Thanks. I think that is both true and false, somewhat true but also self-serving propaganda designed by mobsters to legitimize what they are doing. Tony Soprano at one point says something like, I think to his psychiatrist, "We are SOLDIERS. We kill soldiers from the other side, we risk our lives to feed our families."
When I was in Boston there was a soldier from the Whitey Bulger gang, a guy named John Marazano, not sure I have spelled that right. Anyway, I like it was Marazano who had made a deal with prosecutors in regard to the murder or the businessman in Oklahoma that, in exchange for his testimony in that case, he could not be prosecuted for any OTHER crimes in which he implicated himself while testifying in that case. His lawyer spotted the opening, and, in cross examination or possibly re-direct, led him through all of the murders he had committed. . . and did you kill THIS guy, as a part of this ongoing criminal enterprise? And did you kill this other guy? Got him to confess to 20-some murders while on the stand in that case, making the prosecutors unable to prosecute him for those crimes. (They eventually, years later, came after him for some RELATED offenses, so he did do SOME prison time for the crimes.)
Anyway, while I was living in Boston Marazano was free and clear, and he would occasionally appear on talk shows, not exactly talking about his murders but in general about his crimes. He was church-going man, seriously, and gave off the appearance of a normal laborer, somebody you would hire to fix your electricity without giving it a second thought. He HATED being described as a "hit man", and insisted that he never killed anyone for money. He wasn't paid to kill any of these people; he just did what he was told to do to protect his friends.
But if you follow it through. . .while it may be true that he was not directly paid to kill any of these people. . .it is NOT true that all of the people he killed were engaged in the same business. Some of them were killed because they WOULDN'T engage in the business, they wouldn't play ball.
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The point I should have made yesterday, and above. . .this is where I started to go but didn't get there.
The popularity of gangster movies is largely explained by the fact that they live outside the rules of normal society, and when those rules are destroyed, anything becomes possible, becomes plausible. It opens up the landscape. At the time that I first became "aware", MOST popular movies and most popular TV shows were Westerns or World War II movies. Why? The same thing. The West was a place were the Law had not been clearly established-which it really was--and, because the law did not place parameters on how people could act, anything was possible. The same thing with World War II movies; wars occur at the breakdown of civilization, which makes it possible for things to happen that don't happen in ordinary life. People can be killed; relationships can form and melt in the space of the show.
By the 1970s. . .after some nitwits decided to make "realistic" war movies. . . by the mid-1960s World War II movies were falling out of fashion, replaced by "Space" movies and "Space" TV shows. . . Star Trek and Lost in Space and Star Wars, etc. Science fiction, The Twilight Zone. . .the same thing. It creates a place which is outside the normal rules that we all live by. Or, going backward, the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and onward; "Tarzan" creates a space which is exempt from the normal rules of civilzation, although it has it's own rules. The last Tarzan movie I am aware of, about 1980, postulated a "more realistic" Tarzan. Morons; nobody wants Tarzan to be realistic. Making it realistic kills the genre.
Teen Sex comedies often involve the protaganist(s) going on car trip or going to summer camp or going on a family vacation to Brazil, going to some place where the rules don't apply, so anything becomes possible. The same with gangster movies; it simply creates a space where the normal rules don't apply, people don't live on a budget, etc.
MOST movies are crime movies in some sense.