How does Wellman show the impact of crime on family and wider society in the film the public enemy?

The impact of crime on the family is seen in the public enemy as you see the relationship between tom and mike. As mike is considered the ‘hero’ whilst mike is the complete opposite they always fight as mike is disappointed in his little brother as mike dislike crime a lot. You could assume that tom does so much crime as he knows that he could never live up to his brother which causes him to strive to make more money than mike for his mother as he never feels good enough. We can see that mike dislikes crime in the beer and blood scene in which mike says ‘there’s beer and blood. Blood of men’ he hates crime as his dad was ironically a police officer and also all the blood split in the world war that he was bravely involved in. Although their relationship is strained due to the presence of crime in Toms life you can see that they still care for each other. On the other hand, we can see that the relationship with his mother brings out the emotional side of him and he wants to make her proud this is shown by the way he doesn’t tell her what he really does he just says he has a job in ‘politics’. However, the main impact will be shown in the end when tom dies as you can see that the external impact will be sorrow as he died to the crime he had committed.

The impact on wider society is seen by the way we can see that most people respect them or are scared of them. We can see that people are scared of them when they go off to a bar to sell the beer and force the man to buy some. As we know they do this in multiple other bars so we can see that the crime elicits fear to most people this would cause the society to be more broken. This causes people in the society who are scared to fear unsecure in their own home as you can see that the police don’t have much involvement into helping to stop the gang until later.