American Gangster Cinema
From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction
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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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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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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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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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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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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 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...
Book
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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...