Blood Orange, or Violence in the Movies

Hollywood movies used to make the gangster “understandable” by allowing him a human weakness, and the same trick of complication was played on cops. The unstated principle seemed to be: cops and robbers have more in common with each other than either can ever have with the organization man. They work by their own peculiar skills, and organizations are alien to them because they are individuals. This was the situation more than 30 years ago that gave us everything from Scarface down to Angels with Dirty Faces and The Maltese Falcon. Recently, however, on television and in the movies, there has been a shifting of the current. Corporate evil, which used to be the enemy of independent cop and robber ali...