Scorsese's Crime Film Education

Martin Scorsese is one of the most celebrated and influential directors in cinema history. He has a new HBO series called Boardwalk Empire premiering this fall that's about crime and Atlantic City.

Scorcese has done his share of crime films - Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver - and he won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2007 for The Departed.

He listed the gangster pictures that had an effect on him and the way he would portray crime on film.

He listed films from the last 40 years like Performance, the Godfather saga, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, The Long Good Friday, Sexy Beast, and John Woo’s Hong Kong films BUT he thinks the films that really matters are the ones he saw when he was young, open, and impressionable both as a kid and as a film student.

They range from 1931's The Public Enemy to Point Blank from 1967. In between are films that a lot of people haven't seen - like the original Scarface from 1932.

You can see all of Marty's picks and clips from the films in this post on The Daily Beast.