William Wyler, as this edited collection demonstrates, worked within a wide range of genres and modes throughout his career in Hollywood, but his contributions to the gangster film are some of his least discussed pictures. In Wyler's Dead End (1937) and The Desperate Hours (1955), a distinct narrative structure can be mapped which reveals the gangster film to have undergone a much more complex development with diverse plot types than initial discussions surmise. Through a critique of Thomas Schatz's focus on the “classical” gangster cycle, Amanda Ann Klein argues that “his privileging of the classical cycle does damage to genre history; clearly, the genre's narrative formulas sprang from somewhere.” Moreover, as Klein demonstrates, this privileging of “the classic cycle ignores variations and anomalies in order to create continuity and stability in a genre's definition.” Wyler's gangster films illuminate a divergent narrative structure that becomes more prevalent in the late-1930s with the enforcement of the Production Code that would bring an end to the classical cycle. While I agree with Klein's critique of an evolutionary model for understanding the genre, Schatz does acknowledge that the gangster films’ “evolution was severely disrupted by external forces, and its narrative formula was splintered into various derivative strains.” A derivative strain may be a useful framing of Wyler's gangster films because neither film relies on a “gangster-hero” in the same way that Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) or Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) do. The presence of dual protagonists in each film—the hero is an average civilian as opposed to a gangster—can be attributed to the influence of the Production Code which sought to avoid the glorification of the gangster-hero. However, Wyler's films also rely on an immensely short timeline—each film takes place over only a few days—which cannot be explicitly attributed to the influence of the Production Code. Over a few days, a gangster film cannot possibly show audiences the notorious ascension that most gangster-heroes make within the world of crime—such as Tony in Scarface or Rico in Little Caesar. Therefore, Wyler's gangster films are unique because the condensed timeframe of the narrative, in conjunction with the presence of dual protagonists, intensifies the length of time that the plot teases out the distress of the gangster.