Description
Book SynopsisWith articles by such luminaries as Susan Sontag, Dwight Macdonald, Siegfried Kracauer, James Agee, André Bazin, Robert Warshow, and Claude Chabrol, this anthology is the only single-volume source for important early writing on genre films.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction (Barry Keith Grant and Malisa Kurtz)
- Part I. Comedy
- 1. Comedy’s Greatest Era (James Agee)
- 2. Silent Film Comedy (Siegfried Kracauer)
- 3. Uncle Sam’s Funny Bone (Allen Eyles)
- 4. Whatever Happened to Hollywood Comedy? (Dwight Macdonald)
- 5. The Evolution of the Chase in the Silent Screen Comedy (Donald W. McCaffrey)
- 6. From Kops to Robbers: Transformation of Archetypal Figures in the American Cinema of the 1920s and '30s (Carolyn and Harry Geduld)
- Part II. The Western
- 7. The Psychological Appeal of the Hollywood Western (Frederick Elkin)
- 8. The Western, or the American Film Par Excellence (André Bazin)
- 9. The Olympian Cowboy (Harry Schein)
- 10. The Changing Cowboy: From Dime Novel to Dollar Film (George Bluestone)
- 11. Sociological Symbolism of the "Adult Western" (Martin Nussbaum)
- 12. Puritanism Revisited: An Analysis of the Contemporary Screen-Image Western (Peter Homans)
- Part III. The Fantastic
- 13. Supernaturalism in the Movies (Parker Tyler)
- 14. Reflections on Horror Movies (Robert Brustein)
- 15. A Brief, Tragical History of the Science Fiction Film (Richard Hodgens)
- 16. The Imagination of Disaster (Susan Sontag)
- 17. Extrapolative Cinema (Ivor A. Rogers)
- 18. Even a Man Who Is Pure at Heart: Poetry and Danger in the Horror Film (R. H. W. Dillard)
- Part IV. Crime and Punishment
- 19. The Gangster as Tragic Hero (Robert Warshow)
- 20. Evolution of the Thriller (Claude Chabrol)
- 21. Toward a Definition of Film Noir (Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton)
- 22. Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir (Raymond Durgnat)
- 23. Introduction to The Gangster Film (John Baxter)
- Index
