The rural South in the U.S. and American gangster life are also known as an honor cultures.
Directed by Sir Ridley Scott, American Gangster is based on a real-life story.
He's still snagging lead roles in high-profile flicks, including the critically acclaimed 3:10 to Yuma and this month's American Gangster opposite Denzel Washington.
In 2007 he went on to play criminal Frank Lucas in American Gangster (albeit a criminal who switches sides at the very end).
Other showbusiness names honoured include actor Chiwetel Ejiofor - who has appeared in Inside Man, Love Actually and American Gangster - and Rising Damp star Don Warrington.
Set in the late 1960s and early '70s, Ridley Scott's star-driven "American Gangster" positions Harlem's notorious drug kingpin Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) as an entrepreneurial self-starter in the black economy.
American gangster Al Capone was always an immaculate dresser.
According to Lorcan Otway, director of the Museum of the American Gangster in New York, Capone was adept at creating a public image that captured the imagination of Americans, a feat helped greatly by new media outlets of the time.
To an extent, long-form TV series like "The Sopranos" and "The Wire" have raised the bar by exploring this kind of material in the depth a mere movie can only hint at, and "American Gangster" bites off more than it chews.
Before there was Capone, there was Johnny Torrio, an Italian-American mobster who is credited with beginning the Chicago gangster scene in the early 1920s.
"The gangster is the 'no' to the great American 'yes' which is stamped so big over our official culture, " wrote the critic Robert Warshow.
That American import thrived in Shanghai in the 1920s and '30s, brought there by a Chinese gangster with connections to the West.
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