The archetypal creature of the city is the movie gangster, whom Robert Warshow described over sixty years ago as a tragic hero. “Thrown into the crowd without background or advantages, with only … ambiguous skills,” Warshow wrote, “the gangster is required to make his own way, to make his life and impose it on others.” Frustrated by the facelessness of the individual in the big city, he sees crime as the rational way to establish his identity. Yet there is a tragic flaw in this ambition to rise above the crowd, for the successful racketeer increasingly becomes the target of both the police and his fellow criminals. The greater his success, the more precipitous his fall; in the end, “there is only one possibility – failure.” The final meaning of the city for the gangster, according to Warshow, thus can only be “anonymity and death.”

But Warshow understood that, like Greek tragedies, gangster films were not realistic works of art – they were mythological ones. And this means that, from an artistic point of view, the city, like the ancient Greek stage, is a metaphorical space and not a real one, even when gangster films are shot on location in actual cities like New York. So, for Warshow, the gangster inhabits the