Responding to his fretful, bedridden wife May (Dorothy Tree), who worries, “When I think of all those awful people you come in contact with, downright criminals, I get scared,” double-dealing lawyer Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern), who is about to be arrested for his part in a high-stakes jewel robbery in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), blandly reassures her: “Nothing so different about them. After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.” His remark neatly encapsulates the defining paradox of the gangster film: Even though professional criminals who come together for the express purpose of committing crimes are rough, unscrupulous, and fearsome, they are at the same time indistinguishable from ordinary citizens like Emmerich, both because Emmerich is so corrupt that he might as well be a gangster, and because gangsters cannot help imitating the society whose norms they set out to violate.

Although it could well be argued that every crime film is a critique of the society crime disrupts, the gangster film is especially concerned with the social order its gang mimics or parodies. This concern begins with the gangster film's obsession with rules. Some rules are so fundamental that they are virtually universal in gangster films. The authority of the leader, if the gang has a leader, is not to be questioned.