Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood

Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood PDF Author: Dennis Broe
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813059089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Film noir, which flourished in 1940s and 50s, reflected the struggles and sentiments of postwar America. Dennis Broe contends that the genre, with its emphasis on dark subject matter, paralleled the class conflict in labor and union movements that dominated the period. By following the evolution of film noir during the years following World War II, Broe illustrates how the noir figure represents labor as a whole. In the 1940s, both radicalized union members and protagonists of noir films were hunted and pursued by the law. Later, as labor unions achieve broad acceptance and respectability, the central noir figure shifts from fugitive criminal to law-abiding cop. Expanding his investigation into the Cold War and post-9/11 America, Broe extends his analysis of the ways film noir is intimately connected to labor history. A brilliant, interdisciplinary examination, this is a work that will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers.

Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood

Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood PDF Author: Dennis Broe
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813059089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
Film noir, which flourished in 1940s and 50s, reflected the struggles and sentiments of postwar America. Dennis Broe contends that the genre, with its emphasis on dark subject matter, paralleled the class conflict in labor and union movements that dominated the period. By following the evolution of film noir during the years following World War II, Broe illustrates how the noir figure represents labor as a whole. In the 1940s, both radicalized union members and protagonists of noir films were hunted and pursued by the law. Later, as labor unions achieve broad acceptance and respectability, the central noir figure shifts from fugitive criminal to law-abiding cop. Expanding his investigation into the Cold War and post-9/11 America, Broe extends his analysis of the ways film noir is intimately connected to labor history. A brilliant, interdisciplinary examination, this is a work that will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers.

Historical Dictionary of American Cinema

Historical Dictionary of American Cinema PDF Author: M. Keith Booker
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538130122
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 655

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Book Description
One of the most powerful forces in world culture, American cinema has a long and complex history that stretches through more than a century. This history not only includes a legacy of hundreds of important films but also the evolution of the film industry itself, which is in many ways a microcosm of the history of American society. Historical Dictionary of American Cinema, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries covering people, films, companies, techniques, themes, and subgenres that have made American cinema such a vital part of world culture.

Historical Dictionary of Film Noir

Historical Dictionary of Film Noir PDF Author: Andrew Spicer
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810873788
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
Film noir_literally 'black cinema'_is the label customarily given to a group of black and white American films, mostly crime thrillers, made between 1940 and 1959. Today there is considerable dispute about what are the shared features that classify a noir film, and therefore which films should be included in this category. These problems are partly caused because film noir is a retrospective label that was not used in the 1940s or 1950s by the film industry as a production category and therefore its existence and features cannot be established through reference to trade documents. The Historical Dictionary of Film Noir is a comprehensive guide that ranges from 1940 to present day neo-noir. It consists of a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, a filmography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on every aspect of film noir and neo-noir, including key films, personnel (actors, cinematographers, composers, directors, producers, set designers, and writers), themes, issues, influences, visual style, cycles of films (e.g. amnesiac noirs), the representation of the city and gender, other forms (comics/graphic novels, television, and videogames), and noir's presence in world cinema. It is an essential reference work for all those interested in this important cultural phenomenon.

I Died a Million Times

I Died a Million Times PDF Author: Robert Miklitsch
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052498
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
In the 1950s, the gangster movie and film noir crisscrossed to create gangster noir. Robert Miklitsch takes readers into this fascinating subgenre of films focused on crime syndicates, crooked cops, and capers. With the Senate's organized crime hearings and the brighter-than-bright myth of the American Dream as a backdrop, Miklitsch examines the style and history, and the production and cultural politics, of classic pictures from The Big Heat and The Asphalt Jungle to lesser-known gems like 711 Ocean Drive and post-Fifties movies like Ocean’s Eleven. Miklitsch pays particular attention to trademark leitmotifs including the individual versus the collective, the family as a locus of dissension and rapport, the real-world roots of the heist picture, and the syndicate as an octopus with its tentacles deep into law enforcement, corporate America, and government. If the memes of gangster noir remain prototypically dark, the look of the films becomes lighter and flatter, reflecting the influence of television and the realization that, under the cover of respectability, crime had moved from the underworld into the mainstream of contemporary everyday life.

American Railroad Labor and the Genesis of the New Deal, 1919-1935

American Railroad Labor and the Genesis of the New Deal, 1919-1935 PDF Author: Jon R. Huibregtse
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 081304295X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
American historians tend to believe that labor activism was moribund in the years between the First World War and the New Deal. Jon Huibregtse challenges this perspective in his examination of the railroad unions of the time, arguing that not only were they active, but that they made a big difference in American Labor practices by helping to set legal precedents. Huibregtse explains how efforts by the Plumb Plan League and the Railroad Labor Executive Association created the Railroad Labor Act, its amendments, and the Railroad Retirement Act. These laws became models for the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act. Unfortunately, the significant contributions of the railroad laws are, more often than not, overlooked when the NLRA or Social Security are discussed. Offering a new perspective on labor unions in the 1920s, Huibregtse describes how the railroad unions created a model for union activism that workers’ organizations followed for the next two decades.

