History of Gangster Genre

From Azaan Naseer

What was the first ever gangster film?

Well the first ever gangster film was called The Musketeers Of Pig Alley. It was launched in 1912. It was all about a young wife and her musician husband living in a property in a New York tenement. The husbands job then requires him to go away for a number of days. On his return, he is robbed by his neighbourhood gangster. Sometime later, an unrelated mob shoot-out ensues. The husband happens upon the melee, recognizing the crook who robbed him.

Who Produced it?

The producer of the first ever gangster film The Musketeers of Pig Alley was a person named D.W Griffith.

David Wark Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate Army colonel and Civil War hero. Young Griffith grew up with his father's romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth-century literature that were to eventually mold his black-and-white view of human existence and history. In 1897 Griffith set out to pursue a career both acting and writing for the theatre, but for the most part was unsuccessful. Reluctantly, he agreed to act in the new motion picture medium for Edwin S Porter at the Edison Company. Griffith was eventually offered a job at the financially struggling American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., where he directed over four hundred and fifty short films, experimenting with the story-telling techniques he would later perfect in his epic The birth of a nation (1915).

Reference: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000428/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

What was the narrative?

It was all about a young wife and her musician husband living in a property in a New York tenement. The husbands job then requires him to go away for a number of days. On his return, he is robbed by his neighbourhood gangster. Sometime later, an unrelated mob shoot-out ensues. The husband happens upon the melee, recognizing the crook who robbed him.