A01=Jonathan Munby
american dream
antihero
Author_Jonathan Munby
blacklisting
Category=ATFA
Category=JBFV3
censorship
crime
criminals
dissent
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnicity
film
fritz lang
gangsters
godfather
history
hollywood
huac
immigration
little caesar
mafia
masculinity
mccarthyism
mob
noir
nonfiction
outlaw
popular culture
power
production code
prohibition
rags to riches
robert siodmak
status quo
survival
touch of evil
upward mobility
violence
wealth
Product details
- ISBN 9780226550336
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 Mar 1999
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
