What Is the Best Gangster Movie of the 1980s?

Where Scarface is about excess, Once Upon a Time in America is about memory.

Sergio Leone's final film follows David "Noodles" Aaronson and his childhood friends from the streets of New York through their lives in organised crime.

Robert De Niro plays the older Noodles, but this isn't simply another story about a criminal looking back proudly upon the empire he built.

Noodles is haunted by it.

Friendship, violence, betrayal and regret become tangled together as the movie moves between different periods of his life.

That makes Once Upon a Time in America feel very different from most gangster films.

Leone isn't particularly interested in racing towards the next gunfight. He allows scenes to breathe, sometimes for an extraordinarily long time, creating something closer to a criminal elegy than a conventional thriller.

The film's release history also became part of its legend.

Its American theatrical release was heavily shortened and restructured, dramatically changing Leone's intended approach. Longer versions subsequently helped the film undergo a major critical reassessment.

Watched in its fuller form, its scale is remarkable.

This isn't merely a story about becoming a gangster.

It's about what remains when the money, friendships and ambitions have disappeared and all you're left with are memories of what happened.

Of all the gangster films produced during the 1980s, Once Upon a Time in America may be the most ambitious.

Brian De Palma returned to gangster cinema in 1987, but The Untouchables couldn't feel much further removed from Scarface.

Kevin Costner stars as federal agent Eliot Ness, determined to bring down Chicago crime boss Al Capone during Prohibition.

Robert De Niro plays Capone, while Sean Connery delivers one of the movie's defining performances as veteran police officer Jim Malone.

And The Untouchables absolutely moves.

Where Once Upon a Time in America is reflective and sprawling, De Palma's movie is built like a piece of old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment.

There are gunfights, chases, larger-than-life villains and beautifully constructed set pieces, all driven along by Ennio Morricone's memorable score.

De Palma even makes Prohibition-era Chicago occasionally feel like the setting for a western.

Historical accuracy isn't really the main attraction here.

This is the legend of Eliot Ness and Al Capone turned into big-screen entertainment.

And sometimes that's exactly what you want from a gangster movie.

Then there is Harold Shand.

Released in 1980, The Long Good Friday gave British gangster cinema one of its most memorable characters and Bob Hoskins one of his defining performances.

Harold is a London crime boss with considerably bigger plans.

He believes the redevelopment of London presents an opportunity to transform his criminal organisation into something more powerful and supposedly more respectable.

For Harold, the future looks enormous.

Then his world begins exploding around him.

People are killed. Businesses are attacked. Those closest to him don't seem capable of explaining what is happening.

And Harold doesn't like not knowing.

What makes The Long Good Friday so effective is watching that certainty gradually disappear.

At the beginning, Harold believes he controls his world. His reputation, money and capacity for violence have taught him that every problem can ultimately be solved through intimidation or force.

Then he encounters a situation that doesn't play by his rules.

Hoskins is magnificent because underneath Harold's rage you can see him constantly thinking, recalculating and trying to regain control.

By the movie's unforgettable conclusion, almost everything he believed about his own power has been stripped away.

It's smaller than Scarface, less epic than Once Upon a Time in America and less glossy than The Untouchables.

It doesn't need to be any of those things.

Trying to choose between these movies exposes something interesting about gangster cinema in the 1980s.

There wasn't one dominant style.

If you want the decade's biggest gangster pop-culture phenomenon, it's difficult to look beyond Scarface.

If you want an enormous, melancholy crime epic, Once Upon a Time in America stands virtually alone.

If you're after beautifully constructed Hollywood entertainment, The Untouchables delivers it.

And if you want something darker, tighter and unmistakably British, The Long Good Friday remains exceptional.

You could make a convincing argument for any of them.

But this is Movies in the 80s.

Eventually, we've got to stop sitting on the fence.

If there is only room for one VHS tape tonight, we're putting Scarface into the machine.

Not because it's flawless.

In some ways, it's because it isn't.

Scarface is loud, excessive, violent, messy and seemingly incapable of doing anything quietly. But those qualities are inseparable from what the movie eventually became.

Tony Montana's rise and fall takes the fantasy at the heart of the gangster movie and pushes it until that fantasy becomes grotesque.

He wants money.

He gets it.

He wants power.

He gets that too.

He gets the mansion, the cars and the lifestyle he once could only stare at from the outside.

And none of it is enough.

Tony's tragedy isn't that he failed to achieve his dream.

It's that he achieved so much of it and destroyed himself anyway.

Perhaps the strongest argument for Scarface is simply that the movie refused to stay in 1983.

Every new generation seems to find it.

Tony Montana appeared on bedroom walls and T-shirts. Musicians referenced him. Games borrowed from him. Other movies imitated him.

The black suit, the enormous desk, the mansion and those famous words — THE WORLD IS YOURS — became instantly recognisable pieces of movie imagery.

There are gangster films with greater subtlety.

There are gangster films with tighter scripts.

There are certainly gangsters who make considerably better life decisions than Tony Montana.

But very few are more unforgettable.

So our answer to the question "What is the best gangster movie of the 1980s?" is Scarface.

Tony wanted the world.

More than four decades later, cinema still hasn't entirely taken it away from him.