictions by Fitzgerald and
Bingham, while Danny Fisher is a much more positive figure than anyone in Schulman's
44
novel. He is ambitious, handsome, and a skilled fighter. His occasional forays into crime
are motivated by desperate circumstances; his eventual ruin at the hands of Fields is an
indictment of how the gangsters of a particular ethnic group will largely prey on those
who share their heritage.
The Hoods represents one of the more visceral and emblematic treatments of the
intermingling of criminal elements and their influence upon American ideological
institutions. It combines that theme with an exploration of Jewish identity in regard to the
violent world of organized crime. Grey's original narrative roughly spans from about
1914 on through the early 1930's as a tightly-knit gang of mostly Jewish youths (one is
Italian) gradually transition from petty street crimes to more lucrative careers as lethal
enforcers for a sophisticated organized crime apparatus. This tale is narrated by the
intellectual hoodlum Noodles (so nicknamed because as the gang's resident thinker he is
known for “using his noodle”) as he observes the gang's natural leader, Maxie, evolve
from a cocky and tough street urchin into, initially, a type of self-styled Jewish Robin
Hood and, later, a megalomaniac who likens himself to Napoleon and whose suicidal
scheme to rob the Federal Reserve Bank reveals him as wholly incapable of recognizing
his limitations. The close of the novel finds Noodles informing on his friends so they will
be arrested before they get themselves killed. The police wipe them out in a gunfight
anyway and Noodles, wracked with guilt and targeted as a stool pigeon, flees town,
determined to one day tell his story.
Reliable information on Grey is scarce. “Harry Grey” was allegdly a pseudonym
for Herschel “Harry” Goldberg, a low-level operator in famed New York mobster Frank
Costello’s criminal operation during the 1920s and 30s. According to his profile in the
45
Palm Springs Walk of Stars, Grey/Goldberg’s family emigrated to the Lower East Side of
New York from Kiev in 1905.
58
There is little to no verifiable documentation about his
criminal career, though this may, in part, be attributable to the notoriously unreliable
nature of official information on organized crime. (This is often attributed to such factors
as the difficulty of verifying the accounts from organized crime figures, corruption
amongst members of the law enforcement community, and the fact that official records
on the topic are often recorded with bureaucratic purposes in mind, as opposed to reasons
of general sociological research.
59
) However, if anecdotal evidence is to be lent any
credence, it would appear that Grey, like his character, “Noodles,” spent some significant
amount of his lifetime in hiding from the mob because of his activity as an informant to
the police. Due to his alleged status as a former gangster, however, The Hoods has
developed a certain reputation for authenticity. The work is often considered a mix of
autobiography, autobiographical fiction, and pure fiction, though how one can tell which
sections have a basis in fact and which are fantasy seems impossible to discern.
Regardless of its supposed authenticity, Grey's novel reflects some of the characteristics
of Gold’s vision of Jewish masculinity and complicates it by exploring how such figures
could insinuate themselves into respectable society. Here we see both the macho Jewish
gangster, spurning stereotypes and dominating those who would demean him, and the
gangster whose skills with violence makes him indispensable to agents of the state.
Unlike Gold, though, Grey's perspective towards the Jewish community appears far more
ambivalent. The misery of his characters' surroundings leads them to associate
resignation and failure with the traditional Jewish community that surrounds them. In this
way, they cultivate strongly negative attitudes towards their families and the religion that,
46
in their view, keeps them trapped in a proscribed space as inferior citizens in the greater
landscape of American, and specifically New York, life. Their particular situation instills
in them a complex and ambivalent attitude towards their own ethnic identities.
In the world of The Hoods, there is little alternative for the young protagonists to
escape the dreariness of their surroundings save through crime. The impetus behind their
willful journey into the underworld is the dissatisfaction they experience from their
impoverished and socially limited upbringings in the Delancey Street area of the Lower
East Side. Noodles attends what he derisively calls a “soup school,” so called for the
cheap “charity soup” that was fed to the neighborhood’s poverty-stricken youth and that
Noodles and his friends refuse to eat. His teacher, Miss Mons, reproves his “filthy, vulgar
East Side conduct” and gleefully predicts that he and his friends will die in electric chairs
like a pair of her former students, Lefty Louie and Dago Frank (7). He laughs off the
entreaties of the principal to cultivate his skill at mathematics into a career. “He wanted
me to continue school, break away from Max and miss out on the million bucks we're
gonna make on heists and everything. I'm gonna get help from a social agency? Huh!
Everybody will look down on us. Charity, feh. What good is education?” (15).
Ironically, Noodles' choice of reading material as an adolescent notably includes a
novel by Horatio Alger, a selection that disgusts his mysterious mentor in sophisticated
crime, The Professor. Here, the optimistic take on the “American Dream” exemplified by
Alger's work is contemptuously viewed as delusional by those who are forced endure the
harsher realities of trying to achieve economic and social stability. In such works as
Ragged Dick (1868), hard work and honesty prevail in the end and lead to financial
success and social mobility; the protagonists of Alger's novels succeed as a result of a
47
fidelity to rules of the game as prescribed by those “institutional norms” referred to by
Robert Merton. True to form, Noodles acquires his Alger novel by shoplifting it.
As they climb their way up the criminal ladder, from robbing people in the streets
and figthting other gangs to running a speakeasy and engaging in elaborate heists and
mob hits, they simultaneously find themselves in greater standing in regard to the
institutions that govern their society. Criminality and politics are inextricably intertwined.
Noodles develops a theory early in life that “everyone's illegit” and he sticks to this
mantra well into adulthood. He repeatedly describes how everybody, no matter their
societal standing, will sell themselves for a “charlotte russe,” a dessert treat that the
young neighborhood prostitute Peggy accepts as payment for her services. His later
experiences prove the validity of this notion as his gang's increasingly violent behavior
brings him ever closer to representatives of the state; they even begin accepting contracts
from City Hall once their prowess with violence becomes widely known. Everyone's
integrity has a price in his eyes, and those who attempt to use their outwardly legal
positions to form a moral high ground from which to look down upon his gang are
contemptible for their hypocrisy. Noodles and company repeatedly give voice to their
views that they are virtually indistinguishable from state representatives; the difference is
that they, as gangsters, do not try to rationalize their behavior. The Hoods presents a
curious relationship between these gangsters and politicians. On one hand they are
dependent on one another, yet are simultaneously poised against each other in a sort of
moral stand-off. The politicians who employ the hoods refuse to recognize their own
ethical similarities to them and consistently make excuses for why they must rely on
them. When faced with such attitudes, the short-tempered Noodles reacts with
48
characteristic rage, leading him to browbeat and, occasionally, attack the objects of his
displeasure.
American patriotism and the treasured concepts of loyalty and honor that are
supposed to accompany an appreciation of the state are laughable to the gang. During one
mission from Frank Costello, Noodles and company are assigned to ruin a rival's casino
operation. The “big shot” politician (a noted Klan member) who owns the place resists on
the grounds that he has rights because he is “an American, a one hundred percent
American” who shouldn't be pushed around by “foreigners.” This sets off Maxie who
physically assaults him, as Noodles muses: “This bum is America, with his Ku Klux Klan
and everything else crooked around him. Where else in the world but in America can you
find a character like this crooked politician? Where else but America could a fabulous
figure like Frank [Costello] be produced? And the rest of us hoods, all true and typically
America?... God bless America” (276).
Repeatedly the gang are confronted with gangsters and politicians who espouse
their adherence to American values and their loathing towards foreign elements. When
Eddie and Lefty, a pair of tough-talking strikebreakers, brag about all the “heads [they]
broke” in the course of their efforts, Noodles asks if those heads were American.
“Americans? No Americans. They were mostly Irish, Swedes and Wops or something,”
responds Lefty. Noodles' retort is “Yeh, they couldn't be... They weren't Indians” (343).
Noodles acknowledges that the America is a nation of immigrants and he clearly disdains
an exceptionalistic view towards it. He proceeds to rail against the American system that
allows corporations to gouge the American working man and keep his standard of living
low. “If (the corporations) had a choice”, he muses, “the American standard would be the
49
lowest in the world. Their actions and words prove it” (344). When Crowning, the
businessman behind a campaign to break a strike by a union of elevator operators,
protests their intervention in his plan by essentially declaring their tactics un-American,
he gives Noodles another opportunity to soliloquize about his views regarding American
capitalism.
You have the typical businessman's state of mind. You set a
precedent, then if anybody follows your example and the
methods you originated, you berate him, you call him a
gangster....[Y]ou supposedly legitimate businessmen are
the ones who brought us gangsters into labor disputes....It's
you employers that first attracted us and showed us how
lucrative these disputes can be....You supposedly legit
business men taught us how to corrupt the lawmaking and
law enforcement bodies from way back. You businessmen
conduct your activities with less honesty than we do. (359-
360)

