Hollywood’s Detectives
Crime Series in the 1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to Hard-boiled Noir
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The Galvanic ‘Unhuman’: Technology, the Living Dead and the ‘Animal-Machine’ in Literature and Culture
The history of the zombie is part of a larger set of discourses generated out of industrial modernity relating to notions of the ‘unhuman’ and concepts of ‘unlife’ that develop from unease over the intersectio...
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Englishness and America: Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes
The ‘Sherlock Holmes’ series of films, originally produced by Twentieth Century Fox for two period versions in 1939 (both released as headlining movies), and then by Universal, after the series was revived and...
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The Rise of the Hard-boiled Detective
Although the hard-boiled style has been regarded as a dominant mode of the detective film in Hollywood in the 1940s, as Steve Neale describes (2000: 72), the number of hard-boiled films in this period that act...
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Exploring Detective Films in the 1930s and 1940s: Genre, Society and Hollywood
Hollywood’s version of the whodunnit in the 1930s and 1940s was not always of the classical style associated with the progenitors of the literary detective genre (Poe and Conan Doyle) or the writers of Golden ...
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Between Law and Crime: The Chivalric ‘Criminal’ Detective
An important strand within Hollywood crime series of the 1930s and 1940s focuses on the figure of the criminal detective whose roots are less in the classical detective mode than in the strain of criminal-cent...
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Ordering the World: The Uncompromising Logic of Charlie Chan and Mr Moto
Detective series involving Asian detectives were very popular in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s and, indeed, the most prolific of the Hollywood detective crime series in this period was the ‘Charlie Chan’ se...
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Conclusion: Noir Detectives, Rogue Cops, Undercover Men and Police Procedurals
The crime series persisted into the late 1940s, but the detective crime genre in this period, and into the 1950s, became increasingly fractured, as if the comforting formal style of the mystery series could no...
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‘Such Lovely Friends’: Class and Crime in ‘The Thin Man’ Series
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.’s (MGM) ‘The Thin Man’ films are unusual among the detective crime series of the 1930s and 1940s because they maintained their A-Movie status as main features throughout their run. Oth...
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The Post-Code Gangster: Ideology and Social Conscience
Chapter 1 discussed the significance of the ‘classic’ cycle of Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface predominantly in terms of its articulation of the cultural tensions of the period of modernity within w...
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Outside Society, Outside the Gang: the Alienated Noir Gangster
The period of the 1940s and 1950s is testimony to fact that the gangster genre cannot be understood solely in terms of either a stable set of generic conventions or a fixed iconography as these are represented...
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Nostalgia and Renewal in the Post-Classical Gangster Film
The previous chapters in this account of the gangster film have highlighted the dominant modes and cycles of the gangster genre within particular periods. Any study of a genre that attempts to periodise in thi...
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Modernity and the Classic Gangster Film
Although the classic gangster cycle of Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface was initiated with Little Caesar in 1931 it did not spring into life fully formed, like Athene out of Zeus’ head. The gangster ...
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The Death of the Big Shot: the Gangster in the 1940s
With the exception of High Sierra the gangster movie of the early 1940s has received little attention. Like the films of the late 1930s it has either been ignored or seen as an interlude between the classic gangs...
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Order and Chaos, Syndicates and Heists
Gangster noir reached its apotheosis in the mid-fifties, by which time two other gangster cycles had appeared: the heist (or caper) movie and the syndicate film. These two gangster ‘sub-genres’ highlight the flex...
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The Postmodern Spectacle of the Gangster
The beginning of the 1990s saw an upsurge in the production of gangster films after a slightly intermittent period of production in the 1980s with 1990 itself seeing the release of the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Cro...
