Street corner - gangster stuff

After i started modelling that street corner i posted a picture of a little while ago i decided i wanted it to lead somewhere and what it was really making me think of was early to mid 20th century gangsters and gangster films. What really came to mind with gangster films was the posters that go with them and how iconic some of them have been so i decided to have a closer look at a few. 

The first ones i looked at were some gangster classics like the godfather, scarface and goodfellas 

The colour schemes are the first things that hit you, they are all dark with the main feature being black and white, good fellas slightly different to the other two because the picture is less edited and other colours are visible but this is i think is because goodfellas is more modern than the other two films and posters of that time (90's) were all of a different style. With the godfather and scraface though just 3 colours were used, black white and red, and this are now famously identified with these films and the genre itself so if i was going to create a poster then these 3 colours may help me be effective in my work. 

The next posters i looked at were for gangster series id watched at those were sopranos and boardwalk empire. 

These two shows are at opposite ends of the time scales with sopranos being set in modern america whereas boardwalk empire is set in the 1920's, these time differences obviously effect the content of the postes but that domination of black is still there and the use of white features in both posters with white text from boardwalk empire which was becoming a pattern. the lack of red in the boardwalk poster i put down to the content of the show, the show is based around political aspects and the gangsters and characters are not solely italian like the other films so i think the red is more of a sicilian/mob colour than just a gangster colour. 

A couple more posters i looked at were the departed and the untouchables 

these two films are gangster and mob based but also followed characters from the other side of things and in these films you found yourself cheering for the good guys this i think is why the posters differ again from the others. The white text is still being used, red is used in the departed poster and both posters are dark and moody but they feature on a good/guys as well as the mobsters. the untouchables poster is also similar to the goodfellas poster and this i attribute to the year it was made(87) as much as i do the genre because as i said posters from similar times share characteristics. 

A lot of research for just some ideas but it really got me think for my poster.