eBook - PDF
Public Enemies, Public Heroes
Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
Public Enemies, Public Heroes
Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil
About this book
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 establishment; the issue was not "making it," but simply "making do."
Combining film analysis with archival material from the Production Code Administration (Hollywood's self-censoring authority), Munby shows how the industry circumvented censure, and how its altered gangsters (influenced by European filmmakers) fueled the infamous inquisitions of Hollywood in the postwar '40s and '50s by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Ultimately, this provocative study suggests that we rethink our ideas about crime and violence in depictions of Americans fighting against the status quo.
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 establishment; the issue was not "making it," but simply "making do."
Combining film analysis with archival material from the Production Code Administration (Hollywood's self-censoring authority), Munby shows how the industry circumvented censure, and how its altered gangsters (influenced by European filmmakers) fueled the infamous inquisitions of Hollywood in the postwar '40s and '50s by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Ultimately, this provocative study suggests that we rethink our ideas about crime and violence in depictions of Americans fighting against the status quo.
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Public Enemies, Public Heroes by Jonathan Munby in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Film & Video. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The Gangsterās Silent Backdrop: Contesting Victorian Uplift and the Culture of Prohibition
- 2 The Enemy Goes Public: Voicing the Cultural Other in the Early 1930s Talking Gangster Film
- 3 Manhattan Melodramaās āArt of the Weakā: Tactics of Survival and Dissent in the PostāProhibition Gangster Film
- 4 Ganging Up against the Gangster: Censorship, the Movies, and Cultural Transformation, 1915ā1935
- 5 Crime, Inc.: Beyond the Ghetto/Beyond the Majors in the Postwar Gangster Film
- 6 Screening Crime the Liberal Consensus Way: Postwar Transformations in the Production Code
- 7 The āUn-Americanā Film Art: Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, and the Political Significance of Film Noir's German Connection
- Epilogue
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Film Index
- Subject Index