Film Studies: Celluloid sinners - why do we love them to death?

Not for the first time, the National Film Theatre has turned its attention to films about crime. No other topic leads so quickly into the ambiguous nature of the movies - or the tormenting riddle about what we are doing in the dark, watching and vicariously involved. Anyone who has even been robbed or burgled speaks of the horrifying emotional invasion that goes with the loss of property. Many people subject to serious violence are traumatised for the rest of their lives. As for those murdered - well, they're against it.

And yet, when we watch The Godfather or The Godfather Part II, we are enlisted in the killings that conclude both films, and establish the supremacy of Michael Corleone. The economy, the motion, the melodramatic flair of the killings are nothing less than beautiful. Michael Corleone is not a lot of fun, to be sure. But we have become his supporters, his soldiers. Can you countenance how easily life's moral order has been reversed?

A few weeks ago, the American Film Institute announced the result of a poll on our favourite heroes and villains in movies. Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch was the top hero. But then look at some of the people who figure as villains, and wonder what that word means: Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins); Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins); Michael Corleone (Al Pacino); Noah Cross (John Huston) - from Chinatown; Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) in White Heat; Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro).

Now, how is Travis the "villain" of Taxi Driver? Yes, I know he wastes a bunch of people; I'm prepared to agree that he shouldn't be out on the streets; and he's not the guy I want when I step into a cab. But "villain" is altogether inadequate because of the warped saintliness that writer Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese have shared with us. And Travis endures at the end of the film. He has become a kind of psycho hero, just as Bonnie and Clyde made adorable pets out of a couple of raw hoodlums who once terrorised west Texas. How is it that even Norman Bates has moments when you feel that he's the gentlest, kindest person in that strange gallery of harsh, lost souls, Psycho?

The way movies alter our relationship with villains is still as extraordinary as it was in 1922-3 when Will Hays strove to introduce self-censorship and ordained that there should be no films that "were predominantly concerned with the underworld".

Yes, there are criminals and criminal enterprises that lie at the heart of great literature - though not nearly as many as there are in film. I can hardly think of a major novel that leaves the criminals as triumphant as they are in The Godfather Part II, or as enshrined in legend as in Bonnie and Clyde. Somehow in reading, it is more natural for life's moral imperative to be observed. Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov would not make it as a killer but for remorse and punishment; Dickens's Fagin and Bill Sikes cannot be tolerated going free. But on the screen, as we watch from the dark, some stealthy and unwholesome pact is made with the darkness on the screen.

Take John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (one of the films in this NFT series) and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. They have more in common than just Sterling Hayden in the central role. In both cases they are stories of a gang of unhappy misfits and failures in life who band together to make a great robbery. The purpose is ignoble, and the guys are not glamorous, but there is something fine in their association and something we feel inclined to support. In both cases, the cops on the other side are either nasty or anonymous; they are not characters who challenge our involvement with the underworld.

The jobs nearly work. But human frailty betrays the Huston gang, and in the Kubrick film the getaway is confounded when some stupid little dog makes an airport luggage truck swerve. A big case falls on the ground, bursts open, and all the money that was stolen from the race track is literally gone with the wind, blown hither and thither by the jet slipstream. The look on Sterling Hayden's face, the crushed fatalism, is like the look on ours as the great scheme comes to pieces.

The culmination of this weird trickery is the meeting between De Niro and Pacino in the coffee shop in Michael Mann's Heat. It's such a lovely scene, so well written and played, in which cop and crook prove to their adolescent satisfaction that they're alike. And that's the trouble: it's a scene for boys contemplating fantasy rather than a world in which we cling desperately to bruised faith in the police and are revolted by the threat of criminal behaviour.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk

'Crime Scene 2003': NFT, London SE1 (020 7928 3232), 10 to 13 July