Noodles and Maxie initially fantasize about engaging in the kind of rebellious
outlaw activities depicted in their Jesse James dime novels. The idea of the outsider
whose use of forbidden violence subverts state control and allows himself to make a
living provides a pleasurable reverie for these poor and disenfranchised youth. As his
criminal career progresses, Noodles and Maxie always likes to think of themselves as
urban Robin Hoods, who only prey upon those who would exploit the less fortunate.
They often express pro-union sentiments and their assignment from City Hall to combat
50
Crowning's strikebreakers carries far deeper connotations for them than do their regular
jobs.
In one of Grey's defter uses of irony, however, Noodles comes to align himself so
completely with his role in the mob that he loses all perspective of where he stands in
relation to the rebellious outlaw figures he once admired. Having achieved some
reasonable amount of economic success, Noodles and his friends earn enough clout to
occupy a significant position in (famed real-life gangster) Frank Costello's organization.
Once so entrenched, they take it upon themselves to terrorize any smaller independent
mobs. These small-timers are ordered to pay out most of their revenues to the
Combination or face bloody consequences. Significantly, their justification for this
behavior is that the independent groups are “outlaws.” The irony of the situation appears
utterly lost on Noodles in spite of his alleged intellectual superiority. Noodles frequently
expresses contempt for corporations and the faceless monolith of the American state
which he considers responsible for his shoddy upbringing. In fact, his gang initially
refuses any job offers that will require them to oppress members of the working class. Yet
Noodles is oblivious to the fact that the Combination is itself a corporation; his
unquestioning willingness to subdue these “outlaw” groups alludes to an overwhelming
confusion as to his place in American society. For someone who once idolized Jesse
James, his tormenting of criminals who seek to maintain some sense of individualism
aligns him with the forces he has blamed for his life's sordid trajectory. Yet, in the case of
Noodles, it is perhaps the hypocrisy of the American state that most disgusts him, the
means rather than the ends. It would seem that Noodles is just as guilty of this hypocrisy
as the system which he claims to revile.
51
Family is little more than a burden to the hoods, a constant reminder of how lowly
their position is as first and second generation immigrants in American society. Noodles
largely ignores his family who represent to him a passive acceptance of their lowly social
and economic stature. Whenever he does interact with them, an argument invariably
ensues. When Noodles' mother scolds him for not taking schul more seriously and he
retorts that he'd rather work to get a million dollars, she tells him: “[f]or the millionairies
is the million dollars, for the poor people is the schul” (21). Noodles' mother implies that
he needs to know his place. To her, yearning for wealth is mere wasted fantasy. This
resignation to a lowly life causes Noodles to view his family as another part of the
problem. Upon hearing that his mother is seriously ill, he continues to focus on his
criminal activities and forays into drug use and philandering. Only when she is on her
deathbed, does he deign to appear before her.
Noodles and Maxie have highly ambivalent attitudes towards their Jewish
ethnicity. They view with contempt the mild humility with which the residents of their
neighborhood approach their lives. He derisively refers to them as “yentes and
kurshineerkehs” (Yiddish for “busybodies and cheapskates”) and upbraids his (notably
unnamed) brother for not moving the family uptown away from the Jewish neighborhood
where “it stinks” (248). When his brother tells him that his criminal behavior has brought
shame to the community, Noodles counters with the accusation that his brother's
respectable occupation as a journalist has made him a hypocritical puppet who follows
the dictates of corrupt politicians and that his industry is as compromised as any other.
Hence, Noodles implies that the positive image in the community that his brother puts
forth is empty and illegit. The “good Jewish boy” is no better than the shameful hood.
52
From the perspective of these young toughs, time spent studying the Talmud and
going to temple is time wasted. Noodles looks upon his pious and studious father with
wearying derision. “My dopey old man, why can't he get a job and make some dough?...
Why the hell does he go to schul so much? Two hours every morning and two hours at
night, too. What the hell is it all about? I'll bet the dopey rabbi don't know either” (39).
Noodles, himself, loathes the idea of getting a “legit” job, but expects it of his father who
only, in his view, is wasting time. It is only when an aged rabbi eventually informs him
that his now-deceased father was once known as the notorious criminal “Srulick the
Shtarker” (“Israel the strong and tough one” in Yiddish, according to Noodles.) in his
youth in Odessa, that Noodles begins to change his once contemptuous perspective (171).
He even rushes out to buy his late father a large new stone for his grave. Noodles never
considers why his father might have transitioned from a life of violent crime to one of
studious contemplation. The pangs of regret that Noodles will eventually feel after
betraying his friends and leading them to their deaths is a potential clue. In the height of
his youthful anger, though, Noodles' can not comprehend that one might seek some form
of redemption for the commission of past sins.
Grey frequently returns to the idea of the “good Jewish boy” archetype and how
Noodles loathes these implications. When a potential lover tells him that she knows he's
gentle, because “Jewish men are so peaceful and ever-tempered,” Noodles bemusedly
replies: “Yeh... without exception” (333). In fact, he tends to overcompensate in his
efforts to dispel this stereotype. In spite of his intellectual self-awareness, he prides
himself above all on his deadly reputation as “Noodles the Shiv,” master of the stiletto. A
constant theme of the novel is Noodles' clearly phallic obsession with his status as an
53
expert knife-wielder. During a raid on a rival's casino, Noodles goes into action against
one unfortunate enemy with his weapon: “Boy, this is what I was living for... Yeh, I was
Noodles the Shiv from Delancey Street, the fastest man with the knife on the East Side,
yeh, the fastest man with the knife in the whole world. This was my exalted moment, a
moment that packed the biggest thrill of my life. It was more intense than a sexual
gratification. It was wonderful” (267). As he readies to strike, he declares, “He was my
meat. He was mine, all mine.” The homoeroticism in such a scenario (culminating, of
course, with spurts and gushes of blood) contrasts with the avowed homophobia that the
macho hoods exhibit throughout the novel. On numerous occasions, the hoods encounter
homosexuals and at no time are they remotely tolerant of these alternative performances
of masculinity. They call them “girls” and “fairies,” and discuss one on occasion the
prospect of physcially attacking them. They ultimately decide against it, because, they
reason, such people are to be pitied and physical attacks “won't cure them” (83-84).
Noodles' other macho preoccupation involves his seemingly effortless ability to
bed scores of women. Grey devotes an exhaustive number of pages to Noodles’
conquests, or to be more accurate, his gloating over said conquests which are generally
not depicted on the page. “I've had all of them,” runs one of his typical musings on the
topic. “The ones Winchell calls Debutramps, who hang out in those Park Avenue ‘speaks’
to Broadway tramps. If I could lay out in a single file all the broads I had, they would
reach from the Bronx to the Battery” (195). As a youth, Noodles is shamed at his
rejection by Dolores, the snobbish daughter of the local candy store owner; as a result, in
spite of his later erotic successes, he becomes obsessed with her, secretly attending her
performances at a local theater just to see her (68). Noodles' distant appreciation includes
54
fantasies of Dolores being manhandled by ruffians and requiring his heroism and knife
skills to save her (37). When she finally acquiesces to a date proposal, she expresses
regret that she had treated him shabbily, indicating that her rejection of him was based in
a rejection of the lowly background from which she also wished to leave herself. Noodles
proposes marriage, then rapes her when she tells him that she can't because she is leaving
the city for Hollywood. For Noodles, this is his frustrated reaction to what he selfishly
processes as her final rejection of him; this is also a means of dragging her down to his
level. Noodles feels inadequate before her, unlike how he feels with any other female.
When he rapes her, it is his way of ensuring that she will no longer occupy the elevated
position where he has insecurely placed her.
In spite of their irritation with Jewish stereotypes, the friends react with violent
antagonism when confronted with anti-Semitic sentiments or with those who exploit their
ethnicity for personal gain. The corrupt businessman, Moritz, is identified as a “white
Jew... [who] used his Jewishness, his Masonry, anything, like a whore” (373). People like
him try to suggest the bond of shared ethnicity as a means of winning over allies. Yet this
mercenary use of Jewish identity is offensive to Noodles, who in spite of his opinion that
everyone is “illegit,” prides himself on his integrity. Noodles and his compatriots see
themselves as not succumbing to the hypocrisy of pretending that they are “legit.” The
tactics of one like Moritz make the hoods feel manipulated. Many of the Jews whom they
have encountered in their lives have shamed them as lesser beings. The patronizing
efforts of “white Jews” are just as bad as the Jew-baiting slurs that gangsters and
politicians of other ethnicities hurl at them throughout the novel.
55
After all, the hoods are not ethnic exclusionists; while they may idolize Monk
Eastman (who, at one point in their youth, enlists the gang's help for a brawl with a group
of Irish hoods), they do include Italian members into their gang and even wind up as
valuable figures within Frank Costello’s predominantly Italian operation.
60
Noodles' own
mentor in the criminal arts, the Professor, is an Italian-American. Actually, Noodles and
company take special delight in exploiting fellow Jews whom they deem unworthy of
respect, as in the episode where they scam a pair of naïve Jews with a phony money
machine for the sheer comic thrill of it.
Noodles' act of betrayal that precipitates the close of the novel is a highly
ambiguous act and considerably complicates the narrative that has preceded it. He
believes Maxie's scheme to rob the Fedreral Reserve Bank is downright suicidal and his
stated aim in notifying the police of another of Maxie's plans is an effort to spare his life.
It would seem therefore that the disastrous result of his intervention is unintentional.
However, Noodles is well aware at that time that Maxie, steeped as he is in his
megalomania, would not go down without a fight. Maxie's great success at criminal
undertakings has led him to believe that he can not be stopped. He compares himself to
Napoleon and has even taken to sitting on a throne in the gang's speakeasy office. The
idea that his plan could fail is not a sentiment that he can take seriously. Maxie's
ambitions have spun out of control and his once seemingly unbreakable bond with
Noodles has reached a near breaking point as a result. When Noodles informs the police,
he all but ensures a violent end for the rest of the gang. This appears to represent an
unconscious rejection of his background. Noodles has previously rejected his family, his
upbringing, his neighborhood and his religion. What he had not rejected were his
56
personal friendships and his enthusiasm for crime. But with this act, he destroys both of
those elements. When he is forced to flee New York City, he must cut all ties with even
those once-cherished pieces of his life. While Grey's novel largely reads as a celebration
of Jewish machismo and an indictment of santicmonious sentiments about legitimate
business and “the American way,” this final act presents Noodles as someone who has
rejected everything that once identified him. In this moment, Grey betrays a profound
ambivalence towards the character who is clearly also intended as his own personal
mouth piece and alter ego. Noodles' decision does not constitute a contradiction of all
those sentiments that he had previously celebrated (the constancy and vehemence with
which Noodles has discussed his philosophy indicates that those really are Grey's
personal views), but it does portray him as someone who has been consumed with a
weariness in regard to the life that he has chosen.
Sergio Leone, well before he first encountered Grey's novel, had already staked
out a unique position among foreign artists in regard to his relationship to American
genre films. In such films as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Once Upon a Time in the
West (1968), Leone had exhibited a skill in inverting the genre precedents of the Western.
Leone had a stated aversion to the antiseptic visions of America exhibited in the majority
of film productions made by Americans themselves. After a childhood spent absorbing
American popular culture (especially comic books and Western films), Leone had
cultivated an abstract “fairy tale” vision of America that was mythic and larger-than-life
and populated with mighty heroic figures who stood for “justice and nobility and honor.”
As he matured and became more familiar with America and its citizenry, he came to
understand the falsity of these visions and become frustrated with them. In Leone's view,
57
America belonged to a “worldwide patrimony” and its people were in the unfortunate
habit of “diluting the wine of their mythical ideas with the water of the American way of
life.”
61
This way of life, as depicted in the movies was of a “world without conflict, Abel
without Cain.” This generalization omits subversive American films such as (Leone's
hero and one-time employer) Robert Aldrich's Vera Cruz (1954) or Kiss Me Deadly
(1955), yet there is little question that the “America” portrayed in most Hollywood
productions was one without moral or psychological complexity. “America itself... like
every other society is really about conflict and truth competing with untruth... I wanted to
show the cruelty of that nation, I was bored stiff with all those grinning white teeth.
Hygiene and optimism are the woodworms which destroy American wood. It is a great
shame if 'America' is always to be left to the Americans.”
62
In this way, Leone suggests
that America and its myths belong to the world. Even if those myths are false, they are
worth preserving, though with a critical eye. It is this critical, unsentimental perspective
that Leone finds utterly lacking in American films about America. It is no coincidence
that the titles of two of Leone's most important films about America begin with “Once
Upon a Time....” There is a certain amount of irony implicit in his use of this fairy tale
convention. Leone does not presume to insist that he is telling the real story of America;
instead, he insinuates that he's just not going to tell the same mythic story in the same
tired manner.
Leone's American landscapes are amoral, grotesque, and unsanitary. The humor is
of a level of ribald crudeness that was largely alien to traditional American productions.
The heroes are scarcely more appealing than their enemies. Leone would cast iconic
“good guy” actor Henry Fonda as one of the most depraved of Western villains in his
58
Once Upon a Time in the West. He added a dash of cynicism to the Western that proved
massively influential, not only to the waves of European “spaghetti Western” filmmakers
who followed in his wake, but also on American filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah; his
approach may well have extended the lifespan of the genre in terms of its relevance to
popular culture, a relevance which was fading even in the 1960s. Upon their release,
Leone's now-iconic Westerns found commercial success, but were approached with
bemused scepticism by English and American critics. The fact that Leone was a foreigner
may have obscured for English language critics the possibility that Leone's films were
driven, in part, by a nuanced political vision. Leone's film prior to Once Upon a Time in
America was Duck, You Sucker! (1972) in which a poor Mexican bandit and his large
family become tragically entangled in the Mexican revolution due to the influence of a
former IRA bomber. The film is equally about the causes that inspire revolution and the
disenchantment that can befall the lower classes once they have outlived their usefulness
to the intellectuals. “The revolution is not a social dinner, a literary event, a drawing or an
embroidery; It can not be done with elegance and courtesy. The revolution is an act of
violence...” runs the quote from Mao with which Leone begins his narrative. The
empathy with which Leone treats the disenfranchised suggests a sensibility that shares
certain principles with Marxism. His Once Upon a Time in the West, establishes a tone of
regret that the evolution of the American nation will be accompanied by the rise of
remorseless capitalists.
Leone would take a similarly critical and cynical approach to the gangster film.
The protagonists are not charismatic rebels; their violence against women is not
humorized or glamorized as in numerous James Cagney pictures. Noodles rapes women
59
twice in the film and the over-the-top viciousness of Max's and Noodles' interactions with
females implies a certain commentary on the misogyny and macho posturing of the
traditional gangster protagonists. This sort of material is present in Grey's novel, though
Leone's treatment of it is imbued with a level of self-awareness that skirts the
occasionally celebratory tone that, at times, appears to accompany Grey's project. In The
Hoods, any critique of the gang's performing of their masculinity is well below the
surface.
Leone’s film offers a variation on explorations of Jewish identity. His film
presents Jews who come to sublimate their ethnicity to avoid scrutiny. He is not really
part of the reclamation project, seeking to restore a component of toughness to the Jewish
identity. Actually, his characters represent precisely what the Jewish movie moguls of the
past sought to avoid displaying; the gangsters in Once Upon a Time in America are
sadistic killers, prone to rape and psychopathic reactions. It is hard to imagine that Rich
Cohen or David Singer, the leading advocates for restoring Jewish gangsters to both
Jewish cultural history and the popular imagination, would look with pride upon the
actions of Leone’s Jewish hoodlums. However, on the most basic levels, the film does not
feel particularly Jewish at all. His approach to choosing actors for the film could be seen
as a kind of reversal of the traditional trend of casting gangster films. Leone chose not to
cast Jewish actors in the lead roles of his film. Instead, he opted for Gentile actors Robert
De Niro, James Woods, William Forsythe, James Hayden, and Elizabeth McGovern to
play the Jewish characters as adults. When asked once why he had decided not to cast
Jews for the major roles and why the film seemed so Italian in terms of its atmosphere, he
allegedly replied: “Italians. Jews. There is no difference.”
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This remark, if ever truly
60
spoken, could mean a number of things. Is it merely in reference to physical similarities
between the two races? Or does it have to do, rather, with a similarity in spirit?
Regardless of its actual meaning, this line is indicative of a peculiar phenomenon in the
American cinema: the seeming interchangeability of Jewish and Italian actors in ethnic
roles in the cinema. Certainly, this approach has been borne out in Hollywood films for
decades, even after the heyday of the gangster picture. In any case, a legitimate criticism
of the film could be not so much that it is anti-Semitic (the non-Jewish characters are
hardly more palatable), but that it is not Jewish enough.
In bringing his vision of Jewish gangsterism to the screen, Leone unwittingly
included certain basic inaccuracies regarding Judaism. He had originally wanted a script
from an authentic New York Jew and had approached several of such, most notably
Norman Mailer, to write it. The results, particularly in the case of Mailer (whose attempt
at a screenplay was described by Leone as “a Mickey Mouse version”), were disastrous.
Leone and five other Italians, none of whom were especially familiar with either New
York or Judaism, then set about putting the story on paper. Jewish author Stuart
Kaminsky was eventually brought in, though the extent of his contributions remained a
subject of debate in the years following the film’s completion. Leone suggested that
Kaminsky was a mere translator of the original Italian text, and Kaminsky insisted that he
had complicated the character profiles of both the lead figures and improved the
dialogue.
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Regardless, the result is a vision of Jewry that contains numerous inaccuracies
and a number of token attempts at ethnic color. The Lower East Side of the film is home
to a large number of Hasids even in the scenes set in the 1920s. In actuality, the Hasidic
sect did not have much of a presence in the area until the years of the Holocaust.
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Furthermore, Hasidic men were depicted walking to temple in the company of women
and members of the opposing sexes are shown casually touching one another.
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These are
particularly crucial oversights as Hasidism has a fundamentally conservative view of
gender. Men are chauvinistically privileged to a point where women are excluded from
joining the men on the way to temple. The conservative attitude towards sex and
sensuality precludes any touching of the opposite sex in public. Much of the Jewish detail
is largely in the way of superficial surface details; for example, Patsy, while gazing upon
a cache of diamonds the group have pilfered in a jewelry heist, notes that they can now
afford “a lot of matzoh balls.” The gangsters speak in stereotypical Yiddish expressions;
terms such as “yutz”, “shmuck”, “tuckus”, and “l’chaim” are tossed around on occasion
as if to remind us what heritage these characters come from. Yet, there is little sense of an
authentically Jewish atmosphere. This seems to be a largely unintentional aspect of
Leone’s filmmaking. The man could not help himself from creating an atmosphere that
seems more Italian than anything else. Indeed, one hears more Italian opera over the
course of the film than traditional Jewish music. This is not to say that Leone’s approach
is a failure; despite these surface peculiarities, what the film’s deeper content suggests
about ethnicity is the most crucial element.
Leone's film further complicates the connection between cultural identity and
criminal behavior that Grey addresses in his novel. While his version of the story hews
fairly closely to the source material for much of its running time, his crucial additions to
Grey's narrative are a number of lengthy sequences situated in 1968; it is in these scenes
and the way they comment on the prior action that Leone's ultimate commentary on the
theme of identity can be found. As in the novel, Noodles' betrays his friends to the police
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in 1933 in a disastrous effort to save them from their suicidal plan to rob the Federal
Reserve. They are gunned down, and Max is seemingly burned beyond recognition.
Noodles fights his way past a group of mob enforcers sent to punish him and escapes to a
life of pained regret. Here ends the story of Grey's version of Noodles. In Leone's 1968
sections, Noodles (here given the proper name, David Aaronson, a combination of the
name of the first of the Israeli kings to have the approval of God in the Bible and that of
Moses' older brother and the first high priest of the Israelites), who has remained in self-
imposed exile in Buffalo under an assumed name (the notably un-Semitic “Robert
Williams”) for the past thirty-five years, is summoned back to his neighborhood by a
mysterious message that indicates knowledge of his earlier life. As Noodles investigates
this summons, he discovers that Max is still alive, having faked his own death, and has
used the gang's pooled monies to finance a rise to Secretary of Commerce under the
equally un-Semitic name of “Christopher Bailey.” Furthermore, Max has married and
sired a child, David, with Deborah (re-named from the novel's Dolores), Noodles' object
of desire from his youth. Max's tenure as Secretary has been publicly exposed as corrupt
and he faces a lengthy prison sentence. During a climactic encounter in Max's mansion,
he requests that Noodles shoot him dead. Max emphasizes how greatly he has ruined
Noodles' life and insists that Noodles is the “only one [he] can accept [punishment]
from.” Noodles elects to refuse this request, choosing to treasure his memories and his
longstanding guilt over an acceptance of this painful revelation. Noodles leaves the
mansion and Max apparently commits suicide by sneaking out of his mansion and diving
into the churning gears of a passing garbage truck.
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Leone comments on the complicity of the government with criminal groups in a
more subtle way then Grey does. In Grey's first-person narrative, Noodles repeatedly and
with great explicitness reaffirms his view that the despite their sanctimonious platitudes
to the contrary, state representatives require the violent labor of gangland types to achieve
their aims. Max's transition from second-rate gangster to Secretary of Commerce throws
the outlaw/government relationship into high relief. While Grey noted how an ascension
up the criminal ladder brings one nearer to the halls of “respectability,” Leone's Max
completes the process, becoming one of those same political types whose hypocrisy once
drove him and Noodles to furious distraction. Occupying this position is a rejection of the
honesty that he and Noodles liked to pride themselves on as they navigated among the
thrall of two-faced representatives of officialdom. The embrace of officaldom is the
embrace of the lie. In both versions of this story, the gang accept themselves for the
hoods they know themselves to be. In this way, they occupy a curiously inverted moral
highground that serves as a mirror to the condescending perspective that those in official
capacities have towards the more overtly crooked members of the underworld. When
Max takes office, he abandons pretensions to that integrity.
The fact that he is the Secretary of Commerce highlights this ironic
transformation. As Secretary, Max's job will be to promote the growth of business and
industry from an officially sanctioned position. There is an implication that a large
number of people in Max's position have histories that are just as sordid as his own. That
Max will be murdered by the mob after the public revelation of corruption under his
regime underscores how closely linked the two entities are. Max will not be killed
because he was corrupt; he will be killed for being sloppy enough to allow the outer
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world access to the fundamental lie that integrity and honor are cornerstones of American
industry and politics.
Leone seized upon the case of Meyer Lansky in attempting to justify Max’s latter-
day behavior and his desire to allow Noodles his revenge. Lansky, in his later years,
sought desperately to be able to live his remaining days in Israel, to die and be buried
there. He was deported by the Israeli government for his reputation as a criminal. Leone
read this belated devotion to his religion as a form of atonement for his long list of
criminal activities. “This would not be possible with an Italian,” claimed Leone. “The
Mafiosi completely ridiculed religion. They only used it as a pretext.”
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While such a
contention could certainly be debatable, it does make a case for Max’s particular struggle
with the specter of his own Jewish-ness. As his corrupt administration crashes down and
he sees that the end of his life is imminent, Max feels a need to both make amends to
Noodles and to regain access to his Jewish self, which he had never before appreciated. It
is difficult to know just how long Max has felt haunted by the loss of his Jewish identity,
yet it is clearly something he feels he must answer to before he dies. It seems that the
ghost of his past is less in the character of Noodles, who could have been summoned at
any point in the previous thirty-five years, than it is the looming reminder of his race, the
lost knowledge of his true individuality. Max has fathered a son who clearly has no
conception of his father’s former identity as both a Jew and a gangster. David, Max’s son
and Noodles’ namesake, is destined to live his life as a Gentile. As he is the only child
that any of the gang members sire, the ethnic inheritance of the crew is doomed. Max’s
fantasy life as a Gentile contains all that will be left as a legacy.
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Lansky's involvement with the U.S. Government also provides a useful real-life
contrast to both Grey's and Leone's hoods. Lansky, a one-time disciple of Arnold
Rothstein, rose to become probably the most powerful Jewish-American gangster of all
time. Lansky's control of gambling and entertainment in Cuba, combined with his
arrangements with Cuban president General Fulgencio Batista, enabled himself and the
mob to practically run the country for much of the decade preceding the rise of Castro.
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Lansky's interactions with heads of state has been well-documented. During World War
II, the federal government enlisted the aid of organized crime members, particularly
Lansky, to prevent potentially crippling labor strikes and to limit black-marketeering in
supplies that could have proven useful to the Allied cause. Lansky, who was allegedly
patriotic anyway, gladly embraced the opportunity to help the government battle the
threat of the Nazis. The American government, for its part, recognized that the mob's
mastery of violence and control of the underworld could help them achieve their ends in a
far more effective manner than if they had strictly relied on legal means or the efforts of
conventional law enforcement. Lansky was also a devoted contributor to Democratic
causes and campaigns, investing heavily to aid the election bids of such figures as
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
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Certainly, there were ulterior motives
to all of these practices; Lansky sought to avoid the interference of the law in his
activities and saw no better way to accomplish this end, then by binding himself ever
more tightly to public political figures. With Lansky, as with Noodles and company, the
accretion of criminal power brought with it a newfound access to legal power. Max, for
all of his megalomania, truly dreamed of being a Lansky-type figure. The problem that
arises for him is that, when he changes sides from the criminal world to the offically-
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sanctioned one, he leaves behind everything that made him who he is. Lansky never tried
to integrate himself officially into the government by pursuing office. In one more crucial
point of comparison, Lansky allegedly gave final consent for the murder of his former
partner and longtime friend, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, after the Combination had lost
trust in the latter amid the complications in his efforts to elevate Las Vegas into a
gambling haven for tourists. Lansky had grown to his prominent role in American
organized crime alongside Siegel and the two had been seen as practically brothers since
their first encounter in 1918.
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Lansky's decision, which he had postponed numerous
times, could certainly be interpreted as a betrayal, especially, since, by the time of the
assassination, Siegel's initially unsuccessful ventures in Las Vegas had crucially turned
the economic corner.
When Max offers Noodles his opportunity for revenge thirty five years after his
betrayal, Noodles refuses to comply. What Max is really asking for from Noodles is a
window into the past and into the self he abandoned. Max did what was necessary to
really make it big in America in the mid twentieth century; he erased all traces of his
Jewish life and became a ruthless and conniving politician. Now, when the game is up
and he is to be executed to keep his mouth shut, he wants an acknowledgement of his past
treachery which will simultaneously acknowledge himself as Max Bercovicz, the Jew
from the Lower East Side who was once part of a less complicated world that he shared
with his best friend Noodles. When he calls Noodles “the only one [he] can accept it
