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Screening crime in the United States of America, 1929-1958: From Hays code to HUAC; from ''Little Caesar'' to ''Touch of Evil'
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Screening crime in the United States of America, 1929-1958: From Hays code to HUAC; from ''Little Caesar'' to ''Touch of Evil'
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Dissertation
Screening crime in the United States of America, 1929-1958: From Hays code to HUAC; from ''Little Caesar'' to ''Touch of Evil'
1995
Overview
Attending to the double meaning of \"screening\" crime--as a system of narrative representation on one hand, and as something policed by censorship on the other--this dissertation is a case study of the shared features of both the \"classic\" 1930s gangster genre and film noir (the 1940s and 1950s crime cycle) which made them antagonistic elements within Hollywood's studio system. The American crime film mediated the various crisis contexts of its reception (immigration history, urbanization and modernization, Prohibition, the Depression, World War II, postwar demobilization and redomestication of women, and the Red Scare), in controversial ways. Over this period of dramatic socio-cultural transformation, the gangster genre and film noir, rather than ameliorating crisis, posed awkward questions about the line separating legitimate from illegitimate Americans (in terms of class and ethnicity)--provoking the two most significant attempts on the part of moral and political authority to control the film industry: the Production Code Administration's (Hollywood's internal censoring authority) declaration of a moratorium on gangster film production in 1935 (the Code's first enforcement); and the House Un-American Activities Committee's (HUAC) Hollywood inquisition, 1947-53. To uncover the stakes involved in policing Hollywood's crime film over the period in question, censorship data (from Production Code Administration files) is combined not only with close visual and textual analyses, but analyses of the changing star system, the coming of sound (the popularization of urban vernacular speech), the changing organizational environment of the film industry, and the influence of Austro-German Jewish exiles on the American crime film. Beyond challenging the critical dogma surrounding Hollywood's ideological function, this study questions, more broadly, the axioms which underpin our understandings of mass/popular culture's relationship to power and crisis in a consumer capitalist society.
Publisher
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
Subject
ISBN
9798208262993
