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Representing masculinity
It has been argued that The Public Enemy has a homoerotic subtext, in relation both to Tom and Matt’s close friendship and to Putty Nose’s interest in Tom. However, the film also tries to assert masculine values. The Great Depression created a crisis in masculinity, and in film the previously refined leading males were replaced by rougher, tougher ones. Clarke Gable and James Cagney became icons of masculinity, and Cagney uses this for the character of Tom Powers. (Social, cultural, historical context and Key Concepts – Representation)

Feelings of insecurity about male dominance are at least partially resolved when Tom pushes a grapefruit into the face of Kitty (Mae Clarke) in a scene that is both amusing and distasteful in equal measures, and which bemuses students every time I show this film (Textual analysis to illustrate Representation).

The roles of women are objectified in The Public Enemy. This is certainly true both of Kitty, as exemplified by the breakfast/grapefruit scene, where she fulfils no function other than to be humiliated by Tom, and Gwen who appears to be used as mere decoration. This is shown in the scene in which she accompanies Tom to the dinner dance and is nothing more than a beautiful object for him to show off. This does, however, demonstrate the patriarchal values of the society at the time; the women in the film are represented as having no power other than to attract men with their looks, or to cook and clean for them, as is the case with Tom’s mother. It is the men (and in this case the gangsters) who have the power. This reflects society in that men in America in the 1930s would certainly have held all the positions of power (Key Concepts – Representation and social context).

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Conventions and realism
It is argued that the major conventions of the gangster genre were laid down during this classic period of the 1930s:
• the iconography e.g. the stylised suits, overcoats, shirts and ties etc., cigarettes, alcohol, guns, flash cars
• the sleazy settings and urban backdrop, of bars, clubs and police precincts
• the themes with which we have become so familiar, such as the ‘rise and fall’ structure, the mythology of the gangster as tragic hero, revenge as a prime motivating factor, the binary opposition between the family and the gang.
But the convention that is particularly worth commenting on here is Realism. Gangster films reflect a realist representation of contemporary society, and this is certainly so of the 1930 films and in particular The Public Enemy. (Key Concepts – Genre)

The two main characters in Little Caesar and Scarface, Rico and Tony Camonte respectively, are based on Al Capone; in The Public Enemy, Tom Powers is based on Hymie Weiss. These were real life gangsters and deadly rivals; Weiss was the only man Al Capone ever truly feared. In real life Hymie Weiss had a partner called Dion O’Banion who saw him rise as a gangster (like Matt Doyle in the film). The reason for Weiss’s hatred of Capone was that Capone arranged a successful hit on O’Banion’s life. Similarly, in The Public Enemy, the Burns Mob kills Tom’s partner Matt. Like Weiss, Powers wants vengeance for his friend’s death, so goes into enemy territory armed with only two guns. He is shot and ends up in hospital. Capone later killed Weiss, just as Tom is kidnapped and killed by the Burns Mob (Historical context and Key Concepts – Genre).

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The historical context: prohibition and poverty
The backdrop to the narrative of The Public Enemy is twofold: Prohibition and the Great Depression. The era of Prohibition was between 1919 and 1933. The American government, under the Eighteenth Amendment, made it illegal to manufacture liquor with an alcohol percentage above 0.5%. This was formalised in law by the Volstead Act of 1920, and not repealed until 1933. This law however, only condemned the supplier of liquor, not the drinker. An underground world of clubs and speakeasies was formed and the illegal racketeering of alcohol gave way to a complex arrangement of organised crime (Social, political and historical context).

Prohibition is central to the narrative of The Public Enemy in several scenes, but at the very start of the film we are shown the brewery, with lots of people involved in the manufacture of beer and liquor. Then when we cut to 1920 (shown in text on the screen) we see a ‘Family Liquor Store’ selling off all stock due to Prohibition, and people clearly roaring drunk as a consequence, falling over in the street, and loading up their cars and babies’ prams with liquor. We then cut to a scene in a bar where Paddy Ryan the bar owner has a conversation with Tom and Matt about how expensive alcohol is and tells them that if they can get hold of it he will buy it off them. We see Matt and Tom loading up a gasoline tanker with alcohol, having broken into a warehouse. At this point in the narrative we realise that they have come of age as gangsters; the job does not go wrong, and they are now on a path of dealing alcohol during Prohibition (Textual analysis and social/historical context).

The American Depression was part of a world-wide economic slump provoked by the collapse of the Wall Street stock market in 1929. By the late 1920s, audiences had begun to distrust the cheery optimism of Hollywood’s musicals and fantasies; Warner Brothers exploited this change of mood with the creation of the reality-based gangster genre (Social, cultural and historical context).
When we do a textual analysis of the opening of The Public Enemy it is clear that the Great Depression forms a backdrop to the narrative. From its opening moments, we see that it’s set in 1909; there is a shot of a bustling street, then a rundown neighbourhood, a brewery, a Salvation Army band – and then we are introduced to a young Tom and Matt in scruffy clothes drinking beer from a bucket. They proceed to steal from a department store but get away. We are shown the first glimpse of their neighbourhood, which is quite clearly run down; although this is pre-Depression America, all the signs are in place for things to go rapidly downhill once the stock market crashes (Textual analysis and social/historical context).

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A mini-history of the gangster movie

Like most film genres, the roots of the gangster genre started in the silent era. The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) was directed by D.W. Griffith and featured the gangster villain ‘The Snapper Kid’ who leaches off society, but is rewarded with money rather than being punished for his anti-social crimes. This film already showed the signs of realism through its use of location and representation of gangs and crime in the slums (Historical context and Genre conventions). Although it featured a gangster character at this early date, it was the 1930s’ classic Hollywood gangster cycle that was the real beginning of the genre.

The 1930s were the defining moment, and it was this period which created the rules, conventions, and iconography of the genre as a whole (Historical context).

Media magazine questions:

1) Citizen Journalist refers to Millions of people have constant access to filming capability through their mobiles, and footage can be uploaded and rapidly distributed on the internet. The power to make and break news has moved beyond the traditional news institutions.

2) One of the first examples of ordinary people generating news is the Rodney King incident. Video cameras had become more common and more people could afford them…unfortunately for four Los Angeles police officers. Having caught Rodney King, an African-American, after a high speed chase, the officers surrounded him, tasered him and beat him with clubs. The event was filmed by an onlooker from his apartment window. The home-video footage made prime-time news and became an international media sensation, and a focus for complaints about police racism towards African-Americans

3) Some of the formats News organisations now offer are forums, opinion polls, blogs, links to social sites, message boards.

4) UGC footage evokes more feeling out of the audience as it's a first hand account of what is happening directly in front of the person.

5) A gatekeeper has the job of deciding what is and isn’t news, and what will and won’t be broadcast on prime time television. Also, the gatekeeper (s) can also filter out irrelevant and misleading content

6) One of the main concerns held by journalists over the rise of UGC is that there will be fewer jobs for journalists