from,” he is not merely referring to a compulsion to settle a debt; he knows that this
former friend is the only one who can permit him to reclaim this identity. When Noodles
refuses, he ensures that not only can Max never recover his place in the “gangland
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brotherhood,” as Peter Babiak has suggested, but also that he can never regain his
specifically Jewish self. “Noodles is the sole repository of the gang’s memory,”
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but he
is also the sole repository of Max’s identity. Although Max continually refers to his old
friend as “Noodles” during their latter-day meeting, Noodles never calls him anything
save “Mister Bailey” or “Secretary Bailey.” Noodles denies Max the ability to die as his
original self. “I really hope this investigation turns out to be nothing,” says Noodles
before departing back into anonymity. “It would be a shame to see a lifetime of work go
to waste.”
When Max asks if Noodles’ refusal is his way of getting revenge, the reply is:
“No. That’s just the way I see things.” Were Noodles to acknowledge Max’s betrayal by
killing him, he would effectively destroy his own memories. By shouldering the burden
of guilt, by refusing the role of victim, he at least gives the wasted exile of his adult life
some vestige of meaning. He explains to Max: “You see, Mr. Secretary, I have a story
also. It’s a little simpler than yours. Many years ago I had a friend, a dear friend. I turned
him in to save his life, but he was killed. But he wanted it that way. It was a great
friendship. It went bad for him. It went bad for me, too.” This is the version of history
that he must adhere to. In this way, by eschewing a violent revenge, it seems that Noodles
placates the specter of his own past. The ghost of David Aaronson would likely never rest
were he to shoot Max and forsake the meager comfort of his memories of friendship and
the thought that his years of guilt-ridden exile were not in vain.
Noodles, for his part, has also been forced to abandon his own Jewish-ness in
order to both avoid retribution from those who consider him an informer and to distance
himself from the shame he feels at having been responsible for the death of his best
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friend. Numerous ghosts from the past haunt Noodles as well. One manifests itself when
Max’s survival is revealed. The ghost of his friend whom he had long believed dead
assumes corporeality before his very eyes and endangers every notion he held about their
past relationship. Another haunting remnant, the one of his own lost Jewish-ness, returns
to him when he first receives the summons in 1968. Noodles is in a different position
than Max. He meets up with various people from his past and they all acknowledge him
as David “Noodles” Aaronson, the Jewish street hood turned gangster turned informer.
Unlike Max, his divorce from his identity as a Jew is far from complete. No one in New
York City calls him “Robert Williams” upon his return; he is, as he had always been,
“Noodles” to them. Max, however, is trapped as “Christopher Bailey.” Even Deborah, the
girl that Noodles once worshipped and who has become the lover of “Secretary Bailey”
lover, refuses to acknowledge that his name is Max Bercovicz.
In the case of Noodles, there exists the ghost of a parallel life, a path he might
have followed had he not been so fatally prone to poor decisions and bad luck. Max has
stolen his money, his girl, and his life. He has lived in luxury, in a mansion on Long
Island ever since. This suggests a different vision of post-criminal/post-Jewish life, the
life that might have been. Noodles, according to his words, would have never followed
the path of politics; in his own words, he “like[s] the stink of the streets” too much (It's
debatable whether Harry Grey's Noodles would share this sentiment. The “stink” of his
neighborhood is one of the things he wishes to leave behind.). Yet the life that could have
been lived were he not punishing himself in exile presents a near-limitless range of
untapped possibilities. Noodles spent ten years of his life in prison and saw his gang’s
plans fall tragically apart only a short time later, perhaps only as long as a few months
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(the film is suitably murky about such details). His entire adult life has amounted to
nothingness. He is left, ultimately, with his memories of a great friendship that never
really was.
The figure of Deborah, Noodles’ would-be childhood sweetheart, is particularly
crucial in regard to the question of Jewish identity. For much of the film, she appears to
represent a path of stability at odds with the instability and nihilism symbolized by Max.
Deborah is generally at ease within her community and maintains friendly relations with
the Hasidic residents of the neighborhood. She demonstrates her knowledge of Jewish
text when she reads from the “Song of Songs” in the Old Testament to Noodles. Shortly
after this moment, the two lean in to share a kiss in the backroom of her family’s deli.
Instead, Max steps in to lure Noodles away with his plan to go looting on Pesach. Rather
than stay with Deborah, he leaves the room to talk to Max and the two are, subsequently,
ambushed by rivals and beaten. When Noodles attempts to return to Deborah afterwards,
she refuses to let him in. Noodles finds himself caught between the two poles of Deborah
and Max and it is one of the great tragedies of his life that at the crucial moments, he
always chooses Max. Noodles tends to blame circumstance, but Deborah will hear none
of it. “It wasn’t my choice,” he explains about his stint in prison. She responds: “Yes, it
was. It still is.” While on the surface, Deborah seems to conform to the “good Jewish
girl” stereotype, she also demonstrates a caustic wit and a formidable ambition to become
a successful actress. When Noodles attempts to romance her in 1933, it is too late. She
has decided to leave New York for Hollywood to seek stardom, a goal she seemingly
achieves. It is unclear whether or not she would leave Noodles behind even if the two
were intimate. Her condescending attitude towards him for much of their lives suggests
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she might well have. While she appears to offer a way out for Noodles from his tragic life
as a hoodlum, the film takes pains to show that it would not be that simple. It is difficult
to imagine Noodles embracing a quiet life in the neighborhood among its peaceful,
Talmud-reading residents and going to the temple every Sunday. Part of the reason he
hates going home is his father’s praying. Noodles is full of frustrated energies that would
need to find some sort of vent. The film seems to split Judaism into two poles: the pious
Hasidic types on the one hand and the irreligious hoodlums on the other. Deborah, who
does not fit easily into either category but clearly identifies more with the Hasids,
ultimately leaves the neighborhood behind. It is never established whether she, herself,
changes her name to a Gentile one upon her arrival in Hollywood. However, the fact that
she later chooses “Secretary Bailey” as her mate implies that she, too, eventually
succumbs to a dilution of her Jewish identity. When Deborah tells him that she will not
remain with him, Noodles, in a recreation of one of the novel’s ugliest moments, brutally
rapes her in the back of a limousine. In this way, he seeks to avenge himself on that
proper example of Jewish behavior that has made him feel inferior for so long. It also
marks the complete break with any hope of achieving a stable life.
Jewish identity amongst the main players of the film is largely present in terms of
ethnicity, rather than religion. The worldview of the gangster characters seems more
nihilistic than anything. During the teenage sequences, Max pressures Noodles to go
looting on Pesach, when all the Jewish shop-owners will be at temple. At no time do the
young hoods wear yarmulkes or read the Talmud. The aforementioned inaccuracy of
showing the Lower East Side with a large Hasidic population as early as the 1920s may
merely be Leone’s attempt to further dramatize the divide between the religious Jews and
71
the strictly racial ones of the film. After all, there is no segment of the Semitic populace
that so externally marks itself as Jewish as the Hasidim. Max’s belated desire for an
acknowledgement of his Jewish-ness does not seem motivated by a sudden discovery of
religion as in the vein of Meyer Lansky.
That Max and Noodles are so easily able to adopt Gentile identities suggests
another ambiguous component of Jewish racial characteristics. The film suggests a lack
of external markers of the racial Jew, which fits in well with the decision to avoid using
Jewish actors. Often in a gangster picture (as well as in gangster reality), the man on the
run will have to employ some sort of plastic surgery in order to help them to re-invent
themselves. In Once Upon a Time in America, not only do they re-invent themselves
without changing their appearances, but they are even able to convincingly change
ethnicities with ease. One is left to wonder what makes these characters Jewish to begin
with. If they have no real attachment to religious ritual or belief and they are not
explicitly marked as Jewish in a physical sense, where then lies the nature of this
identity?
To further complicate this question, it is worthwhile to return to the role (or rather
the lack of a role) of family in this film. Leone was undoubtedly hurt by critics who
rather lazily dismissed early prints of Once Upon a Time in America as a mere “Jewish
Godfather.”
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Such contentions, however, seem more convenient than credible. One of
the most significant elements of Francis Ford Coppola’s celebrated films is the emphasis
on family and the loyalty that it should engender. In Leone’s film, family is
conspicuously absent. While Grey's novel certainly minimizes the influence of families
in the lives of his characters, Leone basically omits them. Max’s mother appears for
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literally a few seconds as she and her son move furniture into their new apartment on the
Lower East Side. Noodles’s family never appears. When asked by Patsy at one point if he
is going home, he replies: “My father’s praying, my mother’s crying, and the lights are
turned off. What the hell should I go home for?” This is his only invocation of life with
his family; the room he shares with them is never even shown. He spends his free time in
his apartment floor’s communal bathroom so he can read Jack London novels and avoid
seeing his folks. Gone is the revelation that Noodles' father was a notorious criminal in
Russia, as are the belated pride and feelings of filial respect this knowledge instills in
him. Patsy and Cockeye, Max and Noodles’ pals and partners-in-crime, are never shown
to have families either. Deborah has some family in her father and brother, Fat Moe, who
she treats rather dismissively; yet she is clearly an exceptional case among the central
figures. The young hoodlums are the ones with no families. For Noodles, family and the
apartment he shares with them is just another excrutiating reminder of the depressing trap
that the Jewish sector of the Lower East Side has come to represent for him. Noodles
sometimes calls Max his “uncle” in reference to an inside joke from back when they first
became friends. Deborah mocks Noodles at one point, by calling Max his “mother” since
Noodles always comes running when Max wants him. The clear familial analogue
between the two would be that of brothers, yet the use of these other terms underscores
the reality that Max is the only real family that Noodles feels that he has. When Noodles
has to spend ten years in prison for stabbing a psychopathic gang leader and the police
officer who intercedes, it is only Max, Cockeye, and Patsy who see him off, and it is
those three who emotionally welcome him upon his release, instantly making him an
equal partner in their now-burgeoning prohibition-era criminal operations. The betrayals
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that will characterize Max and Noodles' futures and undermine their relationship as
symbolic brothers are foreshadowed by one of their first assignments after Noodles
leaves prison when Frankie Minaldi, their central mafia connection, hires them to set up
and kill his own brother, Joe. Family clearly is not linked up with feelings of solace or
loyalty in this film. There is also not a single character in the entire film who could be
construed as a “father figure.” One reason for this may be to point up the undeniable
immaturity of these characters (one of the most notable consistencies between Grey's and
Leone's works). It is striking how childishly they still behave in 1933, one decade after
Noodles first goes to prison to serve ten years for murder. Not one of them is shown in a
mature relationship with a woman. Max only bears a child several decades after he has
already abandoned his Jewish persona for “Christopher Bailey.” The suggestion of the
film is that these characters, seeming orphans, are forced to forge their destinies without
the luxury of experienced guidance. They are basically rootless. In this may be seen a sort
of symbolic representation of the view of the Jews as a wandering people. While Leone
and his writers made certain missteps in their evocation of Jewish cultural life, this
particular vision of Judaism may have been of more importance to their handling of the
film’s characters. What this also does is further remove Max and Noodles from their
cultural inheritance. With no ties to their families, they have no real ties to their ancestry
or the historic traditions of their culture. They may inherit the legacy of wandering, but
they are not privy to the more intimate details of Judaic awareness.
It is one of this movie’s striking qualities that in a film about Jews that spans from
1923 to 1968, there are no references whatsoever to the Holocaust, World War II, Adolph
Hitler, Russian pogroms, the formation of Israel, or the Arab-Israeli conflicts. This
74
absence is not necessarily attributable to an insensitivity on Leone’s part. Leone, who had
been born in Mussolini’s Rome, was an adolescent when the Germans occupied Rome
after the failure of Italian Fascism and had a first-hand view of how Nazis treated the
Jews. The Leones had family friends who were Jewish and Leone’s father was reportedly
involved in an organization that sought to protect Italian Jews at this time.
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Years later,
when his career as a filmmaker was well underway, he would incorporate Holocaust
imagery into some of his films, including The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (1967) and
Duck, You Sucker. The former film featured a Union prison camp called Betterville,
which was deliberately designed to evoke visions of Auschwitz. A scene in which the
bandit, Tuco, is viciously beaten while a chorus sings nearby was meant to evoke the
Jewish choirs who were ordered to drown out the screams of the tortured and dying. The
latter film featured, among other references, a sadistic colonel antagonist whose
appearance clearly codes him as a Nazi commandante.
In the case of Once Upon a Time in America, there is some other deliberate
purpose for this absence. In that period from 1933 to 1968, Max and Noodles have
abandoned their Jewish identities. Perhaps, “Robert Williams” and “Christopher Bailey”
would have not seemed to need to take personal interests, but the Jews behind those
masks surely would. Historically speaking, Meyer Lansky and “Bugsy” Siegel were
active in supporting Jewish causes on the larger scale. Siegel donated large amounts of
money to Zionist causes and Lansky led violent assaults on pro-Nazi rallies which
occurred with some frequency in New York in the 1930s. The absence of these most
pivotal moments of international Judaism reflects the absence within Max and Noodles
75
that has appeared as a result of their flight from ethnicity. It seems to suggest that they
actually have lost access to these issues.
It is worth noting the film’s alternative “opium theory” which puts a rather
different spin on the events of the film. The film both opens and closes in 1933 with a
drug-dazed Noodles lying in a Chinese opium den, after his plan to save Max has gone
horribly awry. In this interpretation, Noodles’ betrayal has truly led to Max’s demise.
When he begins to smoke from a pipe, he provokes a series of hallucinatory dreams
which make up the film’s 1968 sequences. In these fantasies, Noodles is able to make
himself the victim of the story, thus turning the tables on the ghosts which he already
recognizes will haunt him for the rest of his life (This theory also explains away the
plothole that would have us believe Noodles to be wholly unaware that his supposedly-
dead former best friend had arisen to a highly visible position in New York government,
until the last stages of his return to the city.). Max becomes the ultimate traitor, the Judas,
instead of Noodles. Similarly, Noodles is able to manipulate the specter of Deborah into a
traitor by placing her in the position of Max’s lover. She knows that Max betrayed
Noodles and ruined his life, yet still she elects to live with him. The film has given no
hints prior to this that Max and Deborah would have been interested in one another, save
Noodles’ observation that the two hate each other because they are so alike, but this
convolution of the plot seems the only conceivable way for Noodles to gain any kind of
moral high ground in his dramatic reunion with Deborah. In imagining the rest of his
adult life as a failed waste, he provides himself with the only possible solace for his
position.
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Leone's film was initially met with a certain amount of critical dismissal in the
United States. This was largely due to the interventions of the studio who chopped
Leone's original four hour cut into a two and a half hour version that eliminated a good
deal of the 1923 material and certain key elements from the 1968 sections. Some gave the
re-cut version withering reviews, only later changing their minds about the film when the
original was made available some time later. A public largely disinclined to watch four
hour films stayed away. The film, while successful around the rest of the world, flopped
miserably in the United States.
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Leone, whose personal investment in the project was
great, took the American critical and commercial reception very hard. According to his
son, Leone “did not lose his love for America, but he did feel cheated by some
institutions which dominate there.”
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It is tempting to consider that Leone’s film was sabotaged as a reaction to its
critical view towards the Jewish characters and their violent ways they act out their
masculine impulses. Perhaps, one could also read the recutting of the film as a response
to the ways in which it portrays the secret complicity between gangsters and American
lawmakers (though, Coppola’s Godfather films touched on similar themes). Ultimately,
this would be pure speculation, as the stated reasons for the alteration are consistent with
general Hollywood studio philosophy: it was overlong and American test audiences
disliked the deliberate pacing and the unsavoriness of the violence that its protagonists
employ. It is ironic, though, that this film which would have been anathema to the Jewish
studio heads of early Hollywood for its depiction of vicious criminal Jews, was treated
with such hostility by the studios some fifty years after the heyday of the classic gangland
picture when such characters would have never been permitted onscreen (unless they
77
were camoflagued as Gentiles). The film does not present a flattering portrayal of Jewish
identity; the ambivalence that Max and Noodles show towards their culture is not
contradicted by the appearance or invocation of an ideal model of Jewish masculinity.
Jewish gangsters would begin to appear more regularly onscreen in the years following
Leone’s film. In 1990, the Coen Brother’ Miller’s Crossing, featured the antagonist
Jewish mobster Bernie Bernbaum (played, notably, by Italian-American John Turturro)
whose schemes drive much of the plot forward; the portrayal borders on the traditionally
stereotypical, despite the Jewish heritage of the filmmakers. The following year saw the
release of films like Michael Karbelnikoff’s Mobsters (1991), Barry Levinson’s Bugsy
(1991), and Robert Benton’s Billy Bathgate (1991). The former films presented the
heroes as essentially decent anti-heroes, while the latter featured an appropriately
disturbing Dutch Schultz, played by Dustin Hoffman. Decades later, Nicholas Winding
Refn’s Drive (2011) would feature small-time Jewish mobsters as the enemies of its non-
ethnic white protagonist; one of them reveals that he has ripped off the Mafia as revenge
for enduring their relentless condescension and bullying in regard to his ethnicity. Jewish
gangsters are not uncommon in Hollywood movies now, and Once Upon a Time in
America would appear to have opened the door. Whether such figures are ultimately
“healthy” for a complete undersatnding of Jewish identity is likely to continue to be a
subject of some debate, but the increasing comfort with their usage in Hollywood
indicates that the debate can reach a more public forum.

78

79
Chapter II

Black Street Gangs and the Prospects of Revolution: Sol Yurick's The
Warriors and Walter Hill's The Warriors

Street gangs (also generally known as youth gangs) are often distinguished in
general culture from the gangs that make up organized crime units. Generally speaking,
organized crime groups are often associated with a sophisticated, business-minded
approach and a high level of interactivity with corrupt lawmakers and other members of
legitmate institutions, such as leaders of banking and industry. Their patterns of extortion,
racketeering, bribery, and political chicanery represent a formalized attempt at achieving
financial benefits in perpetuity. Street gangs are generally held to be informal in nature
and associated with less calculated criminal acts that are not designed for long-term
profitability. Yet the distinctions between the two can actually be quite murky, since both
groups rely on hierarchies, discipline, and common goals. In fact, it has been observed
that street gangs can transition from an informal, strictly self-motivated nature to the
more sophisticated, business-minded approach of organized crime groups. Certain
sociological inquiries over the last few decades have concluded that most gangs would
not qualify as organized crime entities, although the most powerful street gangs fit any
reasonable definition. Gregory P. Orvis, after analyzing general criminal behavior among
youth gangs in the 1990s, concluded that “the most developed, and usually most violent,
youth gangs are organized crime groups” because they qualify under the majority of
factors relied upon by sociologist and author of the seminal Organized Crime (1985),
Howard Abadinsky, to identify and define organized crime.
75
The key question posed by
80
Decker, Bynum, and Weisel in testing the organized crime potential of street gangs in
1998, was “To what extent can offenders announce and embrace common goals, motivate
others to join them in a common enterprise, and maintain a monetary and emotional
commitment to the group enterprise of crime?”
76
Their conclusions concurred with
Orvis’, although with the caveat that even those gangs, such as the African-American
Gangster Disciples of Chicago, who have become more highly formalized and organized,
were able to achieve “virtually no penetration into traditional organized crime groups.”
77

Representations of street gangs in the American news media have generally
followed established patterns which, when combined with law enforcement data, have
contributed to a popular image in the public consciousness. Such accounts paint a picture
of gangs as ethnic (usually African-American or Latino), fundamentally violence-prone,
overwhelmingly male, mostly urban (though apparantly able to spread, virus-like, to
outlying rural communities), and often highly organized. The majority of these accounts
feature an alarmist tone that portrays these groups as immediate threats to the stability of
the family, the community, larger society, and moral decency in general. Numerous
studies of these representations, such as Esbenson and Tusinski’s examination of news
items of youth gangs from 1980 to 2006, have demonstrated the dubiousness of many of
these accounts, since all of the above portrayals are highly limiting.
78
Anayltical or
sociological examination of the causes and features of gang phenomenon are rarely
explored in the American popular media.
79
What these portrayals do is underscore the
socially constructed nature of crime. Because little to no effort is made to distinguish one
particular gang type from the hosts of other that have been observed by sociologists and
criminiologists, the effect is to create in the public mind an awareness of a vague, but
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powerful threat. The alarmism present in accounts from the news media and much
popular culture is a useful way of arousing the concerns of the general audience. Yet
these accounts can serve alternate functions for mainstream culture.
These traditional representations of gangs have tended to validate the notion that
they are emblematic of disturbing trends amongst the nation's youth, instead of
attempting to investigate the structural issues within society that made them seem like an
alluring prospect for working-class youth (or youth from other classes of society). In
other words, the gangs themselves have been represented as the problem, as opposed to
the oppressive factors that make them possible, if not inevitable. Their image can be
drawn upon ideologically by lawmaking institutions as a means of representing a scourge
that threatens the foundations of mainstream society's sense of its own security. In this
way, they may be utilized for purposes of social control, as Thompson, Young, and Burns
suggested after scrutinizing thousands of gang-related articles in the 1990s.
80
Monica
Brown, in analyzing 1990s Latino street gangs, has observed: “urban youth have been
increasingly targeted as criminals, and gang members, in general, are pointed to as the
origins of urban decay, violence, and even the destruction of the moral fabric of our
nation.” This leads to an “unwritten assumption... of a community pathology rather than a
structuralist assumption that crime is a response to circumstances.”
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If youth gangs are
successfully represented to mainstream society or “dominant culture” as a threat to
fundamental notions of order and the institutions that dictate contemporary values, then
those same institutions can use them as a means to bind those dominant segments of
society ever closer to the powers that be as protectors of public safety and an upholder of
national ideals. In this way, gangs can be represented as faceless agents of social disorder
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that need not be understood, so much as combatted. Crime, in general, is of use to the
authorities in this way.
82
It can be used to validate the prevailing hegemony. Popular
representations of gangs, therefore, tend to carry an ideological agenda.
By avoiding in-depth examinations of the social causes that lead to gang
formation, ideological institutions and members of the media with exploitative agendas
can avoid accepting responsibility for the existence and proliferation of gangs. The
official narrative of the United States is one that emphasizes national unity. By
demonizing aberrant elements that don't quite fit the idealized concept of “America,”
those forces that are most able to control the narrative actually undermine notions of
national unity. These racialized figures not only look different from the target audience,
runs the narrative, but their aims are to violently threaten that same audience.
The key motivations for youth of all ethnicities to join street gangs is the promise
of a family-like bond (or sense of brother- or sisterhood) with a group and the promise of
a certain sense of loyalty, security, and protection that would accompany it. The bond is
often made visible through the use of certain styles of dress, be it the use of a particular
color or a certain item or ornament of clothing that the gang will wear in common. Gangs
are often very sensitive about the reputations of their gangs and the protection of the
space their particular gang has elected to “occupy.”
The racializing of criminals is a phenomenon that has been carried on through
much of American history. African-American youth gangs have been among the most
stigmatized of all youth gangs in media accounts. A 2005 study by the Department of
Justice, that counted 750,000 members in 24,500 youth gangs across America, suggested
that African-Americans make up 31% of all gang members across the United States,
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second only to Latino gangs which according to the same study constitue 47% of all
members.
83
Disparities in the treatment of minorities by the police as opposed to white
people have been well-documented.
It has been observed, however, that gang membership often does constitute an act
of rebellion against the dominant culture. This is not to say that gangs will commonly
leave their community to terrorize neighboring or even non-local ones. Most gang
violence is directed towards other gangs and the majority of gangs don't regularly leave
their territory. However, the emphasis on wearing the insignia of one's gang and the
“patriotic” attitude that members will have towards their chosen group is a way of
establishing what Brown dubs a “counter-nation” that features its own “national”
identity.
84
This itself, Brown suggests, is a challenge to a phantom national unity that has
been made a fundamental feature in the mythical narrative of the United States.
85
In light
of such conclusions, it is unsurprising that the revolutionary potential of such groups is a
theme that has been asserted by outside observers.
Such a possibility would require that the “counter-nationalist” sentiment of youth
gangs, as well as the allegedly ever-growing numbers of gang members, could mount a
serious threat to the nation's dominant institutions. In the case of African-Americans,
these elements would be amplified by lingering bitterness over centuries of maltreatment
at the hands of a prejudiced hegemony. “Counter-nationalist” feelings make logical sense
when the people in question have been made to feel like inferior subjects in the country
of their birth.
Steven R. Cureton discovers a direct link between black nationalist groups such as
the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and the African-American urban gangs that have
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survived into the present.
86
The black nationalism movement, which peaked largely at the
time that the Civil Rights movement was in full swing, represented a cry for black
independence from white culture opposed to the integrationist sentiments that
characterized the prevailing ethos of the larger movement. Black nationalism called for
the development of a value system and a sense of separatist feeling divorced from those
associated with White America and its legacy of racism, slavery, and segregation. The
Black Panther movement ultimately dissolved as it became increasingly criminalized by
agents of the American government, in particular J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.
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For
Cureton, present-day African-American gangs are the only entities that possess the
capacity to carry black nationalist agendas forward. In spite of Cureton’s claims,
however, it is certainly questionable whether they are actually engaged or interested in
doing so.
In the early 1940's, a cultural trend emerged wherein liberal, white, intellectual
writers anointed themselves as the ones most able to negotiate the problem of black
disenfranchisement. Eric Sundquist has investigated how Jewish writers in particular
would use the common ground of a legacy of oppression as a rationale for investigating
the issues endemic to the African-American's experience in the prejudicial landscape of
the United States. There were many black intellectuals who participated in this
conversation, who eventually came to view Jewish presence in the discussion as
paternalistic or patronizing.
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Certain members of the black community detected an
implicit suggestion that the African-American proletariat were stymied in their
conception of their own plight by a lack of education and general societal awareness and
that the job of articulating their problems would have to fall to the white intellectuals who
85
did not suffer the same cultural drawbacks. For example, Sol Yurick, author of the gang
novel The Warriors (1965), claimed that he was moved to write the novel, because of
what he perceived to be the passive resignation of the urban proletariat to their plight.
89

