Analyzing crime movies set in Detroit, Miami, Boston, Las Vegas, and the fictional Gotham City, this book examines the role that American cities play as characters in crime films. Furthering our awareness of how popular media shapes public understanding of crime and justice in American cities, this book contributes to scholarship in popular criminology by providing insight into the development of criminological theory in cinematic representations of crime and urban space. Each chapter focuses on a different city, starting with an overview of the social, economic, and political history of the city and proceeding to discuss the cinematic depiction of crime and justice in the city. At the heart of each chapter is a discussion of themes that are common across films set in each city. For each theme, the book makes connections to the criminological theory discussed in that chapter and concludes by focusing on real-world implications that stem from the social construction of urban crime in crime films. Bridging the gap between criminology and media studies, The American City in Crime Films will appeal to students of criminology and media studies, and urban sociology/criminology.

Analyzes how location-shot crime films of the 1970s reflected and influenced understandings of urban crisis. The early 1970s were a moment of transformation for both the American city and its cinema. As intensified suburbanization, racial division, deindustrialization, and decaying infrastructure cast the future of the city in doubt, detective films, blaxploitation, police procedurals, and heist films confronted spectators with contemporary scenes from urban streets. Welcome to Fear City argues that the location-shot crime films of the 1970s were part of a larger cultural ambivalence felt toward urban life, evident in popular magazines, architectural discourse, urban sociology, and visual culture. Yet they also helped to reinvigorate the city as a site of variegated experience and a positively disordered public life—in stark contrast to the socially homogenous and spatially ordered suburbs. Discussing the design of parking garages and street lighting, the dynamics of mugging, panoramas of ruin, and the optics of undercover police operations in such films as Klute, The French Connection, Detroit 9000, Death Wish, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Nathan Holmes demonstrates that crime genres did not simply mirror urban settings and social realities, but actively produced and circulated new ideas about the shifting surfaces of public culture. “Rejecting the easy abstractions and postmodern playfulness of noir and neo-noir criticism, Holmes places 1970s crime films, as he says, ‘in relation to the urban context that was their location, setting, and subject.’ He does this brilliantly, convincingly, and uniquely.” — David Desser, former editor, Cinema Journal

This book surveys the entire range of crime films, including important subgenres such as the gangster film, the private eye film, film noir, as well as the victim film, the erotic thriller, and the crime comedy. Focusing on ten films that span the range of the twentieth century, Thomas Leitch traces the transformation of the three leading figures that are common to all crime films: the criminal, the victim and the avenger. Analyzing how each of the subgenres establishes oppositions among its ritual antagonists, he shows how the distinctions among them become blurred throughout the course of the century. This blurring, Leitch maintains, reflects and fosters a deep social ambivalence towards crime and criminals, while the criminal, victim and avenger characters effectively map the shifting relations between subgenres, such as the erotic thriller and the police film, within the larger genre of crime film that informs them all.

The American city and the American movie industry grew up together in the early decades of the twentieth century, making film an ideal medium through which to better understand urban life. Exploiting the increasing popularity of large metropolitan cities and urban lifestyle, movies chronicled the city and the stories it generated. In this volume, urbanist James A. Clapp explores the reciprocal relationship between the city and the cinema within the dimensions of time and space.A variety of themes and actualizations have been repeated throughout the history of the cinema, including the roles of immigrants, women, small towns, family farms, and suburbia; and urban childhoods, family values, violent crime, politics, and dystopic futures. Clapp examines the different ways in which the city has been characterized as well as how it has been portrayed as a character itself.Some of the films discussed include Metropolis, King Kong, West Side Story, It's a Wonderful Life, American Beauty, Rebel without a Cause, American Graffiti, Blade Runner, Gangs of New York, The Untouchables, LA Confidential, Sunrise, Crash, American History X, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Deer Hunter, and many more. This work will be enjoyed by urban specialists, moviegoers, and those interested in American, cultural, and film studies.

