Public Enemies, Public Heroes – Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil - Hardcover

Munby, J

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226550311 ISBN 13: 9780226550312

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1999

Synopsis

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 study suggests that one rethinks ideas about crime and violence in depictions of Americans fighting against the status quo.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Munby is senior lecturer in film studies and American studies at Lancaster University. He is the author of Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from "Little Caesar" to "Touch of Evil," also published by the University of Chicago Press.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0226550311
• ISBN 13: 9780226550312
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 276