Since his focus is on African-Americans, there is a clear racializing of that proletarian
community. There seems an implicit suggestion that African-Americans lack fundamental
abilities of articulation or self-actualization. Norman Mailer's essay “The White Negro”
(1957), written in the aftermath of World War II and during the early years of the Civil
Rights Movement, was an effort to understand why many young white men sought to
emulate certain aspects of black culture in the wake of the existential horrors associatd
with phenomona like the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. In this work, Mailer contends
that black men in America, living constantly in the shadow of danger, had “kept for his
survival the art of the primitive” and “relinquish[ed] the pleasures of the mind for the
more obligatory pleasures of the body.”
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Mailer’s intention is clearly to view the
American black man’s predicament in a sympathetic light, as “he could rarely afford the
sophisticated inhibitions of civilization” and lived with the impossibility of grasping the
“cameos of security for the average white.” Yet Mailer’s characterization borders on
depicting young African-Americans as primitivistic and unintellectual. Mailer seems
most interested in the sexuality of black men, which he regards as having a mysterious,
almost overwhelming power. One could argue that, no matter how compassionate the
intent, this kind of writing by white intellectuals tended to replicate certain of the racist
attitudes demonstrated by that same oppressive social structure that they sought to
condemn.
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For many African-American intellectuals and radical thinkers of the 1960s, these
gestures would have seemed insulting and infantilizing. Such black writers as Ralph
Ellison and James Baldwin took umbrage at what they considered Mailer's stereotyping
of African-American men as inarticulate sex-machines.
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These portrayals were seen to
imply that though political or intellectual agency would be forever out of reach to the
African-American community. To be sure, as former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver
illustrated in his memoir Soul on Ice (1968), one of the challenges that white America had
presented to African-American men was the seeming criminalization of their manhood.
For Cleaver, sexuality was crucial for African-American men. “We shall have our
manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.”
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Having a group of white or Jewish intellectuals profess to represent the black experience
would seem to undermine the independent agency that would be a fundamental necessity
required to liberate that masculinity. The solution that the youthful Cleaver had pursued
for liberating his masculinity was the employment of rape as “an insurrectionary act” and
an act of revenge.
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Cleaver would repudiate this behavior in the “On Becoming” section
of Soul on Ice,which he wrote while serving a prison term for his serial rape. The
revelation that Cleaver experienced is that in committing these acts he was actually
falling into a trap. In acting out his revenge in a manner that gratified his sexuality
violently, he was, in effect, living up to the expected standards of the society that treated
his sexuality as fundamentally criminal.
These themes of African-American masculinity and sexuality dominate Yurick's
novel, The Warriors. Whether Yurick's novel, written close to a decade after “The White
Negro,” succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls of paternalism is debatable, but it is useful to
87
first examine what his professed motivations were for writing this book. The son of
Jewish Marxist immigrants and a practicing Marxist himself, Yurick's careers as a
novelist, social worker, and political activist were centered on the dilemmas of the urban
underclasses in New York City in the 1960s. The Warriors was published at the height of
the Civil Rights Movement (and approximately a year prior to the formation of the Black
Panther Party) when political commitment and revolutionary fervor had captured the
passions of much of the nation. Yurick himself was quite active in pursuing the causes of
the period, including an affiliation with Students for a Democratic Society.
Yurick's stated intention in writing the book was, in part, to understand the
passivity of those who occupied “the lower social and economic depths.” In his
experiences working for the Department of Welfare of New York City, he found himself
wondering why his clients didn't fight and organize like his communist parents had done.
(186) Yurick would later claim that he eventually came to understand just how complex
the realities of his clients' situations were. In noticing the tendency of many of the
children to join gangs, Yurick noted both the subversive allure of that lifestyle, as well as
the alarmist popular view that such gangs were “the invasion of the barbarians, only this
time they came from the inside rather than the outside” (187). Gangs, Yurick noted, were
considered an irrational phenomenon. Initially, he sought to approach them as a “pre-
rational” or even “primitive” force, “for what were my clients... but prerational? And
what were the fighting gangs but prerational? (191)”
Just a few years prior to the publication of The Warriors, Austrian ethologist
Konrad Lorenz proposed that men, like their equivalents in the animal kingdom,
possessed an inherent need, a biological drive, for aggression. He also suggested that
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inhibitions controlling aggression kept animals from harming their own kind.
94
For
Lorenz, morality consisted of maintaining an equilibrium between men’s instincts and
the inhibitive patterns of behavior required for social order.
95
In his view, the modern man
“suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive”
96
and that aggressive
behavior has no outlet in the modern community that can be considered “legitimate.”
97

This need is not necessarily a bad thing in Lorenz’s eyes, but it must be accounted for.
Lorenz’s view has been contested over the years, but his focus on an instinctual or
“primitive” need for violence is useful for approaching Yurick’s novel.
Yurick intended his book to follow in the traditions of other youth gang narratives,
such as Irving Shulman's The Amboy Dukes (1947), Evan Hunter's The Blackboard
Jungle (1954), and, especially, Warren Miller's The Cool World (1959), which was a
notable earlier attempt by a white novelist to grapple with the black youth gang
experience. All of these works represented the alienation and anger of urban (usually
ethnic) youth, often from the point of view of the youth in question (Blackboard Jungle is
a notable exception.). Hal Ellson, author of the black street gang novel Duke (1949),
articulated the philosophy behind such works in the preface to his own: “It is time… to
interpret evil anew. Evil is ‘sickness.’ Gang members and gangs are part of a sickness, the
sickness of a society that can blame only itself for what has already happened.”
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Yurick
conceived his premise in the 1950s, but it was, appropriately, not published until the more
politically radicalized 1960s when issues like black nationalism further informed the
outlook on disaffected minority youth.
It must be stated that not all gang behavior can simply be attributed to a reaction
against social oppression. There is the added dimension that there is a gratifying
89
component to gang life; gang members enjoy the subversive details of their lifestyles.
Tim Delaney suggests that the need for “kicks” or thrills is a key element that draws
young people to gangs. The subversive thrill of using drugs and alcohol (generally more
exciting when one is underage), and engaging in acts of violence can give the young gang
member a “rush,” or a feeling of “living on the edge.”
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There is a level of excitement in
enacting behaviors deemed beyond the boundary of acceptibility. This “thrill-seeking”
thesis behind gang membership could complement Konrad Lorenz’s view from decades
before. If the release of aggressive instincts is necessary anyway, it can be doubly
gratifying to unleash it in a way that dominant society would not approve of. The
morality that Lorenz describes would seem to have less purchase for people who have
been left to feel marginalized by the same society that dictates the inhibiting factors
towards behavior. One of the “kicks,” then, would be the feeling of defying the rules
prescribed by dominant culture.
Yurick based his novel very loosely on the Anabasis of Xenophon (considered to
have been written some time in the years after 400 BC). The Anabasis, also known as
The Long March, is the story of an army of young Greek mercenaries who had been
summoned by Cyrus the Younger to conquer Persia. Cyrus' death in battle ensured the
failure of the operation, and the killing and imprisonment of the other senior officers left
the force leaderless. The remaining Greek soldiers had to fight their way through
hundreds of miles of hostile territory to the haven of the Black Sea and the nearby Greek
coastal cities. Yurick claimed to have envisioned his own novel as a Classic Comics-
styled treatment of the story. In using this historical antecedent, Yurick sought to connect
a modern-day phenomenon with a heroic element of the past. The “systemic absurdity”
90
that disenfranchised his clients and their children was tied, in his view, to an “ancient
craziness” that had organically developed during the process of establishing laws and
governments (192). In essence, Yurick viewed the gang phenomenon as timeless,
claiming that the soldiers of the ancient period were, in fact, largely made up of what the
Greeks would have considered juvenile delinquents. Their consignment to military
service was a means of getting them away from society.
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In brief, the novel is an account of fifteen hours in the lives of African-American
gang members in New York City, with special emphasis on the Coney Island Dominators;
a small, insignificant outfit in the larger backdrop of New York City gang life. Their
ranks include Papa Arnold, the leader; Hector, his second; Lunkface, whose instinctual
lusts for violence and sex represent the most extreme passions that motivate the gang; and
Hinton, the gang's artist and the eventual protagonist of the novel. Seven representatives
of the Dominators head to a large gathering of gangs in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx
on the 4
th
of July (a date that underscores the novel's focus on the prospects of revolution)
to attend a speech by Ismael Rivera, a politically-minded gang leader who dreams of
uniting the city's various youth gangs into an unstoppable army. When Rivera's oration
fails due to disturbances that escalate into a riot and his seeming murder, the Dominators,
minus their own leader, flee the scene and begin their own Long March as they try to
figure out how to return to Coney Island, a fifteen mile trek through territory occupied by
rival gangs. After an incident with a police officer at a subway stop, the gang separates
into three groups. One group is taken to prison after they attempt to rape a drunken nurse
in a public park. One group fearfully rides another subway train towards home. The third
is comprised solely of Hinton, who ventures on a symbolic journey into the underworld
91
of a midtown subway station and experiences a symbolic (though ironically undercut)
rebirth and transformation into manhood. The novel is ultimately an examination of the
ways in which the compromised nature of black manhood interferes with efforts among
the disenenfranchised youth to mobilize an effective revolution, as they burn out their
energies instead on self-destructive and short-sighted pursuits of sex and violence.
The Dominators are not a terribly sophisticated operation. Their “prerational” or
“primitive” status is one thing that keeps them from achieving greater status in the
criminal world. The perception of black crime as disorganized was commonplace in the
popular imagination. In 1971, Nicholas Gage claimed that the barriers towards black
criminals achieving positions of status in organized crime. He mentions how Jewish,
Italian and Irish gangs generally grow and promote from within and “no door is more
firmly locked to blacks than the one that leads to the halls of power in organized
crime.”
101
Gage does acknowledge the relatively successful criminal career of Ellsworth
“Bumpy” Johnson who led a drug operation in Harlem with the assistance of the
Mafia.
102
Gage omits mention of Stephanie St. Clair or Caspar Holstein whose gambling
operations in 1930s Harlem grew quite lucrative.
103
In the moment Gage was writing, his
own claim was being challenged by figures like Leroy “Nicky” Barnes and Charles
Lucas, drug-dealing crime lords who emerged from benath the Mafia umbrella and whose
operations grew to considerable size and complexity in Harlem.
104
During the time of
Yurick’s writing, prior to the rise of Barnes and his generation into independent black
crime, there was a certain lack of visible black gangsters. The organization and
philosophy behind those men, though, would contradict the notion that such criminal
behavior lacked rational inspiration.
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While the Dominators are disorganized, they are not totally without rules. The
teenaged gang (the youngest is fourteen) is designed as a hierarchy with each member's
position marked with a familial term. The leader, Papa Arnold, is the Father. His second,
Hector, is the Uncle. The rest of the members are titled from Eldest Son down to
Youngest. Some of the gang have additional titles, such as Hinton, the artist; and Bimbo,
the bearer (meaning he carries the gang's essential items: alcohol, cigarettes, candy, cash,
subway tokens) and treasurer. Consistent with this nomenclature is the gang's alternative
moniker as the Family. The authority of the senior members, especially the Father, is not
to be challenged by those lower down in the hierarchy. Yurick once claimed that youth
gangs, far from being philosophically opposed to authority, actually craved it, though not
in the forms that bourgeois culture preferred. Among the novel's crucial and consistent
themes is the failure of various kinds of authority. Papa Arnold, after his separation from
the gang, elects to abandon his fellow members to fate and finds his way home without
them. When the gang loses touch with Papa Arnold amid the riot, they later decide to
rewrite the hierarchical roles: Uncle Hector is named temporary Father, and
uncontrollable Lunkface, the most violent and vicious member, is named Eldest Son to
dissuade him from starting confrontations in the absence of Papa Arnold's authority.
The gang members' actual families are referred to as “the keepers” and their
homes are collectively dubbed The Prison. Hinton's own homelife is dominated by the
abusive, drunken behavior of his mother's boyfriend, Norbert; and the lost, heroin-
addicted ramblings of his brother, Alonso, who appears to be having an incestuous
relationship with their sister. Since their own families do not seem interested in them,
they turn to each other to form a bond of brotherhood, a phenomenon consistent with
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observations of gang scholars. Papa Arnold forms the gang with two mottoes (both
adopted from subway posters) in mind for them to live by: “When family life stops,
delinquency begins.” “Be a brother to him”(15). Yet Yurick exhibits scepticism towards
how legitimate any of these sentiments are. The interactions of the Family are rife with
bitterness, confrontations, and acts of deceit, both major and minor. The senior members
abandon their adherence to discipline and ritual as soon as they are separated from their
subordinates. Minor disagreements flare up into heated confrontations.
The Dominators, like most gangs in the novel, wear a carefully selected uniform
when they represent themselves in public: “blue, paisly-print, button-down-collar shirts
and too-tight black chino pants, high-crowned narrow brimmed straw hats with their
signs: cracked-off Mercedes Benz hub-cap ornaments- hard to come by- with safety pins
soldered in the school shop to the three-ray halo-stars” (16). This insignia is an important
aspect of their group identity, as significant as their association with their geographical
turf of Coney Island. To lose it would be a source of shame and would require the quick
acquisition of a replacement. As Yurick suggests, these pins are hard to come by since
Mercedes-Benzs’ rarely venture into their territory. The appropriation of these relics of
the upperclasses as symbols of their own group identity have a complex connotation. The
Mercedes Benz is a luxury of the privileged and the stealing of one of its trademark
symbols is a subversive act, especially since the Dominators outwardly parade them in
public. They have vandalized a valued instrument of the rich and have elected to boldly
show off the result. Yet this also represents their desire to associate themselves with the
proscribed goals of dominant culture. What they use as their identifying emblem is still
an emblem of privilege, even if it has been repurposed.
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A constant pressure on gang members like the Dominators is the necessity of
always having to maintain one's manhood or “face” when confronted with other warriors
from opposing gangs or even from within their own. The simplest disagreements escalate
into intense contests to determine which of the two sides will lose the most respect.
Casual encounters become macho showdowns in an instant and a series of ritualistic
posturings and passive-aggressive statements ensues wherein each participant tries to
force his adversary to back off first. In these instances, there seems little desire by either
boy to engage in actual physical violence. In fact, the Dominators don’t get into any
fights with other gangs in the entire novel, though Yurick establishes that they do indeed
get into scraps from time to time. These rituals of “face” are performances, which are
largely necessary because of the presence of their comrades. It is crucial to maintain this
masculine poise, to avoid humilation or judgment. This notion of performance is
underscored by Hinton’s careful establishment of his reputation as a fighter. It is revealed
that he doesn't particularly like confrontations, “not having the strength or the heart”, but
has strategically created an aura of toughness by choosing the right times in conflict to go
a “little psycho” (52). Every now and then, Hinton will take part in one of the gang’s
fights and behave as wildly as possible. Since he often chooses to avoid antagonistic
encounters, these “psycho” episodes make him unpredictable. Since, “everyone feared
the flip,” the other members give him space and don’t challenge him when he sits out
other confrontations.
These confrontations don’t merely occur between hostile gang members. Manny
Bernstein, the Youth Board Worker for the Delancey Thrones gang, notes how, even
though he has helped them, the “protocol” of their meetings “was still touchy.” Manny
95
cannot enter the gang's clubhouse until they formally invite him in. “Infringement led to
resentment: their manhood was delicate and easily wounded.” Manny is willing to wait
long minutes for his invitation, since he understands that, in their exertion of this meager
form of power, “it maintained their identity” (9).
The gang's interactions with women demonstrate further challenges to their
manhood. When the gang meet a feisty girl who tries to get them involved in an
unnecessary brawl with her own neighborhood gang, the Borinquen Blazers, they identify
her as a “bitch.” As the leader of the Blazers and Hector size each other up, with the
Dominators (feeling vulnerable on foreign soil after escaping the riot) attempting to be as
placatory as their self-respect will allow, the girl (she is given no other name) mocks the
manhood of the chief Blazer, trying to force him to take one of the Dominators'
trademark Mercedes-Benz pins as payment for safe passage though the territory.
When the girl follows the Dominators after their symbolic victory over the
Blazers, her influence inspires them to prove their manhood in more dramatic effect. With
her in tow, they collectively attack a passerby for the transgression of looking at them for
too long. They stomp and stab him to death one after another as the girl moans
orgasmically. After the murder, the Dominators turn on her and gang rape her before
ditching her and running into a subway station. After perpetrating these acts, the
Dominators share a quiet moment, reflecting on their toughness (“Now they know the
kind of men we are,” says Hector. “No one steps on the Dominators” (103).) and laughing
together. Yet this shared moment stops abruptly, as an argument ensues over who pleased
the girl the most. Initially, these communal acts of violence had appeared to solidify the
group. Yet the power trip that they feel from dominating both the pedestrian and the girl
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with their violence, isn’t destined to last. It becomes replaced by the constant need to
establish dominance over one another.
Recent sociologists like Chris O’Sullivan (1998), in her comparison of gang
rapists and wifebeaters, and Suzanne Hatty (2000), in her analysis of physical abuse of
teen boys towards girls, have each observed the performative aspects of gang rape, which
O’Sullivan suggests is largely not an erotic act, but one of establishing dominance over
another.
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Hatty proposes that “violence enacted in company is the social glue that knits
together the social glue of young males. It valorizes the masculinity of each boy,
positioning individuals within a hierarchical order and emphasizing the differences
between genders.”
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While Hatty was writing many years after the publication of the
novel, her argument is relevant to its portrayal. When the Dominators are united in their
violence, their supposedly familial bond is at its strongest; for that moment, they are all
men. Yet, it seems their masculinity requires continual reaffirmation. After the immediate
gratification has passed, battle lines must be drawn again even amongst one’s peers; the
“glue” sticks only for so long. They had proven themselves to be in more elevated
positions in a hierarchy of power, but soon, it becomes necessary to fight for some small
sense of domination all over again. They must place themselves in a hierarchical
relationship to one another on the basis of masculine achievement, a way not dictated by
the supposed order of their rankings within the gang. Suitably, they resolve the arguments
with a literal urination contest.
When Bimbo, Lunkface, and Hector split off on their own after the subway
incident, they decide, contrary to the gang's tradition, to remove their pins, the markers
that most identify them as gang members. This act is in direct contrast to the lower-
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positioned Dominators, Dewey and the Junior, who never remove their gang markings,
fearful as they are of any potential penalties, should the senior members become aware.
Shortly after removing their pins, these senior members attempt to gang rape a drunken
nurse they encounter in a city park. Lunkface is the initiator and Hector, the acting Father
in the absence of Papa Arnold, is unable to dissuade him. Once the trappings of ritual
and formality are abandoned, Hector's stature as the gang's substitute authority loses all
of its power. Lunkface, whose promotion to Eldest Son had been had been granted to
keep his wildness in check, is now Hector's equal and will not consent to recognize his
power. This loss of authority is accompanied by a loss of that manhood they so cherished.
Initially, the large and strong nurse appears to be in an inviting mood. As Hector gropes
her, she holds him in an aggressive embrace. Hector is stunned and tries to break free,
“because it was the man who did things, not the woman, not some woman they were
going to give it to anyway” (143). The nurse turns against them upon discovering that
they intend to steal her money, and ably fights the three Dominators to a standstill until
police officers arrive on the scene to haul the gang members off to jail.
Hinton, whose relationship to his own manhood appears to undergo the most
profound transformation, escapes the subway confrontation by fleeing alone along the
tracks of an unlit tunnel. Hinton only gradually emerges as the novel's central character;
during the first half of the novel, there appears little to distinguish him from the rest of
the gang, save for his bemused irritation at the superstitions of the others when they
decide to leave the temporary safe haven of a graveyard for fear of ghosts.
In the subway tunnel, Hinton succumbs to fear as he attempts to navigate through
impenetrable darkness, worrying that at any moment a train might come rushing towards
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him. This fear, endured alone without the relative protection of the Family, causes Hinton
to feel shamefully that he is, after all, a child and not a man. D. B. Graham has suggested
that the novel “tests gang identity versus individual identity” and that in this moment,
Hinton faces the “consequences accruing from being cut off from the gang.”
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The
terrified Hinton begins to despair of his role in the gang and rejects symbolically his
position as a Dominator: tearing off and stomping on his cap, and using his Magic
Marker on the tunnel wall to put down the Dominators with pejoratives. Upon reaching
the Times Square Station, he emerges from the tunnel into an underworld scene of pimps,
prostitutes, and junkies. Hinton, though he does have sex with one of the prostitutes,
regards them all with contempt. He is most unsettled, however, by the homosexual
figures who mill among the scene. The manhood that he fights so hard to establish is
threatened by alternative displays of masculinity. Yet, following an episode where
Hinton, after many efforts, finally beats an arcade shooting game against a taunting
sheriff, he considers taking one of the homosexuals aside for a sexual encounter. His
sense of his own masculinity now disproportionately steeled, his first instinct is to subvert
his traditional manliness through a sexual liaison with a figure who represents alternative
masculinity.
Hinton's solo adventure appears to strengthen him enough to become as a new
Father when he eventually reunites with Dewey and the Junior (considered by the others
as the gang's mascot due to his relative youth) at the Times Square Station. These two
experience the least dramatic journey after the gang splits up. They board another train
and sit quietly, though, as mentioned above, without removing their identifying gang
markers. Hinton takes charge of the small group and leads them on a night-time
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vandalism raid on the territory of a rival gang known as the Colonial Lords. The
consequences that Graham speaks of, while they initally reduce Hinton to state of near-
helplessness, ultimately enable him to achieve a step towards maturity by way of setting
aside his proscribed role as a junior member of a hierarchical unit. Yet Hinton's seeming
passage to manhood is undercut when the group returns to their home turf, only to
discover that Papa Arnold, the Father, has preceded them home by several hours. Arnold
has apparently played it solo, navigating his way back to Coney Island and neglecting to
find or help his Family members. The novel ends with Hinton, back home at The Prison,
trying to fall asleep while curled up on a fire escape in the fetal position, his thumb in his
mouth. Despite all of his ambitions to prove himself as a man, Hinton is reduced to
infancy. In his gang, as in his family, the failure of those in the senior positions prevents
the mature progression of those who are subordinated. When Hinton strays away from the
gang identity and is left to rely on his individual identity, he achieves a moment of self-
actualization. Unfortunately, this progress is stifled when he, having no clear alternative,
must return to the fold of ganglife where he will once again resume his position at the
bottom of both the hierarchy of the gang and his home.
In opposition to the Family is the world of the Other, a term Yurick uses liberally.
The Dominators are consistently faced with the prospect of navigating through the land
of the Other. The Other include white people, the police, schools, lawmakers, other
gangs, and adults in general. The other is everything that defines dominant, exclusionary
culture. The Other is what the Dominators are not. When the Dominators are out of
Coney Island, they are in the domain of these Others. When the Dominators venture forth
from Coney Island, it is represented as a journey into foreign lands. The gang cannot
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appreciate any similarities between themselves and these Others. They, in fact, seem to
define themselves primarily by their exclusion from the dominant culture. Their name,
the Dominators, appears intended to be ironic. While they may hold some sway in their
home territory, they do little in the way of dominating when confronted with the larger
tableau of New York City and the many neighborhoods, citizens, and gangs that comprise
it. They dominate the pedestrian and the girl through their communal acts of violence, but
their gratification is short-lived and they turn on each other shortly afterwards. The Other
appears to them as monolithic and the means of domination that they have at their
disposable are meager before it.
This concept of the Other is crucial to the thoughts of Yurick's voice of revolution,
Ismael Rivera, a seventeen-year old Puerto Rican visionary with “the impassive face of a
Spanish Grandee, the purple-black color of an uncontaminated African, and the dreams of
an Alexander, a Cyrus, a Napoleon” (8). Rivera is the undisputed leader of the Delancey
Thrones, probably the most powerful youth gang in the city. Rivera's dream is to unite the
city's many youth gangs into one insurmountable force to challenge New York's law
enforcement. By his estimation, this army would total 100,000 strong against the police
force's number of 20,000. Rivera seeks to ignite a revolution whereby the gangs would
conquer the Other and seize control over the city.
Ismael, who “[knows] how to keep them hating” (27), cultivates the collective
rage of his followers towards the Enemy, his alternate term for the world of the Other.
When one of Rivera's men, Secretary (in Rivera's gang, job titles take precedent over
individual names or nicknames; his closest advisor is known as War-Counselor),
expresses wistful admiration for the trappings of the “good life”- complete with an
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“impressive house with a rich T.V . Interior,” “a long, long car to leap into, gleaming and
heavy with a lot of chrome,” and a “slender, huge-breasted wife, a blond, encrusted with
shining stones” (26), – he is upbraided, with Ismael's approval, by War-Counselor that
“[he] should want to throw rocks” at those refined, elegant homes, and that his daydreams
are the “nearest [he] is going to get to” that life. Secretary is a figure who while situated,
as a gang member, against the Enemy, finds himself aspiring to the ideals promoted by
that same Enemy. In this way, the Enemy, which represents more than just the law,
provides itself a form of insurance against the prospect of revolution. Secretary has not
found within him or his gang a replacement for those inherited goals. Rivera’s
revolutionary ideals have yet to truly penetrate the thinking of some of his own followers.
Secretary, though humbled, finds himself wishing that Ismael had approved of his
longing. In no time, his dreams of the “good life,” as dictated by the Enemy, return.
At the summit in Van Cortlandt Park, Rivera sermonizes that the gang members
are “all lost, lost from the beginning and lost now, lost till their deaths.” He focuses on:
the Enemy, the adults, the world of the Other, those who
put them down. The courts and the prisons and the school-
prisons and the home-prisons; these put them down...The
ones who held all the good things of life and misered it out-
cheap living, televisions to dream with, the over-priced and
easily re-possessed cars, cheap-slick clothes, all to be
earned by breaking their backs for the rest of their lives-
these put them down. (35)
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The gang members pass along Rivera's words in a manner not unlike the game of
“Telephone,” in which one whispered message is passed along quietly from one person to
the next with the aim being to see how closely the final version compares to the initial
one. The result is that the message becomes gradually diluted.The increasing incoherence
of the message as it is repeatedly conveyed combines with the steadily building agitation
that accompanies rival gangs having to occupy the same space. For a few short moments,
it appears that the gang members are internalizing Ismael's message and grasping the
power that they all could collectively wield.

