Before The Godfather Ruled Cinema, The Public Enemy Wrote the Rules—And We All Forgot(Photo Credit –Prime Video)
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Francis Ford Coppola did not invent the gangster film but he definitely reshaped it. When The Godfather came out, it was not just another crime movie — it became the blueprint and the one film everyone suddenly compared everything else to.
If you mention greatest movies of all time to someone on the street, there is a decent shot you will say The Godfather, like it is a given because that is how deep it is sunk into film culture.
The Gangster Film That Came First
However, while Coppola’s masterpiece set a new bar in the ’70s, it owed more than a little to the gritty black and white stories that came decades earlier. There was The Public Enemy, a film shot out of Warner Bros. in 1931, before even Marlon Brando ever mumbled a threat or Al Pacino stared blankly through a murder.
The Public Enemy, directed by William A. Wellman and built from real stories of Chicago crime, featured James Cagney as Tom Powers, a street kid who climbs the ranks of bootlegging during Prohibition. Cagney’s energy lit the screen like nothing else. You had him and his friend Matt (Edward Woods) growing up fast and dirty in early-century Chicago, pulled deep into gang life as alcohol turned from vice into business. Then there was blood, betrayal and a dinner table scene with a grapefruit that got burned into cinema history and that was during a time when Hollywood was still trying to behave (thanks to Hays code).
Coppola may have given us the Corleones, with all their traditions and tragedy but The Public Enemy had already shown that family tension and gangster ambition made for a lethal mix. Tom’s strained relationship with his brother Mike mirrored the same kind of pain seen later between Michael and Fredo. The wedding-day calm before a storm, the rival gangs clashing and the slow fall of a once-rising criminal, it was all there, years before The Godfather ever rolled camera.
Even if The Public Enemy did not get the same kind of global praise, it gave the genre its spine. Cagney’s performance influenced generations of actors who wanted to mix charm with menace. The directors watched Wellman’s raw framing of crime and saw possibilities and its impact did not fade as Coppola picked up that thread and ran with it, per Far Out Magazine.
At the end, The Godfather might be the crown jewel, but The Public Enemy built the throne.
