Public enemies, public heroes screening the gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil / [electronic resource] :
Jonathan Munby.
- University of Chicago Press, 1999.
- 1 online resource (xii, 263 p.) : ill.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-249) and indexes.
Screening crime in the USA: an undervalued symbiosis -- The gangster's silent backdrop: Contesting Victorian uplift and the culture of Prohibition -- The enemy goes public: Voicing the cultural other in the early 1930s talking gangster film -- Manhattan melodrama's "Art of the Weak": Tactics of survival and dissent in the post-Prohibition gangster film -- Ganging up against the gangster: Censorship, the movies, and the cultural transformation, 1915-1935 -- Crime, Inc.: Beyond the ghetto/Beyond the majors in the postwar gangster film -- Screening crime the liberal consensus way: Postwar transformations in the Production Code -- The "Un-American" film art: Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, and the political significance of Film Noir's German connection -- From gangster to gangsta: Against a certain tendency of film theory and history.
In this study of Hollywood gangster films, Jonathan Munby examines their controversial content and how it was subjected to continual moral and political censure. Beginning in the early 1930s, these films told compelling stories about ethnic urban lower-class desires to "make it" in an America dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideals and devastated by the Great Depression. By the late 1940s, however, their focus shifted to the problems of a culture maladjusting to a new peacetime sociopolitical order governed by corporate capitalism. The gangster no longer challenged the establishme.
Gangster films--History and criticism.--United States Fine Arts. Films de gangsters--Histoire et critique.--États-Unis PERFORMING ARTS--Film & Video--Reference.