But it could only hold for a second; too many things probed
at the skin that united them all. What Ismael said got
garbled in the passage because the communicators and the
listeners to the Word could hardly understand its power or
meaning, and so saying it right, or hearing it right wasn't so
important. The dissident elements couldn't stand it. Some
gangs had too much rep; some too little... Their harsh
hatreds could only rest for a second at a time and they must
break out, knowing only to offer violence before it was
offered to them... Most of the others could never dare place
themselves far from their dreamy wants of kicks, power,
women, cars, clothes, and honor.... (40)

Rivera's dream is lost on the gangs in large part because he can't inspire them to
fight off their conditioning to hate one another over their differences or old rivalries, and
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conditioning to fear the Enemy while, like Secretary, simultaneously aspiring to its goals
and priorities. Ultimately, Rivera is shot by many members of the gangs, who had
brought firearms as gifts or offerings for him, and is badly wounded. Their initial hopes
for inspiration are replaced by resentment and distrust. (While Rivera appears to die in
The Warriors, Yurick would bring both him and Hinton back for his later novel, The Bag
(1968), a bleak examination of the lives of welfare department employees and their
clients.) The cynical conclusion is that the gangs are unleadable. It does not appear to be
a failure in leadership that dooms the revolution, but a failure on the part of the followers
to put Rivera's message above their own petty immediate whims and desires. To put it
bluntly, Yurick's story suggests there is no real hope for political solidarity amongst these
youths.
In the 1970s, Yurick was approached with offers by two separate parties interested
in adapting his novel into a feature film, one from a group of independent filmmakers and
the other from representatives from Paramount Pictures. Yurick elected to sell the rights
to Paramount, mainly because The Warriors had been out of print for some years and a
well-financed and marketed adaptation might likely ensure its re-circulation.
(Incidentally, he was correct; the novel has remained in print continuously since the film's
release.) By 1979, when the film was released, the cultural landscape was different from
when Yurick wrote the novel. The book was partly an effort to engage with the themes of
the Civil Rights movement and the development of black nationalism. The film emerged
in a climate that was not quite so politically charged. The post-Vietnam, post-Watergate
era was defined by more of a malaise, though racial tensions had certainly not ceased
since the 1960s.
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The end result of the adaptation process was a film that Yurick himself called “an
evisceration and distortion of my book”
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for its alterations and perceived compromises,
though he always maintained that he had expected such a result from a studio project
anyway. In spite of his objections, the finished film was enthusiastically embraced by the
public. Director Walter Hill's film adaptation of The Warriors (1979) would accumulate
an enduring cult audience for decades after its release (even spawning a few successful
video games) and is, ironically, the primary reason why the book still exists in the public
imagination.
Films about juvenile delinquents had a long history prior to the 1970s. William
Wellman’s Wild Boys of the Road (1933) concerned the fortunes of disenfranchised,
homeless teenagers driven to lives as hobos, and was, perhaps, the most significant of a
series of depression-era films about teenaged criminals, including such titles as Wanted
By the Police (1938) and Boys’ Reformatory (1939). In the post-World War II era, films
about youth gangs began to proliferate amid a general social anxiety about juvenile
delinquency, inspired by the newfound independence of American teenagers. One of the
first youth gang films of this era was The Wild One (1953) in which a rebellious
motorcycle gang enters a small town and inspires panic among the residents. Yet, the
gang of The Wild One and those of many other youth gang films of the era, was as white
as the society they stood in opposition to. The question of race was rarely explored in the
early stages of the juvenile delinquency genre, though Richard Brooks’ Blackboard
Jungle (1955), an adaptation of Evan Hunter’s novel, was an exception. It is the story of a
white schoolteacher’s struggles with the angry and troubled youth that populate his
classroom. The disaffected teenagers in the film are not of a single race; rather, they are a
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mixture of white, black, and Latino youth who are united in their antagonism towards
their restrictive school system. Notably, the film is told from the teacher’s point of view.
Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story (1961), adapted from the 1957
musical, used racialized gang violence as the backdrop for its updating of Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet. This film was a stylized treatment of gang life that notably avoided the
sociological bent of many gang films that had at least a surface message that youth gangs
were a major societal problem that needed to be addressed. Instead, it used it as a poetic
backdrop for its cross-cultural romance. Its abstract and colorful vision of New York
would influence Hill’s violent, though no less stylized, depiction of the city.
When Walter Hill took on the job of The Warriors he was still in the early stages
of a lengthy directorial career, after a successful stint as a screenwriter for movies made
by the likes of Sam Peckinpah (The Getaway, 1972) and John Huston (The Mackintosh
Man, 1973), that would see him specialize in rugged action films that largely focused on
themes of brotherhood, courage and loyalty among groups of tough men, including Hard
Times (1975), The Long Riders (1980), and Extreme Prejudice (1987). Hill would also
develop a reputation for directing action films that featured multiple, differently-raced
protagonists, including 48 Hrs. (1982) and Trespass (1992). The former would prove to
be Hill’s first major commercial success. It teamed Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy as a
white police officer and a black convict who, despite clashing repeatedly, together
overcome their mutual enemy. This film’s popularity would intiate a wave of bi-racial
buddy pictures, including Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon film series. In these films, the
theme of racial solidarity was conveyed as a part of the entertainment package. These
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were not intended as “social issues” films, although issues of racial difference were
occasionally invoked.
Hill’s initial plan was to feature an all-black cast as the lead gang, but was denied
this opportunity, because the studio decided it would doom the project’s commercial
appeal. Looking back in 1993, Hill would admit to having once considered the film a
“terrible failure” because of this concession.
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Instead, one of the key changes from the
book to the film would be the reconfiguring of the gang as multi-racial. While this may
have dismayed Hill, it was an approach that proved quite popular. The multi-racial unity
aspect would prove a key component to the film’s relatively optimistic (at least as
opposed to its source material) outlook. Actually, The Warriors was not the only gang
film of 1979 to address the possibility of alliances between gang members of different
ethnicities. Much of the running time of Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers (from Richard
Price’s 1974 novel), is devoted to the mutual antagonism between the titular Italian-
American gang and their black rivals, the Del Bombers. The climax of the film finds the
two gangs, as well as the all-Chinese Wongs and the hybrid Baldies, uniting against the
large and murderous Irish-American gang the Duckies. The mixed-race union wins the
day and the victorious gangs’ help each others’ wounded. 1979 also featured a host of
other gang films, apparently inspired by the success of Saturday Night Fever (1977).
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Walk Proud and Boulevard Nights focused on Latino gangs from Los Angeles, while
Over the Edge focused on a band of white suburban youths. This trend explains why
Yurick’s novel, as gritty and unpleasant as its content may seem, was pursued by
Paramount; it was a gang story and gang stories were in.
107
Paramount’s objections to Hill’s plans for an all-black cast are interesting,
considering that black members of organized crime had been featured well before this.
Black gangster films were a staple of the “race film” genre in the 1930s. These films,
which were often profitable at the time, featured mostly black casts and personnel and
largely consisted of imitations of Hollywood productions. This derivative quality
combined with the fact that white people provided a considerable amount of the money
for these productions has led to a diminishment of their cultural reputation.
111
However,
films like Dark Manhattan (1937) and Bargain with Bullets (1938) were for some time
the only productions where a black actor could play a gangster anti-hero. Hollywood
didn’t present black gangster protagonists until the 1970s with blaxploitation films like
The Mack and Black Caesar (both 1973), the latter of which was a remake of Little
Caesar, and actually featured a black protagonist who allies, for a time, with the Italian
Mafia.
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In spite of these recent precedents for black anti-heroic gangsters in movies, the
notion of a black street gang as the featured protagonists was a step too far for
Paramount.
Hill enjoyed the central premise of Yurick’s novel, but was impressed with neither
his depictions of gang violence and urban squalor, nor his concern for the political
implications of such groups. Hill would later contend that he never thought that the
“realism” of the novel was unconvincing and that the story's strength was that it
possessed an “elegance and simplicity” and worked as a “pure chase story.”
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Hill
considers it a strength that his film avoids consideration of the gang as a product of social
forces.
108
I think the most unusual thing about the film was the fact
that it didn't present the gang and gang structure as a social
problem. It presented it as simply a fact, the way things are,
and not necessarily negative. It presented them from their
point of view. Up until then, I think all of the movies had
been more like, "Let's look at the situation and figure out
why these people are not turning out to be doctors and
lawyers and dentists." This was a movie that accepted their
values and essentially understood that a street gang was a
defensive organization rather than an offensive one. It
didn't preach to them about middle-class values. And I
think that's what made the movie unique. When you look at
the movie, it's more like a musical than some grimly
realistic thing.
114

Hill's comments indicate the film's general avoidance of Yurick's concerns with
revolution, or the causes and consequences of gang violence. He removed certain of
Yurick's more ironic critical touches, such as the placing of the story on the 4
th
of July or
the usage of the Mercedes-Benz emblems, aswell as much of the intense cynicism that
colors the novel's attitude towards both the gang and the world of the Others. Rather, he
considered the narrative as a skeleton upon which to drape an explicitly fantastic
sensibility. The “social problem” narratives that Hill spoke against likely include the host
of juvenile delinquency books and movies such as The Blackboard Jungle and The
Amboy Dukes, texts that Yurick found indispensible in his creation of the novel. In
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avoiding a perspective informed by “middle class values,” Hill sought to create a
narrative that would be decidedly uncritical about the gangs, as well as about larger
society. The film, despite containing more episodes of violence than the novel, ultimately
presents a more optimistic view towards its characters and their journey.
In his director's cut, Hill adds an introduction to the film in which he narrates the
basic plot of The Anabasis, finishing his account with: “Theirs was a story of courage.
This, too, is a story of courage.” While this sequence is not present in the original
version, it does underline the sensibility that fueled the project. Hill’s gang are intended
as heroes and none of them (save for the wild Ajax, who provides the gang’s primary
source of internal strife) do anything morally reprehensible enough to violate this
sanctified status. This is in direct contrast to Yurick’s novel whose attitude towards the
courage and masculinity of the gang is considerably more ambivalent. Their journey
home is certainly a dangerous feat, but the violent acts that the Dominators engage in, the
murder of the pedestrian and subsequent rape of the girl, are reprehensible and unheroic.
Yurick’s novel is sympathetic towards the Dominators’ isolated status in the stratified
socio-cultural milieu of twentieth-century urban America, but such sentiments are
intermingled with a cynicism about their ability to battle the dehumanizing influence of
dominant culture. The violence in Hill's film would hinge largely on a series of carefully-
choreographed action set-pieces between the central gang (now older, multi-racial, and
actually renamed “The Warriors”) and a number of distinctive rival gangs, including most
notoriously the Baseball Furies, a face-painted, bat-wielding ensemble apparently
intended as a hybrid of A Clockwork Orange's “droogs” and the New York Yankees. The
violence itself is highly stylized; characters recover instantly from direct hits with
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baseball bats and no one appears to suffer broken bones or traumatic injuries amid all the
fight scenes. The film, in essence, is a celebration of the titular gang and the portrayal of
their journey encourages audience identification. The viewer is encouraged to cheer for
their ultimate triumph.
The plot of Hill's film, while superficially similar to the source material, differs
from Yurick's in certain crucial ways. The gang sends nine representatives to Van
Cortlandt Park to attend the gathering of gangs which is now presided over by one Cyrus
(re-named from Ismael Rivera in a manner more directly linked to Xenophon), the thirty-
something leader of the Gramercy Riffs, the most powerful gang in New York. Cyrus, in
the midst of his sermon is shot to death by Luther, leader of the Rogues, who manages to
frame the Warriors for the crime. After losing their leader, Cleon (who unlike Papa
Arnold does not resurface in the narrative) in the ensuing melee, the remaining Warriors
set off to return to Coney Island, while being actively hunted by virtually every other
gang in the city, who are aided in their search by the radio updates of a gang-affiliated DJ.
The newly-appointed surrogate leader of the Warriors, a white man named Swan, strikes
up a romance with Mercy, a young woman (clearly based on “the girl” from the novel)
formerly associated with the Orphans, a minor, disrespected gang who were not notified
about Cyrus’ summit. The gang splits up as in the novel and certain members are killed or
arrested as they encounter rival gangs or the police. Those left alive and free manage to
return home and establish both Luther's guilt and their own innocence in a climactic
encounter with both the Rogues and the Riffs. The film ends with Luther being punished
by the Riffs, as the last remaining Warriors wander away down the Coney Island beach.
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One of the film’s most crucial changes in shifting the narrative from a more
realistic tone to one more in line with comic books is the almost total lack of civilians.
The streets are largely empty save for the presence of the Warriors and their antagonists.
In this way, the concept of the Other that so dominates the novel is avoided. The Warriors
may be different from the other gangs because of their hybrid nature, but the notion of
them being threatening towards and threatened by larger society is generally sidestepped.
A dramatic moment where the character Swan stares down and intimidates a group of
well-dressed teenage promgoers on a subway train into leaving at the next stop is the
gang’s only significant interaction with the dominant society. Nothing remotely similar to
the group murder of the predestrian occurs; of course, this is understandable, as such an
incident (along with the subsequent gang rape) would go a large way towards eliminating
audience identification with the titular heroes.
The key changes regarding the gang in the adaptation from page to screen are that
in the film they are multi-racial and considerably older. For example, the actor who plays
Swan, essentially the film's protagonist, is Michael Beck, a white man who was thirty
years old at the time of filming (and looked it). Yurick, in venting his unhappiness with
the film's changes, complained that multi-racial gangs were “all but an impossibility”
(208-9). On this count, however, he is incorrect. While relatively rare, hybrid gangs, as
they are known, have been traced back in America as early as the 1920's, and since the
1980s, they have become considerably more common in Southern California.
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In Hill's
film, the Warriors appear intended as an example of multi-ethnic brotherhood and
solidarity, although the film avoids explicitly hammering the point home. The narrative
features the black and white members of the Warriors working together for their survival
112
against extremely unfavorable odds. They actually appear to be the sole hybrid gang in
the film. Unlike the novel, the brotherhood and affection amongst the members of the
gang is depicted as legitimate and unquestioned; there are no explicit deceits or betrayals.
The comradeship between the differently-raced members that make up the gang is
genuine and lends an inclusionary quality to the gang which may have helped in the
audience idenitification that Hill aimed for in his “story of courage.” If The Warriors are
outsiders, it is, perhaps, because they choose to be inclusive.
What this multi-racial makeup changes, though, is Yurick’s delineation of the
gang as alienated from dominant culture, because of their race. They are not excluded
from dominant culture as members of a traditionally oppressed racial group. Their
exclusion is due to class issues, as one could infer from the previously mentioned
encounter with the promgoers. In one of the film’s ways of avoiding Yurick’s emphasis
on Otherness, the factor of race is not even explicitly mentioned. Yurick's concern was
not so much with masculinity in the broadest sense, but with the masculinity of young
black men, in particular. The portrayal of Swan as the mature leader and romantic lead
serves to dilute this theme. Swan is actually a very conventional protagonist: the white,
quiet man of action, who still has enough traces of sentiment and vulnerability to appeal
to a female lead.
The aging of the gang into a group of adults mostly in their twenties, removes the
factor that the gang members were intended to be at the borderline between childhood
and manhood. It is worth noting that, as late as 1979, Yurick contended that gang
members tended to move out of gang life as they aged out of their teens.
116
This is
another contention that no longer appears wholly accurate. While the landscape has
113
certainly changed since the days when Yurick worked in the Department of Welfare, the
intervening decades have seen many gang members maintain their affiliation far past
their teenage years; by the mid 1990s, 80% of gang members were found to be between
14 and 30.
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The Warriors are old enough ostensibly to no longer require legal guardians
and to not be so obsessed with proving themselves. They are capable and confident,
generally unplagued by self-doubt or feelings of inferiority. Hinton’s struggles with fear
and masculine identity are irrelevant here. The endless patterns of ritual designed to save
face and establish one's manhood are but lightly indicated; this is evident in the scene
when the Warriors ask permission from the far less accomplished Orphans to pass
peaceably through their turf. In fact, it is only the Orphans, stinging from an inferiority
complex and the humiliation of not being invited to Cyrus’ summit, who really are
defensive about loss of face in that encounter. In the battle against the Baseball Furies in
Riverside Park (in Manhattan’s Upper West Side), the unarmed Warriors disarm and
defeat their enemies who, while ostensibly highly skilled in the use of their trademark
bats, are no real match for the heroes. Masculinity, while a persistent theme in Walter
Hill's overall career, is really a marginalized theme in The Warriors.
Even apart from the factors of age and race, the Warriors have very little in
common with their novelistic counterparts; their personalities, such as they are, and
names are completely changed. Ajax (played by James Remar), is the sole Warrior with a
clear analogue to one of the Dominators. While the Warriors do have an “artist”,
Rembrandt, who wields a spraypaint can to tag their logo wherever they deem suitable,
he does not receive a great deal of attention and is certainly not afforded the complex
inner life of Hinton. His vicious and ultimately rapacious nature clearly mark him as the
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equivalent of Lunkface (though Ajax is white). Ajax, in fact, appears to be the figure most
fixated on his own manhood. He ridicules the masculinity of one of his fellow Warriors
when the latter criticizes his crassly spoken desire to use the foray to the Bronx as an
opportunity to “score some trim.” “What's the matter, you going faggot?” is Ajax's
irritated reply; he uses the term “faggot” several other times in the film to describe people
who are acting in an unmanly fashion. Ajax represents an extreme form of
hypermasculinity. Ajax is the only member to challenge Swan’s assumption of leader (or
“war chief”) following Cleon’s death at the hands of the Riffs, and is, in fact, the only
member of the gang to scowl in disgust at the excitement that Cyrus' oration awakens in
his fellow Warriors. In a variation of the novel’s scene of the failed rape of the nurse,
Ajax attempts to rape, and is subsequently arrested by, an undercover cop sitting on a
park bench. Crucially, this is the only scene in the film which depicts the potential for
sexual violence by any of the gang members. Yet, Ajax, coded by his overwhelming
machismo and relentlessly bullying antagonism as the most “unlikeable” of the crew, is
still given a heroic moment just prior to his attempted sexual assault. When The Warriors
are being chased by the Baseball Furies, Ajax successfully leads a counterattack, snarling
to their leader: “I’m going to shove that bat up your ass and turn you into a popsicle.”
Ajax's macho aggressiveness here becomes a rallying point.
The invention of the psychopathic Luther, the twitchy Rogues leader, adds to the
narrative a clear antagonist. His stated motivations for slaying Cyrus and framing The
Warriors are “I just like doing things like that!” and “I’m having a good time!” Luther has
no prior vendetta against The Warriors, no axe to grind; he happens to select them,
because one of their number, Fox, has witnessed him pull the trigger on Cyrus. The
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Warriors' innocence in Cyrus' murder further establishes them clearly as a wronged party,
worthy of audience sympathy. In portraying the murder of Cyrus as the whim of a
singular maniacal villain, the slaying of the ostensible prophet and leader loses its critical
function. Yurick's novel implicates both leaders and followers as failing in the noble
cause of unity and self-liberation. It is the fault of virtually all the gang members present
(the Dominators included, one must assume) that Rivera’s dream dies. In Hill’s film,
Cyrus’ death and loss of his proposal of unity are the fault of a villain. Now, it certainly is
incriminating to the other gangs that they devote themselves fully to the cause of killing
The Warriors simply because somebody (Luther, of course) calls out: “We saw it.... The
Warriors did it!” Yet, those other gangs are largely faceless and devoid of any
characteristics save their outfits and modus operandi. Since the narrative features
characters who are explicitly heroic, perhaps it was deemed necessary to include
someone who fits the bill as the clear villain. Even Luther’s own compatriots in the
Rogues doubt his motivations and sanity, yet none mount any serious threat to his
leadership. Their grudging acquiesence to his mad plans, leads them to be similarly
punished by the Riffs.
Just before the newly vindicated Warriors walk off into the new day’s light,
Masai, successor to Cyrus as leader of the Riffs, tells Swan: “You Warriors are good. Real
good.” Swan replies: “The best.” This idea seems unquestionable, considering the
outcome of their labors. When they walk away, there is no indication of where they are
heading. Do they live in Prisons as do the Dominators? They certainly appear too old to
be controlled by the Keepers. The stripped-down nature of their lives renders them
mysterious, almost abstracted. Domestic life is a nightmare in Yurick's novel; in the film,
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it doesn't even exist. Yet, the earlier interaction between Masai and Swan is one of mutual
respect; there will be no further acts of aggression between their sides (at least over this
particular situation). This suggests the potential for the cessation of antagonism and,
perhaps, a hopeful insinuation for the solidarity that Cyrus envisioned. The Warriors have
proven their innocence and their skill to all the gangs of the city. Perhaps, their running is
over.
Neither Yurick’s Dominators nor Hill’s Warriors are depicted as being ripe for
comfortable assimilation into the society, though in the case of the novel, the causes are
explicit, being based in both race and class. Racial biases make the Dominators unlikely
even to engage with authority by way of a graduation into organized crime. The situation
of the gangs in Hill’s version is left vague, though class reasons would be the likely
cause. The racial and social stratifications of American life that so fuel the novel’s tone
and themes are almost totally elided in the film, which essentially lets society off the
hook.
Hill derided the “middle-class values” that he attributed to the more politically-
and socially-driven content of the novel, and suggested that his film’s uncritical approach
appreciated the lives and perspectives of the characters without subjecting them to
paternalistic or patronizing judgment. Yet, a calculated decision to remove ideology from
a narrative has its own ideology. Hill’s approach also serves to rob the gang of its
legitimately threatening or insurgent qualities. The Warriors are unarmed and are
generally not placed in power struggles against civilians, save for the notable exception
of deviant member Ajax’s attempted rape. Those “middle-class values” are hardly
challenged by Hill, save for the scene between Swan and the youthful promgoers.
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Actually, in this sense, Hill’s unquestioning perspective makes the gangs appear
closer to an irrational phenomenon than does Yurick’s continual emphasis on matters of
cause and effect. Hill’s Warriors are really not much of a threat to greater society. Ajax,
the only clear analogue to a Dominator, is the filmic gang’s most dynamically
transgressive and threatening figure, although he is also the distinct outlier in the gang.
His attempted rape and subsequent arrest are committed when he is isolated and away
from the Warriors. His threatening and uninhibited nature make him, perhaps, the most
provocative figure of the film. The inclusion of psychopathic Luther essentially absolves
the gangs for the clashes in the film. Their fights are the result of misunderstandings;
once the Warriors’ innocence in the death of Cyrus is established, it seems clear that they
will face no further consequences from the events of the night. Cyrus’ speech, in fact,
avoids the discussion of the Enemy and the Other that lends Ismael Rivera’s speech much
of its resonance. Cyrus speaks in vagaries about he “miracle” that has allowed the gangs
to gather together without fighting. He mentions challenging the police and ruling the
city, but avoids description of the gangs’ status in the overall structure of society or about
the poisonous influence of dominant culture.
The comparatively non-threatening nature of the Warriors may well be a reason
for the film’s enduring popularity; however, the film was quite popular among youth
gang members upon the time of its release. Some early screenings were infamously
disrupted by fights among gangs in attendance, which resulted in police officers showing
up outside movie theaters where the film was playing to ensure the peace. In this way, the
film’s release seemed to validate views of gangs as entities driven by aimless and
irrational violence.
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The film has achieved such a level of general popularity that elements like the
kitschy Baseball Furies (parodied in television shows like the Simpsons) and Luther’s
taunting chant of “Warriors! Come out to play!” (used to this day to rile up the crowd at
the start of Golden State Warriors basketball games) have entered the lexicon of pop
culture’s mainstream. The film succeeds as being an exciting chase movie with surreal
touches (such as the notion that New York at night is populated almost solely by roving
gangs), yet avoids the uglier implications that might have kept away viewers whose
interests lay more in the direction of escapism. This has led to the ironic situation where
narrative that was initially conceived as a challenge to dominant culture has become
subsumed within it.
In 1973, an explicitly political film about black gang members roused to a
revolutionary fervor, Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat By the Door (based on Sam
Greenlee’s 1969 novel of the same name), had been removed from theaters by United
Artists (alleged by Greenlee to have been done at the behest of the FBI
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) for being too
politically unsettling for mainsteam audiences. It subsequently remained without
distribution for over thirty years afterwards. In this film, black CIA agent Dan Freeman
(who, throughout his training, had outwardly demonstrated a mild-mannered “Uncle
Tom” demeanor) leaves behind the agency and gathers the various black youth gangs of
Chicago to instruct them in guerilla warfare tactics and rally them into a legitimate
revolutionary force that challenges the police, the National Guard, and City Hall for
control of the city. Even so, the insurgents of The Spook Who Sat By the Door do not
target citizens; it is less a total race war, than an action against a racially-oppressive State
apparatus. Dixon’s film is a very close adaptation of Greenlee’s novel and the two works
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share an identical ethos, as Greenlee took an active role in developing the adaptation. In
these works, Freeman presents the strong leader figure who is able to peel away the
layers of mistrust between himself and the gang members he seeks to impress. The
climax, which finds Freeman dying at the hand of an old friend, Sergeant Dawson, who
would not be converted to the cause, is still optimistic. The forces of revolution have
been effectively mobilized and the revolution has begun to spread to the other urban
centers of the nation. This dramatically demonstrates Steven R. Cureton’s highly view
many years later that in black youth gangs there lay a potentiality for successful
revolutionary action. This conclusion, of course, is in direct contrast to the feelings of
hopelessness that permeates Yurick’s novel, where the gang members cannot be
persuaded and the leader cannot reach them. It is this optimism about the possibility for
revolution that likely led to Greenlee having far more difficulty in getting his novel
published , than Yurick did. The other major consideration here is that Greenlee was a
black man who claimed that parts of his novel were derived from personal experiences,
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while Yurick was a white writer who approached his topic as a project akin to urban
anthropology.
The fate of The Spook Who Sat By the Door’s theatrical release lends strong
evidence to the notion that it appeared too threatening to dominant culture. A straight
adaptation of Yurick’s The Warriors, complete with gang rape and racial antagonism,
would also have proven too unsettling for general audiences to have achieved its
popularity. The Spook Who Sat by the Door is not comfortable escapism, and any film
that faithfully depicted Sol Yurick’s intentions would not have been either.
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In Yurick’s novel, there is an implicit message that the Dominators and their ilk
mispend their oft-justifed rage in violence against disenfranchised others like themselves.
The narrative is leavened throughout with a heavy pessimism that leaves little room for
Cureton’s hopeful positioning of black gangs possessing genuine revolutionary potential.
In Yurick’s view, desires for instant gratification (whether it be towards lusts for sex,
violence, or sexual violence) and small-minded fixations regarding petty violations of
one’s “face” or personal sense of respect have led to a failure to mobilize in any
politically effective manner. When Ismael Rivera’s dream dies, it seems equal to tragedy.
The dominant culture is worthy of being overturned by those it leaves flailing in the
marginal spaces of society, yet those same disenfranchised figures lack the dynamism and
self-awareness to effect that upheaval.
Yurick’s use of Xenophon’s Anabasis was intended as a means of linking
contemporary gangs to the “kid-mercenaries” (198) of antiquity to underscore the
“primitive” or “prerational” nature of such apparatuses. The overall intent was to uncover
a consistency over the span of history. The warriors of the Anabasis were scarcely older
than the Dominators, despite being an official army, well-trained and armed (initially)
with an articulated political end (that of seizing a kingdom for Cyrus). The extended
analogy between the two groups over such a span suggests an unconscious drive on the
part of young males to become a part of an organized group that wields violence.
It is useful to balance Yurick’s vision of black youth and their travails with
Norman Mailer’s earlier inquiry. While both seek to articulate compassionate
perspectives towards their subjects, it is possible to discern in Yurick’s account a similar
tendency to display black males as inarticulate figures expressing themselves largely
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through “primitivistic” or “prerational” urges towards sex and violence. Yurick’s
Dominators do not seem generally aware of the particulars of their disenfranchisement.
The familial bonding rites of rape and murder seem to be their most cogent acts of self-
aggrandizement, acts that feed into the vicious stereotyping by dominant culture of young
black males. There is an implication, however, that this ignorance is due to the cultural
conditioning that trickles down from the higher end of the dominant culture. This is not
the case with Ismael Rivera and his ardent disciple War-Counselor who are gifted with
the means to decipher and articulate the means and the scope of this conditioning. A
troubling element, though, is that the “primitivistic” and “prerational” figures that Yurick
speaks of, are all black. He does not contend that these adjectives solely apply to black
gangs and not to those consisting of other ethnicities; however, the notion of black
masculinity is so intertwined with these issues in the novel, that the narrative does seem
to re-perpetuate the more troubling insinuations about race and sex that many read in
Mailer’s “The White Negro.” The complications regarding the marginalization of the
young black males in his novel actually seems to contradict Yurick’s attempt to
characterize gangs as “irrational” or “prerational.” His depictions of the difficulties of
assimilating into mainstream society and comfortably attaining the goals dictated by
dominant culture certainly make gangs appear as a rational alternative to the figures in
the novel.
The film of The Warriors largely avoids any of these considerations, and certainly
steers clear of the issues regarding black masculinity (or really any considerations of
race) that problematize Mailer’s and Yurick’s perspectives. Hill’s film, while perhaps
intended as a subversive text that accepts and appreciates the ethos of its subjects, dilutes
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that subversion by ensuring that Ajax is the hero-gang’s only genuinely threatening figure
and that Luther presents to the narrative a figure to occupy the traditional role of villain.
When issues of race, dominant culture, and masculinity are removed from the equation,
what remains is a chase story with an alluring surface appreciation of a subculture which
had not always been exhibited in the most positive of lights in mainstream culture. In
spite of that nod towards a potentially subversive perspective, Hill’s The Warriors doesn’t
appear to risk much in the way of genuinely challenging dominant culture or exploring
the psychology of the gang members whose point of view carries the narrative.
Had the film featured an all-black street gang as the heroes, as in Hill’s original
intentions, the finished product may have resembled a subversive political statement,
regardless of his nominally apolitical stance. Since the film would likely never have
included the rape or murder sequences, the black street gang would have been allowed to
make their journey as heroes in a way that had rarely been afforded in mainstream
American cinema. Given the successful theatrical run and the enduring appeal of the film,
the public was ready for the multi-racial gang’s heroics. Multi-racial bands of heroes
would proliferate over the course of the 1980s, due in part to the success of Hill’s 48 Hrs.
Eventually, black gangs and gangsters became more common in Hollywood. Dennis
Hopper’s Colors (1988) exposed many Americans to the Crips and Bloods gang rivalry in
Los Angeles, though, through the eyes of a pair of white LAPD officers. By the 1990s,
black gangsters had taken center stage in such films as Boyz n the Hood (1991), New Jack
City (1991), Menace II Society (1993), and Set it Off (1996), which featured a female
black gang. All of these films were box office hits with mainstream American audiences
and most of them alluded to the political and social issues that had so preoccupied Sol
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Yurick. Ironically, Hill’s essentially apolitical approach helped to lead the way for the
easing of these topics into the consciousness of dominant culture in a way a faithful
adaptation of Yurick’s novel never would have.

