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D.W. Griffith, 1912, Biograph: the first American gangster film that treats the street as a place, not a backdrop. Lillian Gish is the wife; Elmer Booth is the Snapper Kid. The alley, the dance hall, the shootout that is over before the titles can explain it. One reel. Griffith and Bitzer shooting the Lower East Side as if it were a western, which it was. The musketeers are a gang. Pig Alley is the whole country in one block.
In one programme
Seventeen, a tenement wife, one reel. Griffith and Bitzer shoot the Lower East Side as a western, and Gish is the one figure in the alley who does not play to the back row. Watch her at the dance hall. She is already watching back.
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