Showdown is a study of America's oldest, most representative film genre, the Western movie from the perspective of social allegory. It assesses scores of major and minor films to show how Westerns function as vehicles for contemporary social and political critiques of American life.

Genre and Hollywood provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of genre. In this important new book, Steve Neale discusses all the major concepts, theories and accounts of Hollywood and genre, as well as the key genres which theorists have written about, from horror to the Western. He also puts forward new arguments about the importance of genre in understanding Hollywood cinema. Neale takes issue with much genre criticism and genre theory, which has provided only a partial and misleading account of Hollywood's output. He calls for broader and more flexible conceptions of genre and genres, for more attention to be paid to the discourses and practices of Hollywood itself, for the nature and range of Hollywood's films to be looked at in more detail, and for any assessment of the social and cultural significance of Hollywood's genres to take account of industrial factors. In detailed, revisionist accounts of two major genres - film noir and melodrama - Neale argues that genre remains an important and productive means of thinking about both New and old Hollywood, its history, its audiences and its films.

Reclaims, reframes, and reexamines one of acclaimed maverick filmmaker Robert Altman's most accomplished and admired movies, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, as a commentary on Western history, the Western film, the times from which it emerged, and as a tribute to a neglected masterpiece of American cinema.

Following Richard Aquila's introduction, which examines the birth and growth of the pop culture West in the context of American history, noted expects explore developments in popular western fiction, major forms of live western entertainment, trends in western movies and television shows, images of the West in popular music, and visual images of the West in popular art and advertising.

Der Band widmet sich den vielfältigen Globalisierungsprozessen in filmischen Genrekonfigurationen. Dieser bislang erst in Ansätzen erforschte Themenkomplex wird anhand paradigmatischer Beispiele sowohl theoretisch perspektiviert als auch filmhistorisch kontextualisiert. Neben Analysen US-amerikanischer und europäischer Produktionen liegt der Fokus vor allem auch auf Filmen aus Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerika, wobei Kategorien wie nationale Kinematografien oder abgrenzbare Genremuster in den Fallbeispielen nur noch bedingt greifen. Den transnationalen Dimensionen der Filme entsprechend, versammelt der Band auch Beiträge von internationalen Vertretern der Film- und Medienwissenschaft, darunter Tim Bergfelder, Oksana Bulgakowa, Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Barry Keith Grant, Lúcia Nagib, Ella Shohat oder Robert Stam. The volume deals with the diverse processes of globalisation in cinematic configurations of genre. Focussing on significant examples, this up to now only rudimentarily researched area is both historically analysed as well as theoretically explored. Apart from U.S. and European productions, the volume mainly addresses films from Africa, Asia and Latin America, which render conceptions of national cinema or clearly definable genre patterns especially problematic. In accordance with the transnational dimension of the films, the volume assembles contributions of internationally renowned scholars such as Tim Bergfelder, Oksana Bulgakowa, Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Barry Keith Grant, Lúcia Nagib, Ella Shohat, or Robert Stam.

A lively narrative history of Hollywood's classical age. Over the last twenty-five years, the field of cinema studies has offered a dramatic reassessment of the history of film in general and of Hollywood in particular. Writers have drawn on the methodologies of a number of disciplines—literary criticism, sociology, psychology, women's studies, and minority and gay studies—to deepen our understanding of motion pictures, the film industry, and movie theater audiences. In Hollywood's High Noon, noted film historian Thomas Cripps offers a lively narrative history of Hollywood's classical age that brings the insights of recent scholarship to students and general readers. From its origin during the First World War to the beginning of its decline in the 1950s, Cripps writes, Hollywood operated as did other American industries: movies were created by a rational production system, regulated by both government and privately organized interests, and subject to the whims of a fickle marketplace. Yet these films did offer consumers something unique: in darkened movie palaces across the country,audiences projected themselves—their hopes and ideas—onto silver screens, profoundly mediating their reception of Hollywood's flickering images. Beginning with turn-of-the-century moving-picture pioneer Thomas Edison, Cripps traces the invention of Hollywood and the development of the studio system. He explores the movie-going experience, the struggle for social control over the movies through censorship, the impact of sound on the style and content of films, alternatives to Hollywood's oligopoly including "race" films and documentaries, the paradoxical predictability and subversive creativity of genre pictures, and Hollywood's self-proclaimed "shining moment" during the Second World War. Cripps concludes with a discussion of the collapse of the studio system after the war, due in equal parts to suburbanization, the emergence of television, and government anti-trust action.

In A Social Cinema: Film-making and Politics in America, Brian Neve presents a study of the social and political nature of American film by concentrating on a generation of writers from the thirties who directed films in Hollywood in the 1940's. He discusses how they negotiated their roles in relation to the studio system, itself undergoing change, and to what extent their experience in the political and theatre movements of thirties New York was to be reflected in their later films. Focusing in particular on Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, Jules Dassin, Abraham Polonsky, Nicholas Ray, Robert Rossen and Joseph Losey, Neve relates the work of these writers and directors to the broader industrial, bureaucratic, social and political developments of the period 1935-1970. With special emphasis on the post-war decade, bringing together archive and secondary sources, Neve explores a lost tradition of social fimmaking in America.