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Chapter III

“It’s Not Even New York. It’s Chinatown.” American Tongs and
Invasion Anxiety: Robert Daley’s Year of the Dragon and Michael
Cimino’s Year of the Dragon

In his seminal work of post-colonial theory, Orientalism (1978), Edward Said
coined the titular term to describe how traditional Western powers (England, France, and,
later, the United States) had historically represented the East. According to Said,
Orientalism was a Western system of discourse used to define the East and present it as a
binary opposite of the West itself; in this way, the West was able to form an identity based
on the definition of what it was not. “Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the
corporate institution for dealing with the Orient- dealing with it by making statements
about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it settling it, ruling over it: in
short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority
over the Orient.”
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In this balance of opposites, Orientalism invariably presented the
West as superior and the East as an inferior reflection. This system of contrasts, with its
implicit value judgment, defined the East as an Other, a fundamentally alien culture. In
Said’s terms, the contrast resulted in a view that “[t]he Oriental is irrational, depraved
[fallen], childlike, ‘different’; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal.”
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The Orientalist attitude served as a convenient excuse for Western imperialism and
expansion over the East. By this logic, the East required the assistance of a superior
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cultural entity to enable it to flourish and transcend the centuries of static tradition that
had hindered it from achieving the dynamism of progressive Western culture.
While Said was primarily speaking of the West’s relationship to the Middle East,
his observations have their parallels in Western representations of the Far East or Asia.
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Popular representations of Chinese culture in America, in particular, have often tended
towards exoticism or an emphasis on a sense of cultural Otherness. This particular
representation of Otherness has been based partly on racial differences, an emphasis on
skin color and differences in facial features, often exaggerated in a way to suggest an
implied superiority of Western physical models.
These depictions, which have suffused American popular culture, have also been
generally intermingled with a focus on secrecy and inscrutability in regards to Chinese
(and Asian, in general) interactions with the West. Such perceptions have been
traditionally embodied in the concept of the “yellow peril.” “The yellow peril” is a
longstanding xenophobic reaction to fears of an encroaching domination by Asian
countries over Europe and, later, the United States. When the Othered subject happens to
be settled in a Western territory, an anxiety emerges regarding the “infiltration” of this
supposedly pernicious alien influence that threatens the comfortable values of Western
culture. Robert G. Lee defines aliens as “outsiders who are inside (that) disrupt the
internal structure of a cultural formations it defines itself vis-vis the Other.”
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The “yellow peril” concept dates back to pre-medieval Europe when Genghis
Khan and his Mongol armies aroused fears of conquest in Western cultures. This concept
grew to encompass a form of cultural and economic jealousy when European travelers
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journeyed to the East and discovered formidable advancements in craftsmanship and
economic development.
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A defensive attitude emerged on the part of Westerners that
held that people of China and the other Asian nations, because they were non-Christian,
were of a corrupted or inferior moral character. This aspect complicates Said’s vision,
because it implies that the presumed superiority of the West necessary to an Orientalist
perspective is a proud façade designed to quell any fears that Western culture might be at
a disadvantage. The “yellow peril” carried over into Cold-War attitudes related to China
and the rise of Communism in various parts of Asia. It is a concept that has demonstrated
remarkable staying power over the centuries, despite major changes in technology and
ideology in both the East and West.
As Naomi Greene has suggested, Americans largely receive their information
about China through a series of “images and myths” that take the place of accurate
information.
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The result is a highly skewed apprehension of Chinese culture that feeds
on the general ignorance on the topic of its audienceIt is commonly observed that
information exchanges between the United States and China have long been limited, and
that Americans have often have been slow in showing interest in understanding foreign
cultures in general.
The “yellow peril” anxieties were able to take a firm hold in Western culture,
partly due to representations of the East in popular culture. In the twentieth century, Sax
Rohmer’s series of Fu Manchu novels exemplified this trend by establishing an iconic
Chinese villain who defiantly stood as an enemy to the entire Western white race. The so-
called Devil Doctor, imbued with “all the cruel cunning of an entire eastern race” sets to
the task of destroying white English tranquility.
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His project is one of domination over
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the world, especially the West. What is intended to be most frightening about Fu Manchu
is the fact that he is physically present on English soil, and that he has been well-versed
in English ways of thought. The influence of Fu Manchu as a character finds many
parallels throughout Western literature and film; since his first appearance in 1913, the
character has shown an influence over a large range of media from novels and films to
comic books. The “insidious” Fu Manchu’s project of domination perfectly embodies
these infiltration anxieties. The Fu-Manchu model would endure in American popular
culture in ensuing decades, in films, dime and pulp novels, and comic books., including
such characters as the evil Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon comics (an actual
space alien, but one who is clearly coded as Asian) or the Mandarin, traditional antagonist
of the popular Iron Man series from Marvel Comics.
It should be noted that not all depictions of Asians were intended as negative. As
far back as 1919, D.W. Griffith’s silent Broken Blossoms recounts the story of a
compassionate Chinese immigrant who devotes himself to the welfare of an abused
young London woman. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Flower Drum Song
(1958) and its subsequent adaptation to film (1961), focused on issues related to
assimilation among Chinese immigrants in San Francisco’s Chinatown; the film was
notable for featuring an almost entirely Asian-American cast. In films, Earl Derr Biggers’
Charlie Chan character achieved great popularity as the benevolent protagonist in a long
series of detective novels and films, and was originally created as a counterpoint to the
dehumanizing trends in the representation of Asians in Western culture. Many of these
portrayals carry their own problematic aspects; Chan, despite Biggers’ intentions, is now
often held as a demeaning stereotype in his own right, an obsequious compendium of old-
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world Asian clichés who uses his wisdom to enable white society.
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Chan marks the
alternative stereotype of Asians in American culture, the “model minority.” The “model
minority” label, which is not exclusive to Asians, is a generalized vision of a people that
is intended to contradict more sinister depictions. The “model minority” individual is
non-threatening, of use to society (whether through an assiduous work ethic or
otherwise), and un-embittered about his or her lot in larger society. In spite of this
counter-stereotype, however, the more threatening stereotypes largely prevailed.
These “yellow peril’ tropes have inevitably influenced popular attitudes towards
Chinatowns, which were often considered to be dangerous, exotic enclaves where savage
and unspeakable practices were exhibited on homegrown American or European soil.
Exotic depictions of Chinatowns carried with them a mysterious and seductive allure,
replete with tales of opium dens and sexual perversity. Chinatown was a locus of “yellow
peril” criminality, a “No Man’s Land” where white men and women should fear to tread,
where life was cheap and the police held no authority. Women were in danger of sexual
enslavement and men would risk the dangers of addiction, theft, and unexpected
violence.
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These perceptions carried forward the notion that Chinatown was an alien
Other state that had been formed within the heart of a larger Western one. Those who held
to centuries-old infiltration anxieties would perceive these neighborhoods as confirmation
of their fears. Within these districts were laid the seeds of a movement to conquest.
The evolution of Chinatowns in America began in the middle years of the 19
th

century in San Francisco, due to its proximity to gold mines. As is well-established in
histories of the Chinese experience in the United States, the initial influx of Chinese
immigrants into America is generally traced back to the 1840’s and the early days of the
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California Gold Rush. Chinese workers arrived in Northern California, partly in order to
escape their home country’s social and political destabilization (including the Taiping
Rebellion against the Manchu Dynasty which began in 1850) and partly to seek “Gold
Mountain,” a term ascribed to the wealth that hopefully awaited them in California. Iris
Chang compares the “Gold Mountain” concept to the legendary city of El Dorado that
drew Columbus to attempt to find the Indies.
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These Chinese immigrants, like
Columbus, were largely drawn by fanciful descriptions of a land where wealth was
simply there for the taking. Such visions were, of course, harshly and quickly corrected
for those who emigrated in pursuit of their fortune. At the time, the labor of these new
arrivals was appreciated; the role of the Chinese in helping to build the Central Pacific
Railroad was a significant factor in the development of the American West.
Chang has delineated the complications and misconceptions regarding the early
Chinese experience in the United States. She observes that the influx of Chinese
immigrants into America in the mid-nineteenth century was but one part of a large scale
diaspora as a result of social, economic and political destabilization that led many
thousands from China to nations all over the world.
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Chinese immigrant laborers did
acquit themselves during the Gold Rush as hard-working miners who largely
commingled with others of similar background and, with the exception of gambling,
largely avoided the vices that waylaid many other workers. Following the end of the Gold
Rush, the Chinese population aided American advancements in agriculture, fishing, and
the development of irrigation systems.
Early prejudices against Chinese immigrants in America were rooted largely in
economics, in suspicions that they were going to take profits and job opportunities away
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from those of more longstanding communities. State and Federal lawmakers passed laws
that enabled these prejudices and those who cultivated them. Anti-immigrant tax laws
were enacted to limit the profits that non-Americans could make from gold-mining.
When white Americans took to assaulting and robbing Chinese immigrants, an 1853
court decision in Nevada led to the barring of non-whites from testifying against whites
in a courtroom. This decision essentially legalized the persecution of non-white
peoples.
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Xenophobic sentiments against the Chinese culminated in the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited the further immigration of the Chinese into
America. This act was not repealed until 1943, though only decades later, with the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, would the barriers towards immigration be
substantially taken down.
The first Chinatowns were formed partly as a response to discrimination. Peter
Kwong contends that “the initial formation of Chinatowns in the United States was not
voluntary.” Chinatowns were segregated urban ghettos in which the Chinese immigrants
were “meant to stay.” These people had found themselves forced to live in large urban
centers as they had been driven out of small towns and villages.
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White society’s
xenophobic suspicions and antagonism had inspired the reasonable reaction of forming a
haven of relative safety. Mining camps had also become too dangerous, and Chinese
laborers had to live in fear of having all their savings stolen. In the 1870’s, when an
economic depression had settled over the country, anti-coolie gangs were formed to target
Chinese businesses and individuals, which only increased the anxieties of those
immigrants to freely commingle with white Americans.
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Yong Chen suggests, in
speaking of San Francisco’s Chinatown, that this community should not be seen as a
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mere “segregated urban enclave created by a hostile environment,” for “such a view
prevents us from appreciating the conscious choices and efforts the pioneers and their
followers made in building and maintaining their community.”
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Still, Chen does
acknowledge that “when anti-Chinese violence prevailed throughout the American West,
racial discrimination forced many Chinese to give up their residences and jobs elsewhere
and move to San Francisco.” Chinese San Francisco was where these immigrants could
find safe lodging and economic opportunities.
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This phenomenon was reenacted in
urban centers across the nation; in the 1870’s, Chinese laborers were drawn to
Northeastern cities for employment as corporate employers sought to use them as a cheap
and docile alternative to white workers who had begun resorting to unions to protest low
pay and dangerous working conditions. Unsurprisingly, animosity among white laborers
mounted against this new workforce that threatened to take their jobs. The patterns of
violence continued and the need for safe havens for the Chinese reemerged. That the
Chinese were not so docile as expected and began to stand up for their own rights against
their employers did little to endear them to the local white population.
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The fact remains
that the violence enacted by American nativists and tacitly approved by the local and
Federal government against the Chinese population played a pivotal role in the
emergence of these communities. Since American authorities had been shown to favor the
agents of prejudicial violence, a logical distrust of the American state ensued. In this way,
Chinatowns came to function as alternatives to the larger state structure and be seen as
cities within cities or states within states. The hostility that made such neighborhoods
necessary also fueled xenophobic views towards those areas and the ways of living that
were imagined as being enacted within them.
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The view of Chinatown as the place where Western laws and values could
scarcely penetrate entrenched and alien Eastern traditions has not wholly disappeared
over the decades. Journalist Gwen Kinkead’s relatively recent Chinatown: Portrait of a
Closed Society (1992) stresses a vision of New York’s Chinatown as a secretive enclave
at a remove from the rest of the city. “To a degree almost impossible for outsiders to
comprehend, most of [Manhattan Chinatown’s] inhabitants lead lives segregated from the
rest of America.”
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The Chinatown in Kinkead’s book is one that seems to entrap or
imprison its residents into a pattern of isolation; the portrait that emerges is of a people
essentially victimized by their culture’s habits and traditions and fixated on a distrust of
outsiders and white society. Kinkead, after cataloging certain vicious stereotypes that
have been vollied at Asian-Americans and observing that they are both the “fastest
growing” and “least enfranchised” minority in the United States, stresses that the Chinese
have much to teach Americans: frugality and respect for elders. Yet, she also suggests that
the“Chinese can’t have it both ways- they cannot charge mistreatment and racism and, at
the same time, refuse to talk to outsiders, or vote, or lend a cup of sugar to their
neighbor.”
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The Otherness of these Chinese implants is a very real thing for Kinkead,
who sees them as partially to blame for this development in their stubborn refusal to let
outsiders in on the secret.
Many sociological investigations of New York’s Chinatown culture emphasize its
disorganization. There are now actually six Chinatowns in New York City, though the one
neighboring the Lower East Side and Little Italy is the oldest and, by far, the most
populace with close to 100,000 residents. New arrivals continue to come to the Lower
Manhattan Chinatown neighborhood every year and the population in in a state of
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continual flux. Poverty is rampant and many in the community seek to accumulate
enough money to move their families out of the area.
139
Furthermore, the perceived
homogeneity of the populace ignores the large number of residents from Asian countries
other than China, including Vietnam and Taiwan.
140
Both the Cantonese and Mandarin
languages are well-represented. According to Peter Kwong’s observations in the late
1980s, of the major Chinatowns in America, New York’s is considerably more oriented
towards working class immigrants who do not possess a wealth of education, because of
the greater number of service or manual labor jobs, as opposed to those communities in
Hawaii or California which have tended to attract immigrants with greater professional or
technical skills.
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Following in the tradition of ascribing the quality of secrecy to Chinese-
Americans is the controversy surrounding the tongs, Chinese-American organized crime
apparatuses, often likened to a “Chinese mafia.” While their existence is now generally
accepted, such was not always the case. Howard Abadinsky, whose Organized Crime
(1985) was a foundational work for years, notably avoids any sustained consideration of
Asian organized crime in America, save for two pages devoted to post-World War II
yakuza offshoots in Hawaii, California, Nevada, and Colorado. Asian crime in New York
is never mentioned. Abadinsky suggests there were three “generations” of organized
crime in America: the first generation, included people of English, Scottish, and German
ancestry; the second featured Irish, Jewish, and Italian criminals; the third consisted
largely of black or Latin-American figures.
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The origination of Asian-American
organized crime would seem to locate it chronologically in the second generation. While
Abadinsky’s work is fairly exhaustive in regards to other ethnicities, the almost total
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disregard of Asian-American criminal tradition may well signify the difficulties inherent
in finding usable information.
Studies of the tongs and the influence of triads in America suffer from the same
problems of data collection present in analyses of any criminal subculture: reliable
information is difficult to come by for many reasons, ranging from the difficulty in
collecting accurate statistics to the sensitivity and reluctance of potential witnesses to
divulge factual accounts. Yet law-enforcement investigations into tong activity have
expanded considerably since the 1980s, partly due to the dramatic increase in the Chinese
population in America since 1965, and the expansion of Chinese-American organized
crime into areas outside of Chinatown.
143
According to Ko-lin Chin (1990), crime rates
among Chinese communities in the United States were quite low prior to the Immigration
and Naturalization Act of 1965. This is partly due to the large subsequent influx of
Chinese immigrants into the U.S. since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
Furthermore, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the National Origins Act of 1924
had resulted in a very small presence of Chinese teenagers in the U.S. prior to 1965. The
increase in the number of teenagers, often prone to listlessness as foreigners in a country
whose language many of them did not know, is considered a fairly significant factor in
the proliferation of gang-affiliated crime.
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The first tongs in America appear to have been formed in San Francisco’s
Chinatown during the early Gold Rush era; they began to form on the east coast in New
York’s Chinatown within a few decades. Tongs first achieved widespread notoriety as a
result of the tong war era of 1894-1913 in San Francisco and the New York tong wars,
which began in the 1890s and were popularly recounted in Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs
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of New York in 1927.
145
Yet, street-level warfare has never been the primary activity of
these organizations. The daily activities of tongs are generally unrelated to criminal
activity.
The word “tong” means “meeting hall” in Cantonese and the original purpose of
the tongs was to provide a gathering place where community mercantile interests could
be discussed. Tongs were, and are, officially merchant associations and not all of them
are involved in organized crime or intimidation, though many do have their links to
criminal elements.
146
The term “tong” is actually used by the Chinese in America to
characterize American political parties, such as the Democrats and Republicans, as well
as less-tolerated organizations as groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Italian mafia
(known as the “Black Hand Tong.”). The word, then, has much broader connotations than
a term for the “Chinese mafia.”
147
Regardless, this is the word utilized to invoke Chinese-
American organized crime apparatuses.
Tongs are intended to follow in the centuries-old tradition of Chinese secret
societies, most notably the triads. The tongs align themselves with the triads though the
usage of common values and rituals (including an initiation ceremony requiring 36 oaths
of loyalty). A longstanding narrative holds that the triads (so named for the triangular
relationship between heaven, earth, and man) originated in China towards the latter part
of the seventeenth century as insurrectionary groups driven by a patriotic and
revolutionary desire to rebel against incompetent or corrupt political regimes, such as the
Qing government instituted by the foreign Manchus. As Hung Hua-Lun (2006) observed,
though, contemporary historians generally view the idea that nationalism inspired the
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birth of the Triads as apocryphal, although the Triads themselves continue to perpetuate
it, inspired by the air of romance and nobility that this narrative implies.
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Bandit or outlaw narratives have a long and popular tradition in Chinese culture.
Shi Nai’an’s Water Margin (1589) is celebrated as one of the Four Great Books of
Classical Chinese literature. It presents the tale of a band of outlaws who defiantly gather
together as a force in opposition to a corrupt government. Eventually, the outlaws are
eventually granted amnesty by the emperor and employed as an army to repel enemies
from both within and without the empire. Due to this narrative and others, depictions of
“noble outlaws,” whose grievances are those of just individuals faced with a corrupt state
apparatus, have a celebrated tradition in Chinese culture.
According to the patriotic and revolutionary origin narrative, once the Qings were
removed, many members of the triads remained within their organizations. Originally, the
plan appeared to be to adhere to the political ideals exemplified by the fight against
corrupt authorities. Chin explains: “Without a patriotic cause to pursue, the secretive and
anti-establishment nature of the organizations easily helped transform them into political
groups.”
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In reality, though, it seems that the triad emphasis on patriotic solidarity
eventually became replaced by a focus on drug trafficking and prostitution. The tongs are
generally considered foreign offshoots of the triads. The tong role in the American drug
trade is largely bolstered through their connections in China and Southeast Asia, where
heroin can be acquired in large quantities and on financially advantageous terms. This
transnational linkage is crucial to the maintenance of the tongs’ economic viability.
Although tongs initially acted against racial discrimination against Chinese immigrants
and offered support for new arrivals, as time passed, this patriotic spirit allegedly waned.
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Tongs also became known in their communities for practicing extortion, intimidation,
theft, and the operations of gambling houses. In New York, Chinatown merchants would
be strong-armed into aligning with either the Hip Sing or On Leong. Those that did not
would be at the mercy of both.
Tongs generally rely on local youth gangs to operate as their army or street-level
muscle. In Manhattan’s Chinatown, close relationships have been traced between the Hip
Sing tong and the Flying Dragons gang and the On Leong tong and the Ghost Shadows
gang. It bears noting that these are considered the most powerful and significant tongs
and gangs within that community. These youth gangs have little trouble in recruiting new
members. The particularities of life in Manhattan’s Chinatown have led to parents and
children having less direct contact than is traditional. Since many Chinese youth have
limited expertise in the English language, they often find themselves in an isolated
position at school or on the street. Gangs like the Flying Dragons offer the lure of a group
for these youth to join for camaraderie, friendship, and neighborhood prestige.
Tongs are actually more fragmented than many other organized crime entities.
Members are allowed to participate in criminal activities outside the purview of the
tong’s leadership, so long as they do not violate any established policies. Those youth
gang members whose services are employed by the tongs find this lack of strenuous
oversight to be a boon; they have relative freedom to act according to their wishes and
they carry a certain amount of status due to their connection to some of the most powerful
men in the neighborhood. The men in charge are often intentionally kept out of the
spotlight; often a “puppet leader” will be placed at the top, so that no one with a powerful
backing or agenda may seize control at the expense of his rivals. Eng Ying Gong, a
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former tong member, asserted that tong membership actually was extended to whites as a
means of enabling and expanding tong criminal enterprises into mainstream American
culture.
150
The tongs, therefore, are neither easily definable nor quickly understood. Their
legacy is intertwined with traditions and patterns of behavior on two continents. Perhaps
for reasons owing to the complexity of their makeup, the tongs have been engaged with
in American popular culture less than most other ethnic organized crime outfits.
The most direct and visible mainstream American engagement with the presence
of the tongs in American life is Year of the Dragon; initially a 1981 novel by former New
York Deputy Police Commissioner Robert Daley and subsequently a film directed by
Michael Cimino in 1985. Abel Ferrara’s later China Girl (1987) did engage with the topic
to some degree, depicting a Romeo and Juliet story about a young Chinese-American
woman’s romance with a young Italian-American man against a gangland backdrop.
Unlike Ferrara’s street-level romance (which was likely intended as an homage to West
Side Story, though, Year of the Dragon treats the issue more as a “problem of our times”
that urgently requires a solution. Daley’s novel sold well and generally received positive
notices in the press. Noted Asian-American Studies and sociology professor Peter Kwong
actually praised the novel six years after its publication, as “seem[ing] true to life,” citing
the close similarities between characters and incidents in the work to real-life parallels, as
well as the questions it raises about the purpose of the tongs and how profound a role
they play in the international crime scene. Daley actually based the novel’s tong kingpin
antagonist, Jimmy Koy, on Eddie Chan, a former Hong Kong police sergeant who rose to
become executive director of the powerful On Leong Tong in New York shortly after
emigrating to the United States. Chan allegedly amassed a significant fortune through his
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various criminal enterprises and reigned as the most powerful criminal figure in
Chinatown for years, before being deposed from his leadership position after an internal
coup.
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Daley, prior to his career as an author of police procedural novels and non-fiction
books, had spent a year as New York City’s Deputy Police Commissioner before being
forced to resign his position in 1972 as a result of what he characterized as underhanded
department politics.
152
Daley’s career, according to his peers in the force, was destined to
fail, due to his worshipful and optimistic view of the police force as a fundamentally
chivalrous entity. His romanticizing of the department left him ill-equipped for the
political chicanery that accompanied his position. As a result, one of the pervasive themes
of the novel is how Daley’s independent police protagonist finds his noble crime-fighting
efforts repeatedly stymied by inter-departmental jealousy and bureaucracy.
Daley’s position as a former agent of state power informs the perspective of the
novel. This is not a work where the reader is encouraged to identify with the criminal
element. Daley’s narrative locates integrity in a heroic white police figure who navigates
his way between the self-defeating bureaucracy of departmental politics and the tactics,
generally depicted as alien and inscrutable, of Chinese criminal culture.
Daley has claimed that he envisions himself as a journalist as much as a novelist,
and he sought to inform his novel about the tongs with a generous amount of research and
some attempt to grapple with the cultural differences of Chinese and Chinese-American
peoples.
153
As such, while the novel ultimately received a mixed response to the handling
of race, less criticism was directed at the level of detail in the outlining of tong criminal
networks. For example, Daley’s descriptions of villainous tong leader Jimmy Koy’s
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methods in recruiting displaced immigrant youth into his youth gang street army closely
reflect the observations of the likes of Ko-lin Chin, Peter Kwong, and Peter Huston.
Daley’s narrative focuses on Arthur Powers, a veteran police officer whose lack of
promotion to Precinct Commander is due largely to his unintended predilection for
upstaging his superiors with successful interventions in violent crimes. Powers is finally
promoted to Precinct Commander of Chinatown, the least coveted of districts, after being
present during a gang-related shootout in a Chinese restaurant. Powers becomes
progressively obsessed with stopping the leader of organized crime in the neighborhood,
tong leader Jimmy Koy, who serves thematically as Powers’ double in his professional
and personal lives. Koy, a formerly corrupt Hong Kong police officer with triad
connections, is instrumental in organizing a massive transnational drug operation in
which large amounts of heroin are transported directly from Southeast Asia to the United
States. Koy intends to collaborate with the Italian Mafia on the distribution of the product
and, thereby, immensely increase the stature of his tong as major players in the North
American drug trade. Powers struggles to comprehend Chinese culture, presuming
correctly that knowledge of his enemy’s cultural priorities will provide the means with
which to destroy him. After an information-gathering trip to Hong Kong, Powers returns
with an ultimately successful plan to shame Koy into suicide by threatening him and his
family with public disgrace. Powers is relieved from his role as precinct commander for
once again angering his superiors, and a replacement for Koy is quickly brought in from
China to take over the tong and the drug operation. The spread of the “Chinese mafia”
(the term is much-debated in the novel in regard to the tongs) will continue, but Powers
and the knowledge he has accumulated will no longer be around to challenge it.
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Daley’s vision of Chinatown life is consistent with the perspective of Gwen
Kinkead. New York’s Chinatown is its own self-contained, self-governed enclave in the
midst of the larger city. Mingling with other races is rarely done; Koy’s willingness to
engage with non-Chinese allies demonstrates his ethnic criminal iconoclasm. Powers’
attempts to ingratiate himself with the residents of the neighborhood to gain leads in his
case are almost comically unsuccessful; the fact that he is not Chinese wholly undercuts
his entreaties and assurances.
Powers is explicitly described by Daley as “a traditionalist,” who tends to be
socially conservative (9). Initially, he is content to respect the chain of command and he
meekly accepts the petty departmental politics that have kept him from career
advancement. Yet he is also willing to violate police protocol if the circumstance requires.
His heroic killing of a mad sniper, which inspired much of the inter-departmental
jealousy directed towards him, has actually been used as a means to attack his
professionalism; the act (despite saving numerous innocent lives) was done in violation
of the official policy of waiting for backup. As the narrative progresses, Powers’
willingness to flout protocol becomes more pronounced and leads to certain tactics that
cross the border of legality. In this way, Powers emerges as a milder variation on the
“Dirty Harry” police figure of popular media. This type of character, which has origins
that predate the Clint Eastwood film series, vocally expresses disdain for those civil
rights that hinder his pursuit of societal cancers and proceeds to violate them in the
service of protecting the innocent. His rule-breaking is intended as emblematic of a
deeper integrity not bound by bureaucratic strictures. As the narrative progresses, Powers
will repeatedly mislead his superiors, sanction an illegal surveillance operation, and
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employ blackmail to force his enemy into suicide. In his personal life, he will also betray
his marriage by beginning an extra-marital affair with an ambitious television journalist,
Carol Cone, who seeks to use his knowledge of the tongs as the basis for a career-
defining expose on crime in Chinatown.
Upon being named Precinct Commander, Powers quickly identifies the key
obstacle to law and order in Chinatown as the influence of the tongs and their loose
relationship with the brash and violent street gangs. Powers initially endeavors to engage
the problem by attending community meetings and meeting with business owners in
attempts to persuade them that the NYPD are their friends and will protect them from
those who prey upon them. His efforts are met with politeness and good humor, but he
becomes quickly aware that his words are not taken seriously. Powers’ whiteness and
police affiliation mark him as an outsider in the enclosed city of Chinatown; this is an
ironic reversal of sorts of the problems of assimilation that the Chinese immigrant
population experiences in the larger city of New York, though Powers is really never in
physical danger. The tongs are not interested in harming white people, since that might
disrupt the status quo and open the door to police interference.
Stymied in his investigation due to his racial status, Powers realizes that he needs
a Chinese-American ally to aid him. The Asian officers who are already known in the
neighborhood are too compromised; they cannot act in an undercover capacity and their
reputations are too bound to the judgments and opinions of the local residents to take any
risks. Powers finally locates his ally in the form of inexperienced Chinese-American
officer, Luang. Having been raised in Hong Kong and San Francisco, Luang is not known
in Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown, and has no relations or associations that would stand to
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lose face should he fail at any point in his investigation of Koy. But Powers’ use of Luang
has mixed results. Luang is most effective as a silent observer rather than an actor, partly
because of Powers’ initially poor planning. The plan to use young Flying Dragon recruit
Quong as an informant against the gang and thereby open a possible angle to taking down
Koy’s operation ends disastrously. The district attorney’s hesitance results in Quong’s
brutal murder after Luang, who has been seen in Quong’s company, is deduced to be a
policeman.
Yet it is only Luang who is able to venture into Koy’s most prominent gambling
house and provide an eyewitness account of the goings-on. His visit is coded as a journey
into the exotic and demonic, a “heart of darkness.” Luang feels suffocated by the hideous
odor of the place: “It was like entering a furnace. The dragon’s fire, and also its bad
breath were manufactured here… [m]ost of the heat was body heat. The strongest odor
was that of unwashed Chinese men. Too many of them were crowded into too small a
place” (170). Luang, who has been exposed to Chinese culture for his entire life,
nevertheless finds this underworld scene to be beyond his ability to process. His clear
discomfort and nausea work to signify him as an undercover cop to some of Koy’s
underlings; he has to flee for his life. This unusual episode conveys that something about
New York Chinatown subculture is disorienting and appalling even for a Chinese
individual, provided, it seems, that he is of upstanding moral character. The invasion of
the East into the West is unnatural for anyone who approaches it from a position outside
the community.
The novel opens with a consideration of the Golden Palace, a once grand movie
hall, now in operation as a Chinese restaurant. The Golden Palace’s tenure as a movie
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theater became doomed as a result of the rewriting of laws designed to restrict Chinese
immigration. “The one change it had failed to cope with, the one that put it out of
business, had resulted from the decision to rewrite immigration law; the new law
admitted Asians, mostly Chinese, for the first time in proportions equal to Europeans.
Chinatown… had responded by expanding in all directions, at first slowly and then fast,
engulfing many bastions of old New York” (3). The rapid expansion of the Chinese
population seems akin to a deluge. The term “invasion” is used frequently to evoke this
expansion. Chinese expansion, and with it the expansion of tong influence, across Canal
Street into Little Italy is a major cause of concern for both the police and the mafia who
both prefer to limit the reach of the tongs, though the Mafia does grudgingly accept a
partnership with them. This expansion of the Chinese population is accompanied by a
proportionate increase in the amount of crime in the Chinatown community.
Characters in the novel continually mention that the new wave of Chinese
organized crime is unlike anything ever seen before. High-ranking officers lament the
passing of Chinese-Americans from a “model minority” to a culture steeped in violence.
The “Chinese mafia” is considered a menace with the potential to far outstrip the Italian
mafia in terms of the scope of its criminal activities. The transnational criminal links to
the powerful triads enable a network far too sophisticated to be adequately opposed by
any conventional police force, even that of North America’s most populous city.
The secrecy that accompanies tong operations is ever-present among the novel’s
themes. The highest-ranking police officials attempt to angrily silence any suggestions
that a “Chinese mafia” may even exist. This happens, in part, because the flourishing of a
criminal subculture to rival the storied Cosa Nostra undermines confidence in the police
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and damages its public reputation. Daley establishes that the NYPD has been ordered to
ignore all criminal operations in Chinatown. Police interventions have resulted in
minimal and temporary gains and the loss of resources and money. Furthermore, Powers
uncovers a friendly relationship between the Chinatown tong leaders and the mayor of
New York City. In exchange for financial support (one character asserts that for the
Chinese, money is more useful than votes), the mayor tolerates the tongs’ ventures; after
all they are, on the surface, merely merchant associations. The result is the creation of a
self-dependent, self-policed state apparatus in the neighborhood of Chinatown within the
larger metropolitan landscape of New York City.
At the head of this alternate state is Jimmy Koy (born Koi Tse-ven “in the villages
of Kuangtung Province”), who, unlike Powers, is an innovator in his chosen career. Koy,
who officially runs a funeral parlor, has initiated a takeover of the Nam Loong Tong from
previous chieftain Ting, secretly planning a violent firefight at a popular restaurant as a
means of establishing the weakness of the latter’s leadership. Upon his ascension to
Ting’s former role as unofficial “mayor” of Chinatown, Koy is described as “the most
important Chinese in America” (50). In fact, while Powers grows increasingly fixated on
ruining Koy, the latter scarcely seems concerned with or aware of his opponent until
shortly before their second and final encounter. Powers is a minor and ineffectual idealist
to him. Koy, who disdains the age-old superstitions of many of his peers is fiercely
pragmatic in his approach to business and crime. His revolutionary proposition to ally
with the Mafia is inspired by sheer logic. Yes, they are non-Chinese (“White devils” is a
term Koy is fond of using), but their infrastructure of drug distribution is far more
complex and effective than anything the Nam Soong Tong has created.
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Koy’s attitude towards his own culture is complex. As he listens to one of his
associates discuss how the color orange portends positive developments in the future,
Koy muses: “Many Chinese still believed such nonsense…. Superstition, when dealing
with the Chinese, was not a variable but a predictable, Koy knew. One factored it in”
(25). Koy is willing to utilize his culture’s sensibilities as weapons against itself, yet he
still demonstrates a distinct racial pride. He views his role in spreading heroin and
morphine across America and Western Europe as a fit revenge for the West’s historic
exploitation of the Chinese. “It was the foreign devils who had introduced opium dens to
China. During the more than one hundred years that most of China lay in an opium
stupor, foreign demons had systematically raped the country. Well, it was their turn now”
(271). He notes with bemused disgust the aesthetic traditions of the West during a layover
visit to the Rijksmuseum to see Rembrandt’s work. To Koy, “The Night Watch” is “heavy
and gross, lacking the refinement and delicacy of Chinese art…. [Western art] was as
violent as the violent games -- football, hockey, rugby -- that the foreign devils so much
admired” (253). Koy is an exceptionalist at heart, and his scheme for a belated revenge
against Western culture as a whole marks him as a more humanized model of the Fu
Manchu tradition of portrayals of Asian characters.
Yet Koy, while he distrusts traditions and superstitions, ironically still finds
himself bound by some of them, in particular by the concept of “face.” Face (or mianzi),
which ranks among Daley’s chief interests in his attempt to portray Chinese culture, is a
concept connected to social respect. Peter Huston observes that face is “an abstract
quantity; some people have more or less of it than others. Generally speaking, the more
important you are, the more face you have. You can gain face in different ways. Being
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intelligent, educated, rich, and smart all help…. Titles help as do nice clothes.”
154

