ABSTRACT
Crime provides the subject matter of more movies than any other topic in this book, and, with the possible exception of sex, it tends to generate more discussion. Crime is such a capacious category that it’s difficult to think of it as constituting a single genre; its subgenres are as expansive as most other entire genres. The earliest motion picture footage depicting a crime was Frank Mottershaw’s silent four-minute action mini-drama, “A Daring Daylight Burglary”. Motion pictures depicting what we call common or “street” crimes—most commonly, murder, the heist, and robbery—were not only much of the fare in cinema back at its origin, today, they remain the three most common cinematic crimes. The Godfather was the highest-grossing film of 1972 and, for a time, was the highest-grossing film of all time in unadjusted dollars.
