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• Editor's Foreword (Jon Woronoff) Preface Acknowledgments Acronyms and Abbreviations Chronology Introduction THE DICTIONARY Bibliography About the Author.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

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.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This title features highly original readings that shed new light on familiar movies. It is an unifying and largely original Marxist perspective that offers a fresh look at social relations as expressed in Hollywood cinema. It is a new construction of the category of the crime film, supported by an understanding of the importance of crime and crime cinema in 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 are, no civilization 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 the line may in practice 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, by directors Coppola, Scorsese, Ford, 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 relationship between "gangsterism and capitalism". The volume also includes indepth critique of classics of film noir (including "Double Indemnity" and "Body Heat") and, surprisingly, Western, which is not often thought of as a kind of crime film even though its setting is an entire society in which 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 high capitalism that produced, and that are reflected in, the range of films discussed.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The most pervasive genre in contemporary cinema, the American crime film has recently enjoyed a new surge of popularity and proliferation. Though these innovative films now tackle topical issues, they continue to reference the classic narratives and archetypes established in the great crime pictures of past decades. The titles explored in this critical survey span many themes that have fused with other genres to create fascinating filmic hybrids. Focusing on character and plot construction, the author highlights the gangster and film noir traditions that still run strongly through recent American cinema.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Anthony Mann (1906-1967) is renowned for his outstanding 1950s westerns starring James Stewart (Winchester '73, The Naked Spur, The Man from Laramie). But there is more to Mann's cinematic universe than those tough Wild West action dramas featuring conflicted and secretive heroes. This brilliant Hollywood craftsman also directed fourteen electrifying crime thrillers between 1942 and 1951, among them such towering achievements in film noir as T-Men, Raw Deal, and Side Street. Mann was as much at home filming dark urban alleys in black-and-white as he was the prairies and mountains in Technicolor, and his protagonists were no less conflicted and secretive than his 1950s cowboys. In these Mann crime thrillers we find powerful stories of sexual obsession (The Great Flamarion), the transforming images of women in wartime and postwar America (Strangers in the Night, Strange Impersonation), exploitation of Mexican immigrants (Border Incident), studies of the criminal mind (He Walked by Night), and Civil War bigotry (The Tall Target). Mann's forceful camera captured such memorable and diverse stars as Erich von Stroheim, Farley Granger, Dennis O'Keefe, Claire Trevor, Richard Basehart, Ricardo Montalban, Ruby Dee, and Raymond Burr. The Crime Films of Anthony Mann features analysis of rare documents, screenplays, story treatments, and studio memoranda and reveals detailed behind-the-scenes information on preproduction and production on the Mann thrillers. Author Max Alvarez uses rare and newly available sources to explore the creation of these noir masterworks. Along the way, the book exposes secrets and solves mysteries surrounding the mercurial director and his remarkable career, which also included Broadway and early live television.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Avant-propos / Anne Hidalgo
• Histoires de crimes, débuts du cinéma
• Faits divers et sensations fortes
• L'Histoire d'un crime
• Apaches, voleurs et sergents de villes
• La "Danse apache"
• La belle époque des films criminels
• La vogue des détectives
• Du crime considéré comme une attraction
• Crimes à l'affiche !
• Quand le réel bascule dans la fiction
• Les chiens policiers
• Les maitres de l'effroi
• Fantômas et les fantasmes de la modernité
• Les romans-cinéma échappée imaginaire en temps de guerre
• Les Mystères parodiés
• Le cinéma à l'âge du feuilleton
• Mystères à la française
• Retour aux origines
• Les Nuits de Chicago
• La littérature criminelle saisie par le cinéma
• En attendant Joséphine...
• La bibliothèque des littératures policières (bilipo), mémoire de l'édition policière.

"Véritable enquête sur les origines du cinéma criminel en France, Cinéma, premiers crimes explore son formidable essor, de la Belle Époque aux années 1920. En trente ans le cinéma, dernière invention du XIXe siècle, est devenu la grande machine à fabriquer de l'imaginaire du XXe siècle. Et des vieux bas-fonds de Paris, ses fictions se retrouvent projetées à l'ombre des gratte-ciel d'Amérique. Quelque temps après l'invention du cinématographe, les premières représentations de crimes au cinéma baignent dans l'univers des Mystères de Paris d'Eugène Sue et se nourrissent de la peur des apaches de la grande ville, à travers les faits divers amplifiés par les couvertures illustrées de la presse à sensation. Le cinéma muet, nouvel objet d'attraction, s'empare de l'imaginaire social et de ses figures le bourreau, la victime, le justicier, pour élaborer à partir de stéréotypes visuels, un nouveau vocabulaire en images peuplé de génies malfaisants Fantômas, Zigomar, Rocambole et autres vampires des bas-fonds. Il devient la chambre d'écho de l'actualité policière, transpose la réalité urbaine sur le mode de la fiction. Il se fait le révélateur des hantises d'une société captivée par le spectacle de ses propres peurs, avant que le film de gangsters américain ne vienne imposer sa définition du film criminel comme genre. 200 documents divers et rares, issus des exceptionnelles collections des bibliothèques de la Ville de Paris et de prestigieuses archives cinématographiques, nous font revivre les frissons des spectateurs, durant cette période fondatrice d'un art majeur, avec lequel s'invente notre modernité."--P. [4] of cover.