Furthermore, face can be used to represent not just individuals but groups as well,
including families and merchant associations, legal or otherwise.
155

The status of one’s face is rarely fixed and may fluctuate dramatically in
situations when the individual in question suffers a great humiliation or achieves
something that increases the amount of respect that other people will have for him or her.
While face is an acknowledged aspect in certain Asian cultures, Daley appropriates the
concept as a further example of the Otherness of Chinese people. Yet Daley does attempt
to establish that this concept has a sort of equivalent in American culture. The petty
details of departmental politics in the novel’s NYPD are defined by officers and
administrators jockeying for leverage and social esteem. Powers begs for job security in
his role as Precinct Commander, reasoning that if the Chinatown population believes he
can be removed at any time, they will perceive him to have little face and consequently
will not give him the respect he needs to accomplish his goals. It is consistent with the
portrayal of bureaucracy in the novel that Powers is denied his request and is treated as
one with little face by the police community.
One of the novel’s most striking episodes regarding face occurs during Jimmy
Koy’s visit to a drug farm in Thailand. Koy’s intention is to secure a favorable deal for a
massive shipment of morphine with Khun Sa, the self-appointed general of an unofficial
Thai army that operates as a front for a drug distribution operation. Prior to these crucial
negotiations, Khun Sa and the initially cocky Koy (“He had never been humiliated in his
life and did not intend to be now” (258).) participate in a series of interactions which,
while seeming mundane on the surface, are actually means of sizing one another up and
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attempting to gain a solid advantage in face when it comes to bargaining. From the
outset, Koy, who has taken the risk of arriving solo, fares poorly. Khun Sa exposes Koy
to a number of seemingly minor indignities designed to subtly undermine him, including
mockingly revealing the disgraced and addicted state of a once-revered former general
with whom Koy had arrogantly declared to have had a close relationship. All seems lost.
“In this game of face he was not staying even, might at any moment lose definitively, and
they were still a long way from negotiating for the merchandise he needed” (263). The
episode climaxes when Khun Sa prepares a deserter for execution. Killing this man in the
presence of Koy would finish the battle of face; this demonstration of power over life and
death would establish Khun Sa’s dominance. Koy’s solution is to stop the proceedings to
offer a large amount of money for the right to execute the deserter himself. In a state of
surprise mingled with avarice, Khun Sa takes the offer and thereby loses the contest.
Jimmy Koy, by seizing control over his adversary’s power play, emerges as the stronger
personality and subsequently dominates the negotiations. The life of the deserter counts
as little more than a chess piece in an unspoken, yet mutually understood game. Koy even
considers giving the man back to Khun Sa to complete his rival’s humiliation, yet
reconsiders on the grounds that it would violate “all principles of good business” (271).
To needlessly complete the destruction of his opponent’s face would be to tarnish his
own.
Ironically, Powers experiences his own struggle with face, although he does not
appear to recognize it as such. When he realizes that Carol Cone’s machinations in
attempting to report her expose on the “Chinese mafia” will potentially compromise his
campaign against Jimmy Koy, his status on the police force, and his marriage, he panics.
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Powers stands to lose an exceptional amount of face in this scenario. He will no longer
have the ability to conduct himself professionally or personally from a position of
advantage. Social disgrace and reputation, as loose concepts, are factors in both Western
and Eastern societies. Yet his dilemma enables Powers to understand just how powerful a
concept this notion of face is. It is this element of Chinese culture that he uses to secure
his triumph.
One of Daley’s key concerns is the inability of Westerners to comprehend the
customs, cultural beliefs, or emotional responses of the East. Chief of Patrol Duncan
complains to the Police Commissioner that “we’ve never been able to penetrate even the
legal side of Chinese society, much less the illegal side” (35). Powers, who devotes more
of his energies to understanding Asian culture than do any of the other white policemen,
eventually begins to wonder to himself if he is beginning to “think like a Chinese” (135).
Powers, who is increasingly troubled by the monolithic history that underlies the culture
of his enemy, spends a great deal of time reading and researching Chinese culture; at one
point, he reads Water Margin and muses that “the Chinese invented Robin Hood” (129).
As Powers transitions into “thinking Chinese,” he becomes more reliant on secrecy and
trickery, in pursuing his end goal of destroying Koy, thereby sacrificing whatever
pretension to moral integrity he may initially have cherished. Powers, in the end,
succeeds in attaining some access to those foreign conceits that have eluded his
comprehension for so long. Yet this is only after a prolonged education. Powers is unable
even to recognize the state of terror in which his ally Luang lives following a dangerous
encounter with Flying Dragon leaders Nikki Han and Go Low. He mistakes Luang’s
reserved nature for stoic unconcern. Jimmy Koy in their two brief face-to-face encounters
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takes time to instruct Powers about his ignorance regarding Chinese notions of civic
virtue. Koy informs him that the Chinese have no sense of civic duty and, therefore, do
not place their trust in the police. “To the Chinese, the Good Samaritan was a villain
because he risked the security of his family to help a stranger. Whether you realize it or
not, you are asking the people of Chinatown to do the same” (116). Koy conveys to
Powers that taking care of one’s direct relations is of key importance; Powers is butting in
where he has no direct relational stake. To the Chinese, Koy suggests, Powers is a fool.
Eventually Powers’ miscalculations and impulsive tendencies lead to his disgrace
and termination as the Chinatown commander; he has almost completely lost face in the
department. As a last resort, he manages to extend his tenure for a few hours, just long
enough to play his endgame. He entraps Koy into a situation where the latter stands to
lose a tremendous amount of face. Koy has been juggling two wives, one left in Hong
Kong and one in Manhattan’s Chinatown (a situation paralleling Powers’ involvement
with two women). He left behind the former with plans to send for her once he had
established himself in the new country. Complications ensued when he fell in love with
and married the daughter of a wealthy Chinatown businessman. When Koy finally brings
his first wife over to live in New York after a number of years, Powers concocts a scheme
to get her immediately deported, which would disgrace Koy, as well as compromise his
New York marriage. Using this leverage, Powers blackmails a stunned Koy into shooting
himself to death.
After Koy has committed suicide, Powers finds himself unsettled by how much
the sight of his dead opponent moves him. “’He was nothing but a scumbag,’ Powers
said, and he gazed down not on evil as he had thought and hoped, but on a man who had
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died” (423). Powers, in learning to “think like a Chinese,” also comes to recognize Koy’s
humanity. Powers has not only used Koy’s adherence to Eastern cultural values, but also
his genuine love for his family as the means by which to destroy him. Jimmy’s Hong
Kong wife Iris and her son are only being brought to the United States because Koy has
decided that he can no longer bear shirking his responsibilities to them as a husband and
father. Whether Powers recognizes this or not, he has exploited his enemy’s humanity in
order to defeat him. Koy’s devotion to his family, belated though it may be, allows
Powers his opening to attack. Koy is stunned at the moment, because Powers stands to
win nothing in terms of money, status, or familial security; it all seems motiveless to his
way of thinking. Powers had initially found himself treating the “Chinatown problem” as
resulting from the inscrutable ethos of an alien, faceless community. He eventually finds
in Koy a single figure to locate all of his suspicions and resentment. At the sight of Koy’s
body, he recognizes that Koy is just one small part of the vast clash of civilizations.
Powers wins the battle, but, as both he and Koy are removed from the conflict, he learns
that all his efforts have little impact on the larger war.
The success of the novel and the seeming immediacy of the crisis it addresses
made it an attractive property for an adaptation to film. Unfortunately, the general climate
of American attitudes to Asian culture was quite hostile in the 1980s. For one thing,
invasion anxieties were reinforced by Japan’s financial domination in relation to
American interests. America’s trade deficit had inspired an animosity towards Japanese
trade practices which were deemed “unfair” in a 1983 Congressional report and
compromises between the nations were pursued.
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The popularity of Japanese auto
imports led to a panic about the threat to the domestic industry and a consequent fear
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regarding employment security for American autoworkers, though Japan did agree to
limit its exports in 1981.
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Japanese interests had acquired certain American “landmark
businesses and real estate,” and their outperformance of the U.S. in technology inspired
attitudes described as “techno-Orientalis(t).” This “economic invasion” rekindled “yellow
peril” fears that Eastern forces were primed to control and conquer America.
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Furthermore, anti-Asian antagonism was fueled by America’s still-recent defeat in
Vietnam. The humiliation of losing to a small nation that was not expected to put up
much resistance damaged American prestige abroad and morale at home. American
exceptionalism had been dealt a significant blow, as was the pride associated with
America’s “undefeated” record in military conflicts. Belief in American institutions and
core values was shaken (aided, of course, by the fall of the Nixon administration due to
Watergate).
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The returning soldiers, many of whom suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder or physical disabilities served as reminders of the suffering that resulted from
the conflict for the veterans and their families. The unpopularity of the war in general
combined with the sobering outcome exposed a vulnerable place in the American psyche
well after the fall of Saigon in 1975. As Robert G. Lee observes, the narrative of the war
focused on the presence of a “ubiquitous and invisible enemy” that employed silence and
discipline to fool and overwhelm American soldiers. As a consequence of American
losses on the battlefield and in the realm of finance, the Asian-American became
“identified with the enemy that defeated the United States in Vietnam and figured as the
agent of the current collapse of the American empire.”
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Hence, anti-Asian racism was
on the rise.
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Consequently, the 1980s were not a positive time for Asians in Hollywood. While
Wayne Wang’s films about assimilation and Chinese-American identity like Dim Sum
(1985) and Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989) were notable for avoiding stereotypes, the dominant
trend was back towards negative depictions. George P. Cosmatos’ Rambo: First Blood
Part II (1985) featured American Vietnam veteran John Rambo’s quest to avenge
America’s defeat by returning to the site of the conflict to rescue POWs and destroy the
North Vietnamese soldiers who still imprison them. It earned $300 million dollars. John
Hughes’ Sixteen Candles (1984) features the notoriously caricatured character of Long
Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe), an awkward exchange student from an indeterminate
Asian country, whose appearance is accompanied by a gong sound effect and whose
struggles with American language and behavior are one of the movie’s primary sources of
humor. John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1985) used San Francisco’s
Chinatown as a backdrop for the story of an arrogant white trucker and his heroic
Chinese-American sidekick who fight a horde of “yellow peril” caricatures in an attempt
to rescue the latter’s girlfriend from a powerful ancient sorcerer. Ridley Scott’s Blade
Runner (1982) presented a xenophobic vision of Los Angeles in 2017, when it is
thoroughly colonized by Japanese people and corporations. His later Black Rain (1989)
detailed the quest of an American police officer’s adventures in Japan as he tries to
recapture a yakuza member who has escaped his grasp. One of the yakuza leaders in the
film declares that his plan to counterfeit American currency is his revenge for the “black
rain” (radioactive ash) that fell following the American atomic bomb attacks that ended
the Second World War. In the early 1990s, the trend continued; Rising Sun (1993)
directed by Philip Kaufman from a Michael Crichton novel, depicts Japanese business
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culture as possessing a ruthless warrior mindset; the encroaching dominance of Asian
finance in America is linked to amorality in business practices.
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Ultimately, the director enlisted to film Year of the Dragon was Michael Cimino,
who had completed just three feature films by that point, but had acquired a notoriety that
few other American filmmakers had ever achieved so quickly. Year of the Dragon was to
be his first project of significance since his epic account of the Johnson County War in
1890’s Wyoming, Heaven’ s Gate (1980), became the most notorious critical and
commercial debacle of the era. That project, which contributed to the demise of the iconic
studio United Artists, had shipwrecked his career and reputation and had led to his
scapegoating as the man whose indulgences killed the 1970’s auteur-era in American
cinema. The amount of vitriol directed at Cimino for this transgression was excessive; he
was by no means the only American director of the era whose ambitions had taxed the
patience of studios, critics, and the public. Cimino’s most notable success had been his
second feature The Deer Hunter (1978), which addressed the traumatic impact of the
Vietnam War on a group of friends from a Pennsylvania steel town. The Deer Hunter
won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and proved to be
very popular with American audiences. It is likely that Cimino was approached to direct
Year of the Dragon because of his successful experience in directing a film that dealt with
conflict between Americans and Asians.
Yet even upon its release, The Deer Hunter was criticized for its portrayal of the
Vietnamese characters as villainous and utterly lacking in humanity. They are treated, the
accusations claimed, as inscrutable, yet unequivocally inhumane.
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The pivotal scenes in
which American POWs are forced to play Russian Roulette against one another by the
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Viet Cong (an experience that causes one of the prisoners to lose his mind) were found to
be particularly inflammatory. Not only are there no records of such tactics being used by
the Viet Cong, but there are also no scenes to counterbalance those depictions; not a
single Vietnamese character is afforded any real humanity. For his part, Cimino claimed:
“There’s no political agenda in the movie. It’s not even about the Vietnam war. It’s about
what happens when catastrophe attacks a group of friends who are like family, in a small
town. This is a movie about people. It’s simply about people.”
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The antagonistic reception of Heaven’ s Gate had even led to a retroactive
backlash against the quality of his earlier triumph with The Deer Hunter. Consequently,
Cimino came to be seen as unemployable and directed nothing of consequence for the
next five years. Yet, in spite of his persona non grata status in Hollywood, he was
allegedly pursued by the studio with great persistence for Year of the Dragon, and only
agreed to sign on if he was able to write the film and take it in whatever direction he
deemed fit.
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Cimino’s treatment does not contradict or oppose the general ethos of
Daley’s text. Instead, he took the novel’s East versus West tensions and focus on the
Otherness of Chinese culture and proceeded to heighten them. His major changes include
making the female journalist character a Chinese-American and making his central villain
a far crueler figure than in the novel, with a decided interest in victimizing women, both
white and Asian. While Daley’s vision exhibits a host of arguably problematic elements
in its presentation of Chinese and Chinese-American culture, Cimino would seize upon
those very elements and caricature them to a more pronounced degree. Cimino took
Daley’s already conservative perspective and took it to a further extreme.
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As evidenced by The Deer Hunter, one of Cimino’s enduring preoccupations was
the Vietnam War; this was also true for his co-screenwriter, Oliver Stone. Stone would
later become one of the Hollywood filmmakers most associated with depictions of the
Vietnam War after his trilogy of Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and
Heaven & Earth (1993), each of which attempted to address the war from different
perspectives. Stone, himself, had previously been criticized for the implicit racism and
Orientalist perspective contained in his Oscar-winning screenplay for Midnight Express
(1978), which delved into an American college student’s nightmarish experiences in a
Turkish prison after being caught smuggling hashish at an Istanbul airport. Stone would
later go so far as to issue a formal apology to the nation of Turkey for the one-
dimensional ugliness of his portrayals of Turkish people.
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Cimino and Stone would
carry the Vietnam theme into Year of the Dragon, re-writing the protagonist, originally a
figure with no military background, as an embittered veteran of the conflict with a nasty
racist attitude towards Asian people.
Cimino would claim that the film is actually an investigation of racism and that he
himself possessed a longtime admiration for Chinese people and culture.
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It is not
difficult to see where the issues of stereotyping and racism are addressed in the film,
particularly in moments when the protagonist is criticized by other characters for his
racism and for his tendency to lump people of all Asian ethnicities into one threatening
mass. There are numerous scenes in which the difficulties of the Chinese experience,
including the enduring of prejudiced citizenship laws and barriers towards assimilation,
are explicitly delineated in the dialogue. However, this thematic element clashes with
Cimino’s occasional tendency to rely on stereotypes, as well as the tone which comes to
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border on hysterical as the lead characters use increasingly violent methods in attacking
one another. Ultimately, in spite of Cimino’s stated intentions, the film appears to lean
more towards the restaging of Orientalist biases than to deconstructing or critiquing them.
Cimino’s films, apart from The Deer Hunter, had and would continue to
compassionately treat gangs and people on the margins of society who are forced to
resort to violent means by crooked capitalists. His debut, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
(1974), was a buddy film about a pair of thieves who search for hidden loot while in the
company of more dangerous criminals; the ending, which displays the death of
charismatic conman Lightfoot from a brain injury, is tragic. Heaven’ s Gate took the side
of European immigrants being harassed by crooked cattle barons and forced to take up
arms in a struggle against a legion of hired killers. His later film The Sicilian (1987) told
the story of legendary Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano, whose antagonism of the
wealthy led to his image as a Robin Hood figure before his death at the hands of the
authorities. This thematic inclination would seem to make Cimino a likely fit to direct a
gangster film in the classic mold. Yet Year of the Dragon does not follow in the tradition
of ethnic gangster films like Little Caesar (1931) or The Godfather (1972), in which the
perspective aligns with the ethnic criminal figures as they attempt to advance in the world
by any means necessary. Such films encourage audience identification with the
racialized outsider and work to establish some measure of sympathy towards those
characters, in spite of the brutal violence they often employ. In keeping with the novel’s
point of view, the agent of state power who seeks to smash the gangland enterprise is the
audience’s guide into the Chinese-American underworld.
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In fact, American cinema lacks a defining Asian gangster anti-hero. Chinese
gangsters and tongs first appeared in American cinema in the silent and early sound eras,
in such films as Chinatown Nights (1929), Law of the Tong (1931), and William
Wellman’s The Hatchet Man (1932). Those films featured almost entirely white casts,
with the Asian characters played by Caucasians in heavy makeup, and resort to the
traditional Western portrayal of Chinatown as a lurid world of exotic sin. Chinatown
Nights actually presents Wallace Beery as the white leader of a tong; the protagonists are
intended to be white and the Chinese figures occupy background roles, save for the
wicked Chinese villain played by Warner Oland (a white actor who achieved greatest
renown for playing Charlie Chan). The Hatchet Man featured Edward G. Robinson of
Little Caesar fame in a sympathetic role as the titular tong hitman who falls in love with
the daughter of one of his victims. Such movies would frustrate efforts at character
identification for Asian viewers by their reliance on stereotype and a touristy approach to
the particular ethnic underworld they portray; suffice it to say, none have endured in the
collective imagination. Hong Kong-made films like New York Chinatown (1982) and
Tongs (1986) featured Chinese characters in the classic gangster movie model, yet were
barely seen in the United States. John Woo had more success with films like A Better
Tomorrow (1986) and The Killer (1989), starring Chow-Yun Fat as charismatic criminals
in Hong Kong. Popular Asian actors like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan avoided playing
villain and anti-hero roles in their American films, opting instead to play secret agents or
policemen. When Jet Li, one of the most prominent Chinese movie stars on the
international level in recent years, finally played a gangster for Hollywood, in Lethal
Weapon 4 (1998), his character, a triad human trafficker, was an unambiguously
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villainous antagonist who merely represented a threat to the American heroes. Exceptions
to the trend are few: Japanese director Takeshi Kitano played a yakuza member who
travels to Los Angeles and leads a multi-racial gang against the mafia in Brother (2000).
In mid 2014, an American film, Revenge of the Green Dragons, presented a Chinese
immigrant story that followed the classic gangster film narrative; Chinese brothers, new
to America, fight their way to the top of a violent gang in 1980s New York, before being
forced to face the consequences. This attempt to portray Chinese antihero gangsters was
met with as much critical and public indifference in America as the Hong Kong films.
This continuing phenomenon is an offshoot of “yellow peril” sentiments that yet cloud
American popular culture. Most other ethnic cultures in America have been afforded
numerous rebellious and subversive gangster figures with which to identify.
In the film of Year of the Dragon, Daley’s Arthur Powers is re-named Stanley
White, a dramatic underscore of his racial positioning. White, “the most decorated cop in
the city of New York,” is openly contemptuous of Chinese culture; when a group of tong
leaders lecture him about the sanctity with which many Chinese hold their ancient
customs, White’s response is “This is America you’re living in and it’s 200 years old, so
you better get your clocks fixed.” In White’s view, their age-old Eastern traditions are
meaningless in the United States and do not grant them exemption from American law.
White’s attitude is characteristically Orientalist, implying that the progressive and
changeable culture of the West is superior to the stagnant and stultifying traditions of the
East. Several times, White dismissively says that his intentions are to “make the rice boil
over in Chinatown.” It is established that he has changed his original, Polish surname
name of Wizynski to White. In this way, White has effectively assimilated and re-written
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his own identity. It seems contradictory but common that a second-generation immigrant
like White should demonstrate such hostility to another immigrant community, especially
one that has roots in the United States for over a century before White’s own family
arrived. White, in addition to the lingering prejudices related to his Vietnam experiences,
appears to actively resent what he considers to be the stubborn refusal of the Chinese to
abandon their traditions and accept the necessity to assimilate. There is a suggestion in
the film that the willingness of the Chinese criminals to expand operations outside of
Chinatown without feeling the need to assimilate is attributable to a form of Chinese
exceptionalism, a feeling only validated by the ease with which the police and local
government can be corrupted and bought out. One of White’s underlings is even revealed
to answer directly to the tong leaders with updates about the NYPD’s investigations into
their affairs.
In keeping with the source material, Cimino emphasizes the reluctance of the
police and city hall to acknowledge the presence of a “Chinese mafia” in Chinatown.
Representatives of local government and the police are content to chalk up the acts of
violence in Chinatown to disorganized youth gangs fighting over turf and minor street-
level grievances. In this way, the tong practice of recruiting and cultivating youth gang
armies benefits themselves, the gangs, and the authorities. The tongs have their muscle,
but are able to maintain some level of distance from the violence itself since the gang
affiliations tend to be rather loose. The gangs receive money and weapons and get to
wield the authority of representing some of the most powerful men in Chinatown, without
having to ceaselessly obey the whims and protocols of business-oriented bosses. The
local government gets to assert the limited nature of the conflicts as gang-on-gang
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violence without needing to own up to the fact that tong-related crime is related to a
complex transnational enterprise that is likely beyond their means to control. White’s
superior officer, Bukowski, continually rebukes White’s increasing involvement in tong
violence; he reiterates that the law and the Chinese criminal operations have an
“arrangement” that must be honored. In the current arrangement all sides benefit. White
stands alone in seeking to combat the threat to the city. The authorities have consented to
this invasion.
White’s obsessiveness towards Asians has inspired him to research his enemy in
an attempt to know him. More than any other white character or even a half-white figure
like the Chinese-American reporter Tracy Tzu (the film’s stand-in for Carol Cone), White
appears to understand the nuances of Chinese culture, including the importance of
establishing one’s face. Like Powers, he is shown on several occasions to be reading
books about Chinese history and culture. He instructs his superiors that the Chinese
invented the mafia concept, and he appears to know instinctively which leads in his case
are legitimate and which are to be ignored. White even delivers a speech about the
anonymity with which the early Chinese railroad workers were rewarded for their efforts.
Yet, all of this knowledge hardly gives him any understanding of the humanity of this
other alien culture. He does not, as his novelistic equivalent does, come to “think like a
Chinese.” White is proudly American and would never consent to adopting the mindset of
the enemy. While he endeavors to understand the Chinese, he keeps his psychological
distance. He does not emulate them.
Cimino’s interpretation of the narrative involves adding an additional layer to the
original’s Orientalism and arguable xenophobia. White refuses to concede the outcome of
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the Vietnam War, and Cimino’s Year of the Dragon may be read, in part, as White’s desire
to find a point of redemption in combatting and defeating the Asian Other which, after
finding victory in Eastern lands, has infiltrated America soil to extend its dominance.
“This is Vietnam all over again,” bemoans White after his superior officers instruct him
yet again to respect their arrangement of non-interference in Chinatown affairs. “Nobody
wants to win this, do they?”
It could easily be argued that, for Stanley White, the struggle against the tongs is a
struggle to maintain the stability of white, Western culture. White essentially occupies the
role of Nayland Smith, Fu Manchu’s noble adversary, defender of the realm, and “the last
hope of the white race.”
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Cimino conflates a then-recent trauma of American history
with the age-old “yellow peril” and Chinatown stereotypes to present a totalizing view of
Asians as a threat to the welfare of white America. When White begins to repeatedly
harass the local businesses suspected of criminal connections, it is described on the news
as him “declaring war on Chinatown.”
White is less of a traditionalist than his novelistic counterpart; he follows even
more directly in the line of the “Dirty Harry” mode of fictional cop for whom protocol
and civil rights are mere annoyances. When one of his underlings expresses concern that
his orders regarding surveillance of Chinese gangsters borders on illegality, White snarls:
“Fuck civil rights!” Powers gradually becomes comfortable with flouting police
convention; White is already a fully-formed iconoclast at the film’s outset. His
decorations are “action-oriented, no desk citations.” White approaches the responsibilities
of his job flamboyantly with a proud defiance of departmental rules, and always manages
to avoid punishment for his antagonistic behavior and racist provocations. The first time
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White meets his adversaries face-to-face is when he swaggers into the center of a private
meeting of the leaders of the Hun Sang Association, the equivalent of the novel’s Nam
Soong Tong. (Curiously enough, the term “tong” only appears once or twice in the entire
film. White generally invokes triads, describing the tongs briefly as their foreign
offshoots.) After being scolded for his rude and disrespectful nature by newly appointed
chieftain Harry Yung (the stand-in for the novel’s Ting), White declares: “There’s a new
marshal in town. Me. New marshal means new rules. New rules means no more street
violence. You collar the gangs. I don’t wanna see their fucking faces unless they’re
serving me in a restaurant.” White asks the tongs for help in putting an end to the street
violence that has so recently claimed the lives of a tong leader and an Italian-American
shopkeeper who refused to be extorted. When the tong representatives explain that police
interference is antithetical to Chinese tradition, White explodes: “You’re too impressed
with yourself. Fuck you!… I’m tired of all this ‘Chinese this, Chinese that.’ You people,
you think gambling, extortion, corruption are kosher? Because it’s 1000-years old? Well,
all this 1000-year old stuff, it’s a lot of shit to me. This is America you’re living in, and
it’s 200 years old.” His racist sentiments and impulsiveness are a more exaggerated
version of the attitudes displayed by Arthur Powers, so much so that it initially may
appear that Cimino intends the audience to condemn him. What problematizes this
interpretation is that the film supplies an enemy that validates virtually every
preconceived notion that White gives voice to.
White’s antagonist is Joey Tai (played by John Lone) who, like Jimmy Koy, is a
visionary at odds with the traditionalistic outlook and methods of his peers and
predecessors. That White is similarly anti-traditionalist more dramatically underscores
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the doubling of the enemies. They are each afforded scenes where they boldly assert
themselves in encounters with entrenched authority figures (White with the chief of
police and Tai with a Mafia chieftain) and where they are scolded with variations of the
expression: “Nobody does what you just did in here. Nobody.” When depicting
interactions between White and Tai, Cimino emphasizes the contrast between the studied
gracefulness of Tai and the brutish directness of White. Tai is relentlessly polite and
chooses his words with care and delicacy; White is given to shouting profane insults and
losing his temper. Tai rarely gets his own hands dirty; he is more likely to order killings,
than perform them himself. His masculinity appears more ambiguous then his rival’s. Tai
is only shown in the company of his wife a single time (there is no second wife in Hong
Kong in this version) and does not even glance in her direction. There is nothing to
indicate that he has any great interest in the opposite sex, save as a tool. He marries his
wife only, it is implied, to gain entry into the world of her crime boss father, Jackie Wong.
Tai’s background follows a narrative familiar to stories of immigrant crime.
Unlike Jimmy Koy, who came to America in middle age, wealthy with funds
accumulated from years as a corrupt police officer, Joey Tai arrived as an indigent youth
“from the slums of Kowloon” and steadily worked his way up to his powerful position
after his marriage into the family of the most powerful crime boss in Chinatown. Then,
after strategically removing the leadership of his tong, he elevated himself to the position
of “Cho Kun” (a term which, according to Daley, connotes “boss,””leader,””chairman,”
and a host of other like terms). White sardonically refers to Tai’s story as “a human
interest story” and “the American dream.” In the latter instance, anyway, White’s remarks
appear rather truthful. In another kind of gangster movie, Tai might even be an anti-hero,
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a “Scarface”-type figure, who responds to a lack in social and economic opportunities
with deviant behavior as a means to reach a position of comfort. In this narrative,
however, his strategic ascent is treated simply as evidence of his moral bankruptcy and
opportunism.
Tai’s personal experience has inculcated within him a certain cynicism in regard
to how society must be negotiated. He recounts to White the story of how, as a young
waiter, he witnessed his boss’ abuse at the hands of an extortionate Chinese street gang.
When he filed a complaint, the main perpetrator received a mild jail term; at that point,
the white authorities lost interest in the case. Some months later, when the criminal was
released, Tai was assaulted and received a near-fatal knife wound. This incident educated
him in the general indifference to the Chinese community on the part of white
representatives of the American State, as well as in the ruthless tactics that enable the
tongs and their gangs to dominate Chinatown.
Tai is afforded some moments establishing his ethnic pride and his bemused
bitterness regarding the experience of the Chinese in America. He angrily recounts how
non-Chinese Americans refer to his people as “yellow niggers” and muses on the
forgotten legacy of those Chinese who built the railroads and were rewarded with
prejudice and anonymity. Tai ascribes the closing of his restaurant by the police
(ostensibly due to health violations) to discrimination during an antagonistic on-air
interview with Tracy Tzu. When she needles him with questions about the “Chinese
mafia,” he responds: “Why do you people insist on this sinister Charlie Chan image?
Why don’t you talk about the chair in Chinese history our association has endowed at
Yale University or our $12 million dollar fund for our 10,000 members, or free meals for
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the aged and the unemployed, free burials, things like that. Positive things.” Yet, Tai’s
outrage exists as a smokescreen, since he is principally responsible for the eruptions of
violence in Chinatown. If these lines are one of Cimino’s attempts to represent real
Chinese-American frustrations, it is undercut by what has already been revealed about the
character who voices them.
Tai, despite his platitudes, still exploits the people of his community. When a
weeping mother begs him to help with tuition to send her daughter, Tina, to Columbia.
Tai readily agrees, in a sequence that establishes why the tongs might be welcomed in the
community. It is established that the Hun Sang Association donates liberally to
community causes. On the surface, such tendencies appear to align Joey Tai with a figure
like The Godfather’s Vito Corleone, who uses his position of economic stature in the
Italian-American community to present himself as an alternate to a prejudiced American
system. When people go to Don Corleone for assistance, he aids them, though always
with the qualifier that he is to be owed a future favor. Tai agrees to such generous favors,
while still encouraging his youth gangs to extort the local businesses.
Tai is unambiguously coded as a cold, unscrupulous figure. He succeeds in his
visit to the Thai drug lord merely by presenting the severed head of a rival and stunning
his hosts into acquiescence. He orchestrates two violent public acts of murder to
eliminate those figures who stand between himself and leadership of the Hun San Tong.
The victim of the assassination that opens the film, Jackie Wong, is his father-in-law.
Respect for one’s elders and care for one’s family are frequently invoked in the film as
cornerstones of the Chinese ethos. Tai’s ordered murder of his father-in-law marks him as
a traitor to those very tenets that he publicly extols. (It is notable that the youth gang
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members and the African-American bodyguard with whom he surrounds himself offer no
judgment regarding these tactics, and do not express any reverence for cultural customs
or traditions.) Tai is a young man, several decades the junior of the other members of the
tong’s board of decision-makers; he occasionally frequents a disco in his spare time. His
behavior follows in one of the familiar themes to be found in many gangster narratives-
that the younger generations are more ruthless and contemptuous of “the old ways” than
their predecessors. Yet, in this film, the older generations are incriminated as well.
Despite an awareness of the rumors that Joey is responsible for Wong’s murder and the
massacre at Yung’s restaurant, they acquiesce to Tai’s methods and do not reprimand him,
so long as profits roll in and the police keep their distance. It is only when White’s war
threatens their security that they begin to push back against Tai’s leadership. Otherwise,
his tactics, as vicious and offensive as they are to Chinese tradition, are tolerated.
Gary Hoppenstand and Gina Marchetti have written on how “yellow peril”
narratives tended towards representations of Asian men as sexual deviants who represent
a threat (usually of rape) to white women.
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Among the more crucial qualities that
establishing Tai as a figure of depravity lies is his treatment of women. After reaching the
limits of his patience with White, Tai orders the murder of Connie White and the gang
rape of Tracy Tzu. Unlike Koy, who does not appear to relish violence, but utilizes it out
of necessity, Tai is quite comfortable employing tactics of murder and rape. While Tai
wishes both Whites to perish, there does not appear to be any strategic value in killing
Connie White, save perhaps to eliminate a witness to her husband’s murder. Tai has no
moral issues with targeting these women; he seems to find that the best strategy to
wounding White is through those females closest to him. Tai himself is largely
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asexualized, yet at he commands a legion of young gang members who readily act upon
his orders to commit sexual assault. He appears once with his wife, but they scarcely
interact; there are no other women in his personal life. White, for his part, does fatally
shoot a young Chinese-American gunwoman after a chase, though this is only after she
has attempted to murder himself and his partner, Rizzo. His act is directly related to
matters of preserving public safety and saving his own life. White’s shooting of the
female gang member is, thus, established as acceptable, and even heroic.
Cimino attempts to offset the potentially racist undercurrents of his portrayals of
Joey Tai and his colleagues by presenting three Chinese characters with more positive
moral inclinations. These figures are Tony, a working-class figure who reports a tong
murder to the police; Herbert Kwong, the inexperienced Chinese police officer (replacing
Daley’s Luang); and, most crucially, Tracy Tzu, the journalist and love interest. Yet all of
these characters are depicted as subservient to White’s desires. White praises Tony’s
willingness to defy the Chinese tradition of ignoring white authorities; Tony is so touched
by White’s praise that he forces his way into Connie’s funeral to pay his respects and
show solidarity. He only appears in two scenes and appears as little more than a device to
soften White’s bigotry.
White, who is as stymied in his investigation by his own race as Powers was in
the novel, recruits Kwong to serve as his undercover operative. Kwong is largely depicted
as a non-threatening, comical, even pathetic character who can’t shoot or drive well and
who continually whines about his responsibilities. He must even be reminded not to drive
on the left side of the road in a scene that is played for laughs, but only replicates a tired
stereotype about the unreliability of Asian drivers. He endures White’s bullying racial
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remarks whenever he appears onscreen. Kwong’s one moment of self-assertion against
White occurs in an outburst after Stanley attempts to shame him into a dangerous
assignment by invoking his ancestors. Kwong responds by detailing how the Chinese
have a proud history as inventors and explorers, emphasizing their contributions to
America in agriculture and irrigation systems. He declares: “I’m not going to die for you,
Captain White! No more Chinatown Joe! Those days are over!” Yet, this moment of self-
assertion is undercut soon after when Kwong is murdered by one of Tai’s goons while
undertaking that same mission for White. With his last breath, Kwong reveals crucial
information to White, and dies in his arms. In spite of his proud speech, he sacrifices
himself so that White can achieve his victory over Tai, and the white man can stave off
the dangerously expanding Chinese threat. Kwong is, to paraphrase Sax Rohmer, the
“model minority incarnate,” or, in Margo Skinner’s words, a Chinese “Uncle Tom.”
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White reacts to Herbert’s death in a fury; he immediately seeks out Joey at a dance club
and gives him a vicious beating before being distracted by the Chinese gunwomen.
Kwong, then, serves as another reason to make White’s antagonism personal. He follows
in the long tradition of cinematic ethnic sidekicks, whose sacrifices become plot devices
to add to the torment of the white protagonist.
Possibly the most dramatic change from the source material is the recasting of
Carol Cone as a Chinese-American woman, Tracy Tzu. While Tzu’s character hits some
of the same notes of her literary predecessor (She’s still an ambitious and highly-rated
television reporter and she still embarks on an affair with the protagonist.), her ethnic
reconstitution has the effect of making the narrative, in part, about Captain White’s
efforts to rescue her from a corrupted Other culture. White’s general attitude towards
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Tracy Tzu is largely one of wearying condescension and antagonism. His language
towards her is peppered with statements like: “What’s the matter with you Chinese. Why
don’t you ever say what you think?” He conflates her with his adversaries during
Vietnam: “The first time I saw you I hated your guts. I think I hated you before I even
met you…I hated you in Vietnam.” He tries to manipulate her into reporting on the tong’s
activities, reasoning that if a Chinese-American journalist does so, it can’t be deemed
racist. He patronizingly gives her history lessons about the Chinese experience in
America, presuming her ignorance and insists that Chinatown is the most vile
neighborhood in the entire city. Yet, when he attempts to seduce her after being thrown
out of his house by Connie, she does not put up much of a fight. It is true that she calls
him a racist and insists that she is not “some gook hooker on the streets of Saigon.” In
spite of her initial resistance, however, she passively accepts when he roughly clutches
her and has sex with her. Following this moment, she soon falls in love with him, having
been won over, apparently, by his brutal directness (in marked comparison to the
secretive ambiguity that marks Joey Tai’s conduct in virtually all of his affairs.). Her
sexual submissiveness, combined with the fact that she subsequently begins to aid his
efforts against the tongs by exposing Joey Tai’s corruption to the public, has inspired
numerous commentators to liken her character derisively to a passive “china doll”
stereotype of an Asian woman.
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Yet sexual conquest is not enough for White; he moves in to her luxurious
apartment and eventually overtakes it for use as a crime lab. White thereby invades and
occupies her home in what is intended as an ironic reversal of how, in his eyes anyway,
New York City is being overwhelmed and occupied by the Chinese. It is notable in this
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light that White’s marital difficulties stem largely from his lack of sexual contact with
Connie, who is able to stand up to him in an argument. His sexual nature is awakened
only when he is confronted with someone whose defiance can be easily cast aside. Given
White’s obsession with Vietnam and his likening of all Asians to the Viet Cong, he views
the conquest of her as a form of redress, a correction of a past defeat which has likely
emasculated him. After all, he tells her: “It’s the same as in ‘Nam. We lost to you,
because you were smarter than us.”
When the gang members rape Tracy Tzu, it is a confirmation of the savage nature
of the Other. This act is supposedly performed in order to convince her to cease her
journalistic investigations into the Han Sung’s activities, yet it also symbolically marks
her body as a battleground over which and White and Tai struggle for dominion. Tai, who
has most certainly inferred that Tzu is White’s lover, feels the desire to conquer her back.
The adversaries are competing for physical control over both the Chinese-American
neighborhood and the Chinese-American woman. White behaves as if the rape is the last
straw in solidifying his rage against his antagonist, growling: “He went too far this time,
that fucking Joey.” (It should be noted that this occurs after White has already been
widowed by Tai’s henchmen.) White appears to take the act as a personal affront, so
much so that Tzu has to remind him: “It didn’t happen to you! It happened to me!” The
sexual violence against his mistress, rather than the murder of his wife, is what takes
White to his limit and directly precedes his climactic ambush of a drug deal attended by
Tai and his associates.
The climax is treated in as melodramatic a fashion as the rest of the film. The
novel’s ultimate confrontation between Powers and Koy is relatively understated; the two
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adversaries converse, Powers leaves the room, and Koy shoots himself. In the film,
White, after being pushed to the breaking point by the murder of Kwong and Tzu’s rape,
ambushes Tai and his bodyguard at the site of a drug deal. Prior to the confrontation, he
makes sure to don his old army jacket beforehand. Whereas Arthur Powers had to learn to
“think like a Chinese” to understand his enemy and, thereby, acquire the knowledge to
defeat him, White attempts to recreate his position as the American soldier in Vietnam,
fully in opposition to the enemy Other enemy that has plagued and obsessed him since
his time in the conflict. For White, this moment is his chance to correct all of his past
defeats at the hands of Asian adversaries. The final shootout, which involves both men
charging towards one another, firing their guns wildly, occurs atop a railroad track. This
scene, of course, recalls the numerous invocations within the film regarding the Chinese
contributions to building the railroads. The railroad is where, in White’s view, the rival
cultures first encountered one another on American soil; it is here that the final resolution
of their battle for conquest ends.
White’s defeat of Tai appears to have little to to do with using his understanding
of the other’s culture; he simply shoots more accurately in their confrontation. Tai begs
White for his gun, so he can commit suicide and White complies. Why White would
choose this moment to afford his adversary some measure of compassion is unclear, Tai,
who could easily kill White at that time, proceeds to shoot himself. In this way, Joey
avoids not only a prison sentence but also the loss of face that would accompany the
exposure of all of his public lies. Tai, himself, has already lost his face; Powers’
interference has led to the likelihood of the Han Sung finding new leadership. Tai’s badly
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beaten and bandaged face after a physical altercation with White underscores this
development.
That White allows Tai to die by his own hand is an unusual move for his
character. Had he kept Tai alive to be arrested and interrogated, it is possible that valuable
information could have been gleaned to combat the larger tong operation. Tai’s death
guarantees that his tong will survive without him, a fact that is made clear in the film’s
final moment as his former colleagues attend Joey’s funeral procession. White’s decision
appears to undercut his plan to save New York from the Eastern enemy. This is likely
intended to demonstrate that for all their mutual hatred, White has come to respect some
element of his rival’s culture. However, unlike the ending of Daley’s novel, this
development is not clearly linked to changes in White’s attitude towards the Chinese.
In the final scene of the film, White and Tzu reconcile (she had spurned him
because of his insensitive reaction to her rape) after he initiates a riot while attempting to
disrupt Tai’s funeral procession. They embrace laughing as chaos erupts around them in
the Chinatown streets. Whatever respect White may have directed towards Tai in the last
moments of the latter’s life clearly does not extend to his death. Yet White and Tzu’s
relationship is also clearly intended as a union between East and West. The original
closing line spoken by White was to be: “Well, I guess if you fight a war long enough,
you end up marrying the enemy.” According to Cimino, this was cut because of worries
that it would be offensive; yet, it would have been an appropriate conclusion.
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White
has seemed to marry himself to Eastern culture in the sense that he has incorporated it
into his life and made it his primary focus. There is the implication that White has
achieved some acceptance of his rival culture through his interactions with the three more
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positively-drawn Chinese characters; yet his attempt to disrupt Tai’s funeral and confront
the tong members in attendance clearly delineates that he is not finished with fighting
against the influence of the Other. As he and Tracy happily walk arm in arm away from
the riot he has just instigated, the movie seems to be suggesting that this has really all
been some sort of game to him. Since he finds self-identification largely through his
defiance of Chinese culture, he will always have a mission to cling to. In this light, his
settling of debts with Joey Tai, rather than the tongs as a whole, allows him to continue
his war for the foreseeable future. As the West has traditionally used Orientalist visions of
the East to define itself, White uses his reductive view of and opposition to Asian culture
as the means with which to give himself an identity.
Year of the Dragon opened to middling reviews and box office, and received
harsh criticism regarding its portrayal of Asian cultures which was, even upon its release,
widely considered to be overly reliant on “yellow peril” tropes and clichés. Some critics
went so far as to shame Chinese actors like John Lone (who had studied with the Peking
Opera) and Victor Wong for participating in such a stereotype perpetuating work, and
lamented that this particular film employed more Chinese and Chinese-American actors
than had any prior Hollywood film.
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Cimino, for his part, blamed the film’s poor
reception on the insistence of the media, including the New York Times, that a “Chinese
mafia” was too far-fetched a concept and a reactive effort to cover up the film’s
discussions of the ill treatment that people of Chinese ethnicity have experienced in their
history in America.
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Regardless, the film became seen as another strike against Michael
Cimino’s career. He directed two more films in the next five years, but has only made one
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since 1990 (1996’s barely released Sunchaser), and his ostracization from Hollywood has
been more or less completed.
It is curious that Cimino, who has always styled himself as an iconoclast, repeats
Hollywood conventions in fashioning an Orientalist take on Chinese culture. Yet, it does
not appear that this is a case of mere selling out to tradition. Cimino’s film occupies an
odd middle ground between replicating and critiquing racism and Orientalist
perspectives. The clash of opposing messages may well be the key hindrance to the film’s
lack of widespread popularity. Cimino, whose The Deer Hunter was accused of
displaying a far-right fascistic ethos and whose Heaven’ s Gate carried connotations of a
Hollywood version of Marxism, creates a politically inconsistent vision. While the film is
ultimately unflattering in its portrayal of Chinese culture and its reliance on “yellow
peril” tropes, it also indicts City Hall and the police as being complicit in the success of
the Chinese “invasion.” What results is the privileging of the individual rebel policeman.
While Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry and William Friedkin’s The French Connection (both
1971), achieved great acclaim and popularity with their independent racist police
protagonists a decade and a half before, it is possible that by 1985 the public was weary
of rooting for such problematic characters. Racial solidarity had become a more
prominent theme in Hollywood police films. Walter Hill’s 48 Hrs. (1982) achieved
notable popularity several years prior to Year of the Dragon and initiated a trend of bi-
racial buddy cop films. Just two years after Cimino’s film came the beginning of the
Lethal Weapon series, featuring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as Riggs and Murtaugh, a
black and white tandem of police officers who were also best friends, in contrast to Hill’s
film which considered the racial tension between the protagonists. The tone of racial
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acceptance of the Lethal Weapon films became immensely successful with the public and
reached its apex in the second film of the series, Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), in which the
pair tangle with a corrupt South African diplomat who represents Apartheid and
segregation. Of course, as mentioned earlier, the fourth film abandoned the series
tradition of white villains to feature a host of evil Chinese gangsters for Riggs and
Murtaugh to shoot down in dramatic fashion.
Year of the Dragon remains the most well-known treatment of the influence of the
tongs in Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown. In both forms, the narrative outlines the
expanded presence of Chinese culture in New York City as a form of cultural invasion.
The emphasis on Chinatown life and politics as existing outside of the comprehension or
control of white society feeds into the traditional casting of said neighborhood as an
isolated enclave that exists by its own inscrutable rules. That the leader of the most
powerful tong is known as the unofficial “mayor of Chinatown” (a title which actually
has been conferred upon tong leaders in the past) underscores that an alternative state
structure exists independently of the larger American state. Both the film and the novel
portray Chinatown as akin to a prison where the average citizens are victimized by tongs
and gangs and have little recourse to police intervention, as they are equally trapped by
the static traditions of an ancient civilization. The white protagonists nobly and selflessly
seek to cure the helpless population of the criminal influence, yet the neighborhood they
fight for is still suffused with Orientalist conceits. That, in the nearly three decades since
the most recent depiction of the narrative, there has not been a significant corrective to
this perspective in an enduring popular narrative is a likely indication that for all of
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modern America’s move towards post-racial awareness, lingering strands of Orientalism
still hold a prominent place in the general societal ethos.

