Public heroes : screening the gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of evil / / Jonathan Munby

• Autore: Munby Jonathan
• Pubblicazione: Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, c1999
• Edizione: 1st ed.
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (277 p.)
• Disciplina: 791.43/655
• Soggetto topico: Gangster films - United States - History and criticism; Crime films - United States - History and criticism
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-249) and indexes.
• Nota di contenuto: Front matter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. Screening Crime in the USA -- 1.. The Gangster's Silent Backdrop -- 2. The Enemy Goes Public -- 3. Manhattan Melodrama's "Art of the Weak" -- 4. Ganging Up against the Gangster -- 5. Crime, Inc. -- 6. Screening Crime the Liberal Consensus Way -- 7. The "Un-American" Film Art -- Epilogue. From Gangster to Gangsta -- Appendix. Production Code Administration Film Analysis Forms,1934-1957 -- Bibliography -- Film Index -- Subject Index
• Sommario/riassunto: 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 1930's, 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 1940's, 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 '50's 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.
• Titolo autorizzato: Public heroes
• ISBN: 1-282-71075-3; 9786612710759; 0-226-55034-6
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910809391903321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II