"A complete and detailed guide to crime on film: prison dramas, film noir, heist movies, juvenile delinquents, serial killers, bank robbers, and many other subgenres and motifs. The historical and social background to movie crime is covered by articles on the FBI, the Mafia, the Japanese yakuza, prohibition, boxing, union rackets, drugs, poisoning, prostitution, and many other topics."--Cover.

The Western introduces the novice to the pleasures and the meanings of the Western film, shares the excitement of the genre with the fan, addresses the suspicions of the cynic and develops the knowledge of the student. The Western is about the changing times of the Western, and about how it has been understood in film criticism. Until the 1980s, more Westerns were made than any other type of film. For fifty of those years, the genre was central to Hollywood's popularity and profitability. The Western explores the reasons for its success and its latter-day decline among film-makers and audiences alike. Part I charts the history of the Western film and its role in film studies. Part II traces the origins of the Western in nineteenth-century America, and in its literary, theatrical and visual imagining. This sets the scene to explore the many evolving forms in successive chapters on early silent Westerns, the series Western, the epic, the romance, the dystopian, the elegiac and, finally, the revisionist Western. The Western concludes with an extensive bibliography, filmography and select further reading. Over 200 Westerns are discussed, among them close accounts of classics such as Duel in the Sun, The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven, formative titles like John Ford's epic The Iron Horse, and early cowboy star William S. Hart's The Silent One together with less familiar titles that deserve wider recognition, including Comanche Station, Pursued and Ulzana's Raid.

Examines the ways in which the frontier myth influences American culture and politics, drawing on fiction, western films, and political writing

The Western is arguably the most popular and longlived form in cinematic history, and the acknowledged master of that genre was John Ford. His Westerns, including The Searchers, Stagecoach, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, have had an enormous influence on contemporary U.S. filmmakers, and on everything from Star Wars to Taxi Driver.In nine majors essays from some of the most prominent scholars of Hollywood film, John Ford Made Westerns: Filming The Legend in The Sound Era situates the sound era westerns of John Ford within contemporary critical contexts and regards them from fresh perspectives. These range from examining Ford's relation to other art forms (most notably literature, painting and music) to exploring the development of the director's public reputation as a director of Westerns. Articles also address the intricacies of Ford's shifting approach to storytelling and the subtle techniques whereby Ford's films guide spectator interpretation and emotional engagement.While giving attention to film style and structure, the volume also explores the ways in which these much loved films engage with notions of masculinity and gender roles, capitalism and community, as well as racial and sexual identity. Authors also examine how Ford's sound-era Westerns create a complex relationship to the genre's traditional project of "defining an American nation" and how they uphold up but also question popular culture depictions of history and nationhood, to offer a commentary that engages with both the past, the present and the future.In addition to new scholarship, the volume also offers a dossier section of out of the way magazine articles that illuminate the issues raised by essays, including the director's tribute to John Wayne as well as a moving posthumous appraisal of the director published by the Director's Guild of America.

The indispensable sage, fierce enemy, silent sidekick: the role of Native Americans in film has been largely confined to identities defined by the “white” perspective. Many studies have analyzed these simplistic stereotypes of Native American cultures in film, but few have looked beyond the Hollywood Western for further examples. Distinguished film scholar Edward Buscombe offers here an incisive study that examines cinematic depictions of Native Americans from a global perspective. Buscombe opens with a historical survey of American Westerns and their controversial portrayals of Native Americans: the wild redmen of nineteenth-century Wild West shows, the more sympathetic depictions of Native Americans in early Westerns, and the shift in the American film industry in the 1920s to hostile characterizations of Indians. Questioning the implicit assumptions of prevailing critiques, Buscombe looks abroad to reveal a distinctly different portrait of Native Americans. He focuses on the lesser known Westerns made in Germany—such as East Germany’s Indianerfilme, in which Native Americans were Third World freedom fighters battling against Yankee imperialists—as well as the films based on the novels of nineteenth-century German writer Karl May. These alternative portrayals of Native Americans offer a vastly different view of their cultural position in American society. Buscombe offers nothing less than a wholly original and readable account of the cultural images of Native Americans through history andaround the globe, revealing new and complex issues in our understanding of how oppressed peoples have been represented in mass culture.

The cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and outlaws, schoolmarms and barkeeps of Western films have wholly transformed our ideas about the reality of the American frontier. Westerns is the first book to consider seriously the historical meanings and functions of the Western film genre. In Westerns , leading scholars unpack the ways in which the form has embellished, mythologized, and erased past events. Contributors explore the mythic Wild West envisioned by Buffalo Bill Cody, the revisionist aims of recent westerns like Posse, Lone Star, and Dead Man , and how the genre addresses key issues of biography, authenticity, race, and representation. Included is an introduction by Janet Walker.