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Conclusion

The film adaptations discussed in this project are all roughly situated in a
particular moment of American history, the first half of the 1980s. The decade of the
1980s in America is generally characterized politically as a shift towards the right that has
largely been maintained in American culture since. This is largely due to the Reagan
administration’s more reactionary policies which included the implementation of tax cuts
for the wealthy and a decided aversion towards social programs and the reforms
associated with the New Deal, as well as the burgeoning influence of the Christian Right
and consequent attacks on aspects of culture which ran counter to conservative notions of
morality.
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Income inequality between different sectors of society became more
pronounced, to the notable disadvantage of non-white citizens. The so-called “me
decade” or ”decade of money” had seen the push towards an overwhelmingly cock-eyed
distribution of wealth in favor of the socially and economically elite.
In reality, this era featured complicated tensions between a push for uniformity in
American culture and the increasing prominence of multicultural elements in American
society. While a significant majority of white males voted for Reagan, support for his
candidacy among minorities was notably weak. Since the 1960s, American culture had
begun a move towards a more diverse, less-white population; the black, Latino, and Asian
segments of American society all began to see substantial growth.
Furthermore, the increased presence of such elements as feminism, immigration,
multicultural education, the push for homosexual rights, and affirmative action caused a
“culture war,” in which the nature of American identity was held up to debate.
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Forces
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representative of America’s traditional white, Anglo-Protestant tradition came to see the
strengthening of diverse societal elements as an attack on their place in society and
consequently took up a highly defensive position. College curriculums, since the end of
the 60s, had begun to incorporate programs that were more indicative of the increasing
diversity within American society, including ones devoted to queer studies, women’s
studies and black studies. This inspired a conservative outcry that education was
becoming too politicized and was veering away from the foundational values of
traditional academia.
The tension between these poles of homogeneity and diversity was replicated in
the field of popular culture. As Steven Prince has observed, not all cultural works were
designed to reinforce the prevailing political ethos promoted by the Reagan
administration.
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For example, while films like Tony Scott’s Top Gun (1986) and the
Rambo series (which began in 1982 and reached peak popularity in 1985), appeared to
align with conservative attitudes towards American interactions with foreign powers,
films like Oliver Stone’s Salvador (1986) and Roger Spottiswoode’s Under Fire (1983)
were major releases that criticized, often harshly, America’s influence on foreign affairs.
The 1980s, generally speaking, are seen as a period of transition in American affairs and
the complex trajectory of cultural output of the times reflects the tensions within
American society.
As I illustrated in the introduction and the different chapters, the films discussed
within each of the chapters engage to varying degrees with the issues relevant to the
backdrop of the culture wars between traditionally- and progressively-minded advocates,
whether in terms of internal themes or in the shifts they demonstrate from the ideological
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positions of the original novels. Yet these ideological engagements are not always clearly
defined and certainly do not follow like trajectories in the adaptive process. The process
of transition in each case is intermingled with varying points of ideological ambiguity or
ambivalence. What all these cases do demonstrate, as befits a period of tension and
conflict regarding multiculturalism in America, are conflicted attitudes towards either
their racialized subjects or their source material.
In Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, he does foreground Jewish
activity in organized crime to a degree previously unexplored in American cinema, but,
rather than celebrate it as with Harry Grey’s inclination, he presents a more nuanced and
critical view that suggests that reveling in the violent machismo of ethnic gangsters is
problematic. The reprehensibility of Max and Noodles’ treatment of their victims, both
male and female, indicates a heavy moral cost to such behavior. Leone undercuts the
rebellious appeal of the ethnic urban gangster. Yet the film makes a reasonable case for
the protagonists’ turns to criminal life. In addition, the move towards assimilation that
their entry into organized crime makes possible is also accompanied by an appreciation of
the potential for a loss of cultural identity. The shift it represents from the source material
is, therefore, of an ambivalent nature. He casts a suspicious glance at both celebrations of
gangster life and the lure of assimilation, but presents the characters’ lives prior to their
criminal ascension as essentially an unfulfilling trap of resignation and poverty.
Walter Hill’s version of The Warriors represents simultaneous ideological shifts
towards both the right and the left. The move to the right is encapsulated in both the
avoidance of the political elements of gang culture and the changing of the protagonists
from black to mixed-race (which according to Hill was against his wishes). The move to
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the left is demonstrated by the fact that this multi-ethnic group is triumphant, capable of
defeating whatever threats come their way. In Hill’s film, the gangs that are comprised of
a single ethnicity are clearly shown as being inferior to the Warriors in moments of
violent confrontation- moments that seem to form the basis of gang identity.
Michael Cimino, in his adaptation of Year of the Dragon, also presents seemingly
contradictory messages in regard to Chinese organized crime. Cimino, far more than does
Robert Daley, repeatedly invokes the difficulties of the Chinese experience in America
(though Joey Tai’s speech in favor of Chinese culture in America is undercut by the fact
that the speaker is a duplicitous, power-hungry murderer), and there are a few positive
Chinese characters present in the narrative who are shown to make beneficial
contributions to their community. The racist protagonist, Stanley White, is repeatedly
challenged about his bigoted views, and his reconciliation with his Chinese-American
paramour is intended as a larger symbol about the mutual acceptance of rival cultures. At
the same time, however, White’s intuitions about the tongs and the dreariness of life in
New York’s Chinatown are largely validated. His obsessive hatred towards Asian cultures
is rewarded when he defeats his enemy, Joey Tai, and ensures that more conservatively-
minded tong leaders, who will be less likely to push for an increased tong presence
outside the confines of Chinatown, will remain in place. The major Chinese characters,
even the positive ones, conform to classic Orientalist stereotypes that are not ultimately
undercut or subverted.
It is fitting that of all three cases, the only film to be a financial success in the
United States is Walter Hill’s The Warriors, which really operates as a celebration of a
kind of of multiculturalism. The mixed-race gang of his film is heroic and victorious;
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their ultimate triumph in the narrative lends a generally optimistic sheen to their ongoing
struggle for survival. Emotional investment in their success is rewarded. By contrast, the
gang members of Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America and Cimino’s Year of the
Dragon are not presented in a celebratory tone and do not achieve victory. In the case of
the former film, the gang members do succeed in leaving behind their humble origins;
tragically, their violent tendencies prove ultimately self-defeating. The film ends with
betrayal, death, and regret; everyone’s lives, except perhaps Deborah’s, are ruined. Yet,
while the fate of Jewish gang of Leone’s film is depicted as an epic tragedy, the Chinese
one of Cimino’s film is not presented as worthy of such sympathetic treatment. Unlike
the other gangs, they are clearly the villains of the piece. While the Jewish gang is
morally compromised, there are no prominent heroic figures to contest them. The Han
Sung Tong on the other hand are clearly established as a wicked influence in Chinatown.
The defeat of Joey Tai is a victory for the community and for all of New York as, it is
implied, his place will be taken by more conservative and traditional tong leaders who
will not attempt to replicate his innovative plans to spread the tong’s influence throughout
the rest of New York City, or even the rest of North America.
Ironically, Joey Tai and his villainous Han Sung tong of Year of the Dragon is
actually the only gang covered in this project that actually appears to be contributing to
the welfare of their community. Harry Grey’s hoods will occasionally share some of their
wealth in order maintain their flattering image of themselves as Robin Hoods and as rare
rewards for certain individuals who amuse them with displays of integrity or rare candor,
yet they generally choose to ignore the denizens of their old Lower East Side
neighborhoods. The filmic version of their gang isn’t even interested in such ego-
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gratifying token acts of charity. They may bristle at anti-Semitic remarks, as when
potential client Joe Manoldi ridicules Jewish culinary tradition during a conference, but
can’t be bothered to lend assistance to the poor Jews of their acquaintance. The street
gangs in both versions of The Warriors, don’t really have any surplus funds and don’t
appear to be in any position to make financial contributions to their community. The
tongs in both Daley’s novel and Cimino’s film lend money to help families and fund
Chinese studies programs at local universities. Yet they are in a place of control that the
other gangs are not. Even though Noodles and his gang get to leave behind their lowly
tenements and experience luxury and interaction with social and political elites, they are
never their own bosses. They are mid-level operators within a larger criminal corporation.
The tong in Cimino’s film is depicted as in a position of total hegemonic dominance over
the Chinatown neighborhood. Joey Tai ensures that he and his tong are needed in the
community, which allows them to maintain control through more than just fear. The real
purpose behind this generosity is clearly shown to be a false front for more insidious
intentions, yet the financial contributions so still take place (in a manner that seems
consistent with real life tongs). While the tongs do contribute to the community, they also
prey upon and exploit the people of their own ethnicity to a far greater degree than any of
the other groups in this study.
The visual nature of each gang’s ethnic identity is a crucial point of divergence in
these works. The ethnic gangs in all three cases emerge from situations of poor social and
economic standing and with little opportunity for advancement in any socially acceptable
way. This lack inspires the transition into criminal behavior. The Jewish hoods of Leone
and Grey are of white ethnicity and of all the gangs discussed here, their stories are most
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reflective of the classic gangster narrative. They conform most directly to the subversive
take on the American Dream exemplified by Scarface and Little Caesar. The ethnic
protagonists use violence and deviant behavior to rise from impoverished anonymity to a
place of economic prosperity and social recognition. This resemblance to the traditional
gangster narrative is unsurprising, because the characters are of a white ethnicity. While
the whiteness of Jews has been a subject of much debate and has been challenged, the
history of Jewish gangsters in America demonstrates that social and economic mobility
through crime was a more readily available option for them than for figures of non-white
ethnicity. Notably, Max and Noodles use their new opportunities to leave behind their old
community, and, in the cinematic version, their actual ethnic identities. Of the ethnic
gangsters in all these works, they are the least bound to a physical location.
The Chinese antagonists of Year of the Dragon also manage to enter into
organized crime, even to the point of planning major criminal deals with the entrenched
New York Italian Mafia. Yet their status as non-white organized criminals prevents them
not only from being afforded the anti-heroic status of ethnic gangsters in the classic
gangster tradition, but also the ability to move beyond the physical confines of their
enclave in New York’s Chinatown. Point of view is with white police protagonists and
represents an Orientalist perspective generally held against Asians by white people. The
great threat that Jimmy Koy and Joey Tai represent, in their respective versions of the
story, is their visionary desire to emerge from their self-contained (according to the
works) communities and integrate into the larger landscape of New York City. As
mentioned above, their elimination, particularly in Cimino’s film, suggests that the threat
of invasion is, if not wholly stymied, at least dealt a serious setback. The traditional tong
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philosophy (again, only as depicted in these fictional works) of developing and
reinforcing their dominance over the community means that, though they may increase
their stranglehold over life in Chinatown, they still face significant limitations in
mobility, due, in part, to the fact that they are not white ethnic figures.
By contrast, the black gang of Yurick’s The Warriors and even the mixed-gang of
Hill’s version are tied to Coney Island. When they emerge from those relatively familiar
confines, they immediately enter a battleground. Their disorganized nature, and the
consequent lack of capital, present barriers to resettling elsewhere. In the novel, of
course, this is tied to the color of their skin. Their community in Coney Island is not tied
to a specific ethnicity as with Chinatown, and they do not possess the same level of
control. Actually, since both narratives take the gang on a journey through the rest of the
city, the reader isn’t afforded much information as to how they interact with their
community. One must speculate whether they are known and feared by the general
populace of Coney Island. It is likely important that of all the gangs in this study, theirs is
the one that is not tied to immigration. New York City is traditionally viewed as the
landing point for immigrants and the place where the journey in pursuit of the American
Dream begins. The city is home to all strata of society. There are both the public space
associated with street cultures and the corporate world of Wall Street, a place where the
general public is denied access. The history of the black experience in America is
inevitably tied to the forced removal of Africans by slave traders to the United States, a
legacy that has continued to have detrimental effects for black people long after the
abolition of slavery. Unlike Jewish and Asian people in America, black people have not
been linked to “model minority” stereotypes. In fact, black masculinity has been
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criminalized in American culture and media. In the real world, black criminals have been
able to make entry into the halls of organized crime and even risen to positions of great
power; yet, the black gang members of The Warriors do not appear to have any access to
such advancement.
The masculinity of The Warriors in the novel is paradoxically both defensive and
aggressive. Their continual need to maintain face before their peers and enemies forms
the backbone of their identities as men. Their acts of violence are gestures of rebellion
against the forbidding influence of dominant culture. They provide temporary respite
from feelings of dispossession and disenfranchisement, yet are depicted as reprehensible
and unheroic. Their behavior actually ends up following the popular narratives that
criminalize black masculinity, particularly in their brutal treatment of women. Their
willingness to commit rape indicates their need to view themselves as dominant by
humiliating and subjugating female victims. Their violence is an ultimately self-defeating
escapism. The filmic gang is also defensive in the sense that they are hunted and must
protect themselves, but they, when provoked, demonstrate a skill in violence unmatched
by the other gangs in the city, save perhaps the all-black Riffs, the largest and most
powerful gang in the city.
The enactment of masculinity in Harry Grey’s The Hoods is not connected to a
fundamental defensiveness, and privileges a heroic and rebellious vision of Jewish
masculinity. As mentioned before, Sergio Leone’s version of the story subverts Grey’s
intentions. Grey’s characters are intended as counters to the “model minority” stereotypes
that have been associated with Jewish men in American culture. The gangsters in both
versions are rather stunted emotionally; none of them seem able to carry on mature
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romantic relationships and seem most interested in gratifying lusts for sex and violence.
In Gray’s world, this is generally connected to a “boys will be boys” ethos that is
reinforced by protagonist Noodles’ motto that “Everyone’s illegit.” Respectable behavior
is but a front for corrupted desires that fuel all peoples’ natures. Leone’s view could be
seen as even more cynical. Not only are there no truly honorable characters, but the acts
violence committed by Noodles and his friends is just as ugly as those perpetrated by Sol
Yurick’s Coney Island Dominators. As with that gang, rape is utilized as a means of
establishing some form of dominance. When Noodles rapes Deborah, he is trying to drag
her down from an elevated position to his level as a compromised figure.
As for the case of Year of the Dragon, Robert Daley is less explicitly concerned
by ethnic enactments of masculinity, though he does concern himself with the fading
virility of middle-aged men. However, the need to maintain face is as crucial with the
residents of Chinatown society as it is with Yurick’s gang. The loss of one’s honor and
social respect is clearly a much-feared form of emasculation. When Jimmy Koy wins the
battle of wills during his visit to the Thai drug farm, he clearly emerges as the better man
over his rival. Cimino’s adaptation presents two poles of stereotyped Asian masculinity.
There is the sexless, emasculated “model minority” figure and the savage rapist figure.
Here again, rape is used as a weapon. By sexually assaulting Tracy Tzu, Tai’s thugs
essentially remove her as a threat, until Stanley White’s heroic elimination of Tai enables
her to once again use her newscasts to report on the tong situation. Joey Tai is a neutered
figure compared to his predecessor, Jimmy Koy, though he, unlike more outwardly virile-
seeming White, has fathered a child.
188
The portrayal of family presents a crucial point of contrast in regard to all of these
texts. Harry Grey represented the family as a continual source of shame and resignation
to poverty to his young hoods; the sole moment of familial pride that Noodles feels is
sparked by his discovery that his father was once a criminal just as Noodles has turned
out to be. Sergio Leone, in his adaptation, generally avoided depicting the family
members of the young gangster characters. The only nods to their families are the
seconds-long glimpse of Max’s mother as the Bercovicz family moves into the
neighborhood and Noodles’ exasperated statement about how: “My father’s praying, my
mother’s crying, and the lights are turned off. What the hell should I go home for?” The
dreariness and poverty of their home lives feeds into their desires to break away from the
traps of their daily lives by any means at their disposal. Even the surrogate family that
gang life provides them is undermined by the eventual betrayals that mark the characters’
fates, regardless of one’s interpretation as to whether the 1968 sequences are an opium
dream or not.
Sol Yurick’s vision of the misery of home life for his ethnic gang members is
consistent with those portrayals. Hinton’s home is a depressing den of drug addiction, and
abuse, controlled by “the Keepers.” In these works, the desire to find a new family
outside of the home is clearly a major factor that leads the protagonists to gang life. The
elimination of family from Hill’s film version goes a long way towards sidestepping
some of the bleaker implications of the lives of youth gang members. The Warriors
appear to be a fairly close-knit family, in spite of the antagonistic behavior of wild card
Ajax. Their camaraderie and teamwork are what enable them to survive the aggressions
of virtually all of New York’s major gangs. In a contemporary context, this view of a
189
multi-racial gang family has been given a more intimate treatment in John Singleton’s
Four Brothers (2005). The titular group in the film features two black and two white men
who were all raised together by an adoptive mother; they reunite to avenge her murder.
These characters are literally brothers in the legal sense who were raised in the same
household.
In Cimino’s Year of the Dragon, family is used by Joey Tai as a stepping-stone in
his advancement up the ladder of Chinese organized crime. He is the only tong member
whose family life is examined in any way. His marriage to the daughter of a tong leader is
a cunning strategy to gain him entry to the tong world. Subsequently, he has his father-in-
law murdered to allow him further opportunity to strive for leadership. This is in contrast
to Robert Daley’s version, where a devotion to family is what leads to Jimmy Koy’s
downfall. His inability to leave Iris Koy behind in Hong Kong and his unwillingness to
shame his family by allowing them to be deported.
Of all these films, it seems most doubtful that Year of the Dragon could be made
in the present-day; its messages regarding race are too mixed and problematic and its
bigoted protagonist’s gestures towards multiracial acceptance are too dubious. The use of
Asian figures as villains poised against white protagonists has carried on into later films,
such as Lethal Weapon 4 (which I briefly discussed in the third chapter) or Quentin
Tarantino’s Kill Bill Part 1 (2003) in which white protagonist, “The Bride,” travels to
Tokyo and singlehandedly wipes out an entire Yakuza militia. Yet, these latter films do
not wear their problematic racial aspects as explicitly as does Cimino’s film, which both
provides an articulate mouthpiece for anti-Asian sentiment and does not ultimately
condemn him. Tarantino’s O-ren Ishii, a Yakuza boss played by Lucy Liu, is afforded
190
some sympathetic treatment; despite her role as a central antagonist, her traumatic past is
explored in some detail, and she even apologizes to the Caucasian protagonist in the
middle of a fight for having mocked her race.
The fact that of the films discussed the one whose featured criminals appear most
disconnected from economic stability is the most one to offer the most hopeful resolution.
The Warriors are independent and are not burdened with the businesslike details of
organized crime. Whatever respectability they possess is at the street level. They are not
bound by the age-old traditions and false gentility that are shown to dictate the general
operations of the Hun Sang Tong. Nor are they entangled in the caprices of the elites of
the political and economic worlds, as are Noodles, Max, and the rest of their
organization. The Warriors, then, appear as the least compromised and least reliant upon
societal institutions. City Hall is complicit in the successes of both the Chinese and
Jewish gangsters, though in the former case, the cooperative relationship appears
contingent on the tongs agreeing (or at least pretending to agree) to limit operations to the
alternate state of Chinatown. Walter Hill has traditionally been associated with Westerns
and a familiar reading of his body of work is that all of his films tend to be Westerns at
least in spirit, regardless of their actual locale. The Warriors tend to resemble a mythical
Western outlaw gang, embodying ruggedness and a brand of individuality; while they are
a collective group, they appear as an independent family. When they are called to answer
for the assassination of gang leader Cyrus, they refuse to bow down before the informal
laws of gang society. The Riffs, the elites of New York’s gang world, have no real
authority over them. Complicity with authority can undermine the outlaw appeal of
criminal groups.
191
These films collectively illustrate how muddied the ideological landscape can be
in treatments of racialized gangs. Gang and gangster films had already achieved
considerable moral complexity in regard to their subjects prior to the era investigated in
this project. Gangs and gangsters can be utilized as ciphers, as coded symbols to
represent scourges to the moral fabric of society, challenges to the corruption or
unfairness of that same society, or some combination of both. The period of the 1980s in
New York was ripe for virtually all of these interpretations. Reactions against
multiculturalism could have inspired fears of the “other,” an attitude which would mesh
well with the notion of ethnic gangs, unencumbered by the reason or moral decency of
white Anglo-Protestant American society. Yet this period also offered the opportunity for
less alarmist portrayals of gangs of ethnicities that had not previously seen nuanced
exploration in American cinema. The cynicism that characterizes Once Upon a Time in
America does not allow for a heroic treatment of the Jewish protagonists, but does not
prevent a complex investigation into the troubling entanglements between ethnicity and
criminal behavior in America. The mixed messages of Cimino’s Year of the Dragon
demonstrate how difficult it can be to reconcile the dangers of organized criminals with
the troubling circumstances that have lead people of varying ethnicities in America down
such roads in the first place.
The aforementioned Tarantino is an important case in exploring ethnic gangsters
in present-day cinema, as many of his films feature such characters. Virtually all of his
films feature gangs of a sort, if one includes 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, which focuses
on a special platoon of Jewish soldiers who wreak havoc against Nazis during the Second
World War, and 2012’s Django Unchained, which features bi-racial bounty hunters
192
poised against the slavery culture of the antebellum South. Excepting his debut, Reservoir
Dogs (1992), all of his films have featured ethnically marked protagonists, and
occasionally mixed-race teams of fighters. The treatment of race in Tarantino’s body of
work is not without its critics, particularly in regard to his liberal use of the word
“nigger” in most of his films. However, his sympathies are almost always in the favor of
the ethnic gangland figures, notably excepting the Yakuza gang of Kill Bill, although, as I
mentioned, his attitude towards O-ren Ishii is rather nuanced. Tarantino’s consistent
popularity is an indicator that his overall vision regarding fighting groups of varying
ethnicities has found its reflection in contemporary American society.
While there are certainly still racial stigmas against certain ethnicities, particularly
black and Latino peoples, the increasing presence of sympathetic portrayals of criminals
of those backgrounds in the popular media implies a greater acceptability in society as a
whole. Mixed-race gangs are also far more commonly found in popular media than in
previous generations. The most popular film of 2014, Guardians of the Galaxy goes so
far as to present a gang composed not only of humans of multiple skin colors, but with
the bizarre additions of a talking raccoon and a sentient tree in a gesture that speaks of a
humorous transition beyond post-racialism to a post-humanism.
The culture wars between advocates and opponents of multiculturalism are
certainly not over, and the concept of a post-racial society is an as yet unfulfilled one. It
may seem paradoxical to find positive signs in fictional depictions of ethnic criminals.
Yet the instinctual desire on the part of vast numbers of people to challenge the
entrenched values and institutions of a given society is undeniable. The more
representative that depictions of rebellious antiheroes are, the more different members of
193
a multicultural society can find a vicarious and cathartic release. The films adaptations
addressed in this project and the ambilaneces and ambiguities present in them all
demonstrate the growing pains that can come with such a transition.

194
Notes

Introduction

1
Margai, Florence M. and John W. Frazier. “Multiculturalism and Multicultural
Education in the United States: The Contributory Role of Geography.” Multicultural
Geographies: The Changing Racial/Ethnic Patterns of the United States. (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2010), 1.

2
Nachbar, Jack and Kevin Lause. “An Introduction to the Study of Popular Culture:
What is this Stuff Our Dreams are Made of?” Popular Culture: An Introductory Text. Ed.
Jack Nachbar and Kevin Lause. (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University
Popular Press, 1992), 2.

3
Ibid., 3.

4
Ibid., 6.

5
Macfarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996. 8; Leitch, Thomas M. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary
Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45.2 (Spring 2003): 161.

6
Stam, Robert. “Introduction.” Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of
Adaptation. Ed. Robert Stam. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 42.

7
Ibid., 43.

8
Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. (New York: Perennial, 2000),
380-404.

9
McCarty, John. Hollywood Gangland: The Movies’ Love Affair with The Mob. (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 13-16.

10
Clarens, Carlos. Crime Movies: An Illustrated History. (New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1980), 32.

11
Mundy, Jonathan. Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little
Caesar to Touch of Evil. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5.

12
Ibid., 2.

13
Ibid., 5.

14
Warshow, Robert. “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” Partisan Review 15. 2 (February
1948): 242.

195

15
Mundy, 5.

16
Sante, Luc. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. (New York: Farrar, Strauss,
and Giroux, 1991), 198.

17
Howell, James C. and John P. Moore. “History of Street Gangs in the United States.”
National Gang Bulletin Center. (No. 4, May 2010). n.pag.

18
Sante, 199.

19
Abadinsky, Howard. Organized Crime.(Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1985), 96.

20
Abadinsky, 97-99.

21
Cressey quoted in Lyman, Michael D. and Gary W. Potter. Organized Crime. (Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 4.

22
Abadinsky, 5.

23
Albanese, Jay. Organized Crime in America. (Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing Co.,
1996), 3.

Chapter I

24
Bell, Daniel. “Crime as an American Way of Life.” Antioch Review 13.2 (June 1953):
99.

25
Ibid., 133.

26
Ibid.

27
Clarens, 88-89.

28
Denton, Sally and Roger Morris. The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas
and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 25-6.

29
Merton, Robert K. “Social Structure and Anomie.” American Sociological Review 3.5
(October 1938): 672.

30
Merton, 673.

31
Merton, 675.

32
Cohen, Rich. Tough Jews. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 154.
196

33
Joselit, Jenna Weisman. Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish
Community, 1900-1940. (Bloomington: Indiana Univesity Press, 1983), 1-3.

34
Joselit, 9-10.

35
Singer, David. “The Jewish Gangster: Crime as 'Unzer Shtick.'” Judaism 23.1 (Winter
1974): 71.

36
Ibid.

37
Cohen, 259.

38
Ibid., 151.

39
Ibid., 153.

40
Frayling, Christopher. Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death. (New York: Faber
and Faber, 2000), 386.

41
Gabler, Neal. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. (New
York: Crown Publishers, Inc. 1988), 320-321.

42
Ibid., 344.

43
Fried, Albert. The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1980), 113.

44
Singer, 74.

45
Jay Gatsby's allusion to him as the man who fixed the 1919 World Series makes the
point rather obvious.

46
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. Reprint. (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1953), 69.

47
Joselit, 23-24; Rubin, Rachel. Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature. (Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 5.

48
Gold, Michael. Jews Without Money. (New York: Horace Liveright Inc., 1930), 36-7,
45.

49
Ibid., 137.

50
Ibid., 37.
197

51
Ibid., 128.

52
Ibid., 180-1.

53
Ibid., 181.

54
Ibid., 309.

55
Ibid.

56
Rubin, 83.

57
Gold, 41.

58
Anonymous. “Harry ‘Noodles’ Grey.” Palm Springs Walk of Stars. (December 17,
1999). n.pag.

59
Kelly Robert J. “Criminal Underworlds: Looking Down on Society from Below.”
Organized Crime: A Global Perspective. Ed. Robert J. Kelly. (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1986), 12.

60
The real Costello was a noted ally of Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky who was known
to defend them if any of his compatriots dared to direct anti-Semitic epithets towards
them.

61
Leone quoted in Frayling, 24.

62
Leone quoted in Frayling, 24.

63
Martin, Adrian. Once Upon a Time in America. (London: BFI Publishing, 1998), 31.

64
Frayling, 434-5.

65
Frayling, 453-4.

66
Frayling, 402.

67
Fried, 266-268.

68
Denton, 25-27.

69
Fried, 229-230.

198

70
Babiak, Peter. “Once Upon a Time in America: Sergio Leone and the Construction of
Myth.” CineAction 72 (Spring 2007): 67-8.

71
Frayling, 460-2.

72
Frayling, 19-21.

73
Frayling, 461-3.

74
Frayling, 463.

Chapter II

75
Orvis, Gregory P. “Treating Youth Gangs Like Organized Crime Groups.” Gangs: A
Criminal Justice Approach. Ed. J. Mitchell Miller and Jeffrey P. Rush. (Cincinnati,
OH:Anderson Publishing Company, 1996), 93-103.

76
Decker, Scott H., Tim Bynum, and Deborah Weisel. “A Tale of Two Cities: Gangs as
Organized Crime Groups.” Justice Quarterly 15.3 (1998): 396.

77
Ibid., 423.

78
Esbensen, Finn-Ange and Karen E. Tusinski. “Youth Gangs in the Print Media.”
Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 14.1 (2007): 3-6.

79
Esbensen, Finn-Ange and Karen E. Tusinski, 21-38; Thompson, Carol Y ., Robert L.
Young, and Ronald Burns. “Representing Gangs in the News: Media Constructions of
Criminal Gangs.” Sociological Spectrum 20 (2000): 409-432.

80
Thompson, Young, and Burns, 416-7, 427.

81
Brown, Monica. Gang Nation: Delinquent Citizens in Puerto Rican, Chicano, and
Chicana Narratives. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xiii.

82
Brown, xvi; Thompson, Young, and Burns, 427.

83
United States Department of Justice. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention Fact Sheet: Highlights of the 2005 National Youth Gang Surveys. United
States Department of Justice, Washington, DC (2008). N.pag.

84
Brown, xvii.

85
Brown, xviii.

199

86
It should be stated that the presence of black gangs in America can be traced back to at
least the 1920's.

87
Cureton, Steven R. Black Vanguards and Black Gangsters: From Seeds of Discontent
to a Declaration of War. (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc., 2011),
30-32.

88
Sundquist, Eric J. Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 5.

89
Yurick, Sol. The Warriors. (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 186.

90
Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” Dissent
(Fall, 1957). N. pag.

91
Sundquist, 68-9.

92
Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1968), 61.

93
Ibid., 14.

94
Lorenz, Konrad. On Aggression. Trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson. (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, Inc., 1966), 240.

95
Ibid., 243.

96
Ibid.

97
Ibid., 253.

98
Ellson. Hal. Raw Rumbles: The Hal Ellson Omnibus. (San Francisco: Rudos and
Rubes Publishing, 2008), 10.

99
Delaney, Tim. American Street Gangs. (New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006), 112-
118.

100
Miller, Walter James. “Sol Yurick on Reader’s Almanac, 1979.” NYPR Archives/
WNYC Archive Collections. June 2, 1979.

101
Gage, Nicholas. The Mafia is Not an Equal Oppportunity Employer. (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1971), 113.

102
Johnson has been criticized as a Mafia tool for the exploitation of his own people.
(Gage 115-6)

200

103
Lyman, Michael D. and Gary W. Potter. Organized Crime. (Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1997), 220-1.

104
Abadinsky, 157; Albansese, 148; Lyman and Potter, 224.

105
O’Sullivan, Chris. “Ladykillers: Similarities and Divergences of Masculinitiees in
Gang Rape and Wife Battery.” Masculinities and Violence. Ed. Lee H. Bowker.
(Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc., 1998), 93.

106
Hatty, Suzanne E. Masculinites, Violence, and Culture. (Thousand Oaks: Sage
Publications, 2000), 68.

107
Graham, D.B. “Naturalism and the Revolutionary Imperative: Yurick’s The Warriors.”
Critique 18,1 (January 1, 1976): 124.

108
Auster, Al and Dan Georgakas. “The Warriors: An Interview with Sol Yurick.”
Cineaste V ol. 9, No. 3 (Spring 1979): 22.

109
Gross, Larry. “Walter Hill.” Bomb 42 (Winter 1993): 58-61.

110
Siskel, Gene. “Gang films boom, violence steps out from the screens.” Chicago
Tribune, February 25, 1979.

111
Massood, Paula J. Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experience in Film.
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 59.

112
Lawrence, Novotny. Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre. (New
York: Routledge, 2008), 64.

113
Wood, Jennifer M. “Can You Dig It? The Warriors, 35 Years Later.” Esquire, February
19, 2014. N.pag.

114
Ibid.

115
Valdez, Al. Gangs: A Guide to Understanding Street Gangs. (San Clemente: LawTech
Publishing Co., Ltd., 1997), 201.

116
Auster and Georgakas, 24.

117
Valdez, 14.

118
Schudel, Matt. “Sam Greenlee, whose movie ‘The Spook Who Sat by the Door’
became a cult classic, dies.” The Washington Post, May 21, 2014.

201

119
Ibid.

Chapter III

120
Said, Edward. Orientalism. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1978), 11.

121
Ibid., 48.

122
Klein, Christina. Cold War Imperialism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-
1961. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003),10-11.

123
Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1999), 3.

124
Hoppenstand, Gary. “Yellow Devil Doctors and Opium Dens: The Yellow Peril
Stereotype in Mass Media Entertainment.” Popular Culture: An Introductory Text. Ed.
Jack Nachbar and Kevin Lause. (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University
Popular Press, 1992), 281; Greene 4-6

125
Greene, Naomi. From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American
Film. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014), 1.

126
Rohmer, Sax. The Insidious Fu Manchu. (New York: Pyramid Books, 1961), 17.

127
Greene, 15.

128
Hoppenstand, 283.

129
Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. (New York: Penguin Books,
2003), 17-18.

130
Ibid., ix.

131
Ibid., 43.

132
Kwong, Peter. The New Chinatown. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 11.

133
Loo, Chalsa. Chinatown: Most Time Hard Time. (New York: Praeger, 1991), 39.

134
Chen, Yang. Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 47.

135
Ibid., 60.
136
Chang, 99-102.

202

137
Kinkead, Gwen. Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society. (New York: Harper
Collins, 1992), 3.

138
Ibid., x.

139
Huston, Peter. Tongs, Gangs, and Triads: Chinese Crime Groups in North America.
(Lincoln, NE: Author’s Choice Press, 2001), 88; Chin, Ko-lin. Chinese Subculture and
Criminality: Non-traditional Crime Groups in America. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1990), 50-51.

140
Chin, 50.

141
Kwong, 40.

142
Abadinsky, 44.

143
Chin, 4-7.

144
Ibid., 1.

145
Asbury 278-301.

146
Huston, 60.

147
Ibid., 46.

148
Huang, Hua-Lun. “Dragon Brothers and Tiger Sisters: A Conceptual Typology of
Countercultural Actors and Activities of American Chinatowns, China, Hong Kong, and
Taiwan, 1912-2004.” Crime, Law, and Social Change. 45.1 (February 2006): 75, 87.

149
Chin, 9.

150
Chen, Michelle. “A Cultural Crossroads at the ‘Bloody Angle’: The Chinatown Tongs
and the Development of New York’s Chinese American Culture.” Journal of American
History 40.2 (2014): 364.

151
Kwong, 116-7.

152
Lavin, Eric. “Robert Daley, Man with a Message, Once Again Tackles the Problems
with Police in Man with a Gun.” People. V ol. 29, No. 18 (May 9, 1988).

153
Ibid.

154
Huston, 11.

203

155
Ibid., 14.

156
Lash III, William H. “The International Trade Policies of President Ronald Reagan.”
President Reagan and the World. Ed. Eric J. Schmertz, Natalie Datlof, and Alexej
Ugrinksy. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 355.

157
Ibid., 356.

158
Morikawa, Suzuko. “Reading MTV: Proliferation of United States Culture in the Age
of Globalization.” The 1980s: A Critical and Transitional Decade. Ed. Kimberly R.
Moffitt and Duncan A. Campbell. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 330-331.

159
McVeigh, Stephen. “’Do We Get to Win this Time?’ Movies, Mythology, and Political
Culture in Reagan Country.” The 1980s: A Critical and Transitional Decade. Ed.
Kimberly R. Moffitt and Duncan A. Campbell. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011),
473

160
Lee, 190.

161
Ibid., 209-214.

162
Biskind, Peter. “The Vietnam Oscars.” Vanity Fair March 2008.

163
O’Connor, Michael. “Battling the Past: An Encounter with Michael Cimino.” Three
Monkeys Online Magazine. (August 1, 2005): N. pag.

164
Cimino, Michael. “Director’s Commentary.” Year of the Dragon. Dir. Michael
Cimino. Perf. Mickey Rourke, John Lone. Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 1985.

165
Skinner, Margo. “’Year of the Dragon’: Unrelenting Racism, Violence, and an
Unbelievable Plot.” Asian Week. V ol. 6. Issue 51. September 16, 1985. N.pag.

166
Cimino. “Director’s Commentary.”

167
Hoppenstand, 279.

168
Marchetti, Gina. Romance and the Yellow Peril: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies
in Hollywood Fiction. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3-4;
Hoppenstand, 280.

169
Skinner, N. pag.

170
Marchetti, 23-4; Bidlingmaier, Selma Siew Li. “The Spectacle of the Other:
Representations of Chinatown in Michael CImino’s Year of the Dragon (1985) and John
204

Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986).” Current Objectives of Postgraduate
American Studies V ol. 8 (2007). N.pag.

171
Cimino. “Director’s Commentary.”

172
Skinner, N.pag.

173
Cimino. “Director’s Commentary.”

Conclusion

174
Prince, Stephen. “Introduction: Movies and the 1980s.” American Cinema of the
1980s: Themes and Variations. Ed. Stephen Prince. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2007),12.

175
Thompson, Graham. American Culture in the 1980s. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2007), 33.

176
Prince, 12-14.

205

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Asset Metadata

Creator Gordon, Brett Michael (author)

Core Title Ideological shifts in portrayals of ethnic gangs and gangsters in New York novels and film adaptations

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 01/30/2015

Defense Date 01/26/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag film adaptations,Gangs,Gangsters,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Rowe, John Carlos (committee chair), Braudy, Leo (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member)

Creator Email bmgordon@usc.edu,brettmgordon@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-528824

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Legacy Identifier etd-GordonBret-3154.pdf

Dmrecord 528824

Document Type Dissertation

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Rights Gordon, Brett Michael

Type texts

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