The Precinct With The Golden Arm

The Precinct With The Golden Arm PDF Author: Dennis Broe
Publisher: Pathmark Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Calamitous Corruption: The Harry Palmer LA Trilogy Book 3: The Precinct With The Golden Arm “A superbly plotted, Chandleresque historical Noir”–Lilja Sigurðardóttir, “the Queen of Scandinavian Crime Fiction,” author of the trilogy Snare, Trap, Cage and of four financial thrillers, the latest of which is Dark As Night “Private detective Harry Palmer, a distant relative of Philip Marlow and Lew Archer, takes us back to the LA of the 1940s in an exciting story with an impressive accumulation of details from the backstreets of that city” – Gunnar Staalesen, who Jo Nesbo called “the Norwegian Chandler,” writer of the Varg Veum series “Dennis Broe compels us to assert that novelists, like himself—and not just poets—are the unacknowledged legislators: for in this masterpiece, he poetically provides a scintillating dissection of capitalism, L.A. style”—Gerald Horne, historian and author of Class Struggle in Hollywood “…the seamy world of the LAPD,…the Mexican-American community in Boyle Heights…the Ku Klux Klan and the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry…combine and collide in a cleverly integrated story that will keep a reader fully engaged to the last page and beyond”–Eric Gordon, LA Progressive “An ingeniously plotted book that weaves its plots together well, and gives us another fascinating look at mid-century Los Angeles”—Ellen Clair Lamb, assistant editor Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels “The Precinct With The Golden Arm outlines an LA teeming with corruption end to end, and one–same as it ever was–not that different from the city today with many of the same problems still unresolved and thus recurring”–Crime Time In his third encounter with the seamy world of the LA power structure of the 1940s, disgraced ex-homicide detective Harry Palmer tangles with the LAPD as it attempts to shed its aura of corruption while clamping down on the Mexican American community of Boyle Heights in the wake of the Zoot Suit Rebellion. Lurking in the background is a burgeoning Big Pharma industry as these various threads interconnect and lead Harry into a maze of sex and drugs as he confronts his own tarnished past.

Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Fall 2016)

Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Fall 2016) PDF Author: Elizabeth Foxwell
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147662609X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.

Hollywood by Hollywood

Hollywood by Hollywood PDF Author: Steven Cohan
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190865784
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
The backstudio picture, or the movie about movie-making, is a staple of Hollywood film production harking back to the silent era and extending to the present day. What gives backstudios their coherence as a distinctive genre, Steven Cohan argues in Hollywood by Hollywood, is their fascination with the mystique of Hollywood as a geographic place, a self-contained industry, and a fantasy of fame, leisure, sexual freedom, and modernity. Yet by the same token, if backstudio pictures have rarely achieved blockbuster box-office success, what accounts for the film industry's interest in continuing to produce them? The backstudio picture has been an enduring genre because, aside from offering a director or writer a chance to settle old scores, in branding filmmaking with the Hollywood mystique, the genre solicits consumers' strong investment in the movies. Whether inspiring the "movie crazy" fan girls of the early teens and twenties or the wannabe filmmakers of this century heading to the West Coast after their college graduations, backstudios have given emotional weight and cultural heft to filmmaking as the quintessential American success story. But more than that, a backstudio picture is concerned with shaping perceptions of how the film industry works, with masking how its product depends upon an industrial labor force, including stardom, and with determining how that work's value accrues from the Hollywood brand stamped onto the product. Cohan supports his well theorized and well researched claims with nuanced discussions of over fifty backstudios, some canonical and well-known, and others obscure and rarely seen. Covering the hundred-year timespan of feature length film production, Hollywood by Hollywood offers an illuminating perspective for considering anew the history of American movies.

On Screen and Off

On Screen and Off PDF Author: Anne Berg
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812298411
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
On Screen and Off shows that the making of Nazism was a local affair and the Nazi city a product of more than models and plans emanating from Berlin. In Hamburg, film was key in turning this self-styled "Gateway to the World" into a "Nazi city." The Nazi regime imagined film as a powerful tool to shape National Socialist subjects. In Hamburg, those very subjects chanced upon film culture as a seemingly apolitical opportunity to articulate their own ideas about how Nazism ought to work. Tracing discourses around film production and film consumption in the city, On Screen and Off illustrates how Nazi ideology was envisaged, imagined, experienced, and occasionally even fought over. Local authorities in Hamburg, from the governor Karl Kaufmann to youth wardens and members of the Hamburg Film Club, used debates over cinema to define the reach and practice of National Socialism in the city. Film thus engendered a political space in which local activists, welfare workers, cultural experts, and administrators asserted their views about the current state of affairs, articulated criticism and praise, performed their commitment to the regime, and policed the boundaries of the Volksgemeinschaft. Of all the championed "people's products," film alone extended the promise of economic prosperity and cultural preeminence into the war years and beyond the city's destruction. From the ascension of the Nazi regime through the smoldering rubble, going to the movies grounded normalcy in the midst of rupture.

A Companion to Film Noir

A Companion to Film Noir PDF Author: Andre Spicer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118523717
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 662

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Book Description
An authoritative companion that offers a wide-ranging thematic survey of this enduringly popular cultural form and includes scholarship from both established and emerging scholars as well as analysis of film noir's influence on other media including television and graphic novels. Covers a wealth of new approaches to film noir and neo-noir that explore issues ranging from conceptualization to cross-media influences Features chapters exploring the wider ‘noir mediascape’ of television, graphic novels and radio Reflects the historical and geographical reach of film noir, from the 1920s to the present and in a variety of national cinemas Includes contributions from both established and emerging scholars