Versions of Hollywood Crime Cinema

This title features highly original readings that shed new light on familiar movies. It presents a unifying and largely original Marxist perspective that offers a fresh look at social relations as expressed in Hollywood cinema. It constructs a new category of the crime film, supported by an understanding of the importance of crime and crime cinema in both cinema and society as a whole.

No society is without crime, prompting Nathaniel Hawthorne's narrator to make his famous statement in The Scarlet Letter that, however high its hopes, no civilisation can fail to allot a portion of its soil as the site of a prison. By establishing the category of crime—by drawing a line between the lawful and criminal, however thin, blurry, or even effectively meaningless that line may become—society offers its own perhaps most consequential self-definition.

Film, argues Carl Freedman, is an especially fruitful medium for considering questions like these. With Versions of Hollywood Crime Cinema, he offers a series of critical readings spanning several genres, featuring directors such as Coppola, Scorsese, Ford, and Wilder.

From among the mob movies, Freedman focuses on Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy—arguably the foremost work of crime cinema—using it to reflect on the Marxist notion of primitive accumulation and the relationship between "gangsterism and capitalism". The volume also includes in-depth critique of film noir classics such as Double Indemnity and Body Heat, and surprisingly, the Western genre, which is not often thought of as a kind of crime film despite its setting in a society where crime flourishes yet is fought against, bringing into focus films of John Wayne.

For crime fans and scholars alike, the radical readings of known classics in Versions of Hollywood Crime Cinema provide an insightful critique of modern culture and the high capitalism that produced, and are reflected in, the range of films discussed.