How has American cinema engaged with the rapid transformation of cities and urban culture since the 1960s? And what role have films and film industries played in shaping and mediating the “postindustrial” city? This collection argues that cinema and cities have become increasingly intertwined in the era of neoliberalism, urban branding, and accelerated gentrification. Examining a wide range of films from Hollywood blockbusters to indie cinema, it considers the complex, evolving relationship between moving image cultures and the spaces, policies, and politics of US cities from New York, Los Angeles, and Boston to Detroit, Oakland, and Baltimore. The contributors address questions of narrative, genre, and style alongside the urban contexts of production, exhibition, and reception, discussing films including The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), Cruising (1980), Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), King of New York (1990), Inception (2010), Frances Ha (2012), Fruitvale Station (2013), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), and Doctor Strange (2016).

The crime film genre consists of detective films, gangster films, suspense thrillers, film noir, and caper films and is produced throughout the world. Crime film was there at the birth of cinema, and it has accompanied cinema over more than a century of history, passing from silent films to talkies, from black-and-white to color. The genre includes such classics as The Maltese Falcon, The Godfather, Gaslight, The French Connection, and Serpico, as well as more recent successes like Seven, Drive, and L.A. Confidential. The Historical Dictionary of Crime Films covers the history of this genre through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on key films, directors, performers, and studios. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about crime cinema. -- from Amazon.com.

In the 1930s the gangster film in the United States coincided with a very real and very sensational gangsterism at large in American society. Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932) borrowed liberally from the newspapers and books of the era. With the release of just these three motion pictures in barely more than a year's time, Hollywood quintessentially defined the genre. The characters, the situations, and the icons-from fast cars and tommy-guns to fancy fedoras and fancier molls-established the audience expectations associated with the gangster film that remain in force to this day. As with their Film Noir Reader series, using both reprints of seminal articles and new pieces, editors Silver and Ursini have assembled a group of essays that presents an exhaustive overview of this still vital genre. Reprints of work by such well-known film historians as Robin Wood, Andrew Sarris, Carlos Clarens, Paul Schrader, and Stuart Kaminsky explore the evolution of the gangster film through the 1970s and The Godfather. Parts 2 and 3 comprise two dozen newer articles, most of them written expressly for this volume by Ursini and Silver. These case studies and thematic analyses, from White Heat to the remake of Scarface to "The Sopranos," complete the anthology.

This book studies a grouping of films set in New York City between 1965 and 1995, reflecting a town besieged by rampant criminality, social distress and physical decay. "Fear City" is a term the NYPD used to label New York as a frightening environment, incapable of securing the safety of its residents. This book not only deals with the social problems evident in New York during this period, but also provides a study of how independent filmmakers were able to capture unsettling urban imagery, capitalizing on feelings of paranoia and dread. The author explores how the tone of these films reflects upon the anti-urbanism that led to the War on Crime, the mass exodus of working-class people from the city and mass incarceration of young Black men.

Examining one of the earliest films made specifically for young audiences in US cinema, Rock around the Clock (1956), this book explores the exploitation production company that made the film and the ways it represented young people, especially in terms of their association with rock ’n’ roll music and culture. Providing new avenues of approaching the film, the book looks at how Rock around the Clock has attracted significant scholarly attention, despite its origins as a low-budget production made by master exploitation filmmaker Sam Katzman. It challenges accounts that see the film’s young people as juvenile delinquents, using instead the label ‘cultural rebels’ as a signifier of youth’s ability to resurrect a moribund music industry and rejuvenate a stale youth culture. This book also questions the nature of the label ‘exploitation’ as applied to the film by examining Columbia Pictures’ role as a resource provider for Katzman’s film, comparing Rock around the Clock to contemporaneous films with a youth focus that were produced in different industrial contexts and investigating its relationship to adaptation by asking whether the film is an example of a ‘postliterary’ adaptation. Rich on archival research and industrial and textual analysis, Rock around the Clock will interest both film studies and youth cultures scholars.