Explores American Joseph H. Lewis's eclectic career, including his best-known film, Gun Crazy. Joseph H. Lewis enjoyed a monumental career in many genres, including film noir and B-movies (with the East Side Kids) as well as an extensive and often overlooked TV career. In The Films of Joseph H. Lewis, editor Gary D. Rhodes, PhD. gathers notable scholars from around the globe to examine the full range of Lewis's career. While some studies analyze Lewis's work in different areas, others focus on particular films, ranging from poverty row fare to westerns and "television films." Overall, this collection offers fresh perspectives on Lewis as an auteur, a director responsible for individually unique works as well as a sustained and coherent style. Essays in part 1 investigate the texts and contexts that were important to Lewis's film and television career, as contributors explore his innovative visual style and themes in both mediums. Contributors to part 2 present an array of essays on specific films, including Lewis's remarkable and prescient Invisible Ghost and other notable films My Name Is Julia Ross, So Dark the Night, and The Big Combo. Part 3 presents an extended case study of Lewis's most famous and-arguably-most important work, Gun Crazy. Contributors take three distinct approaches to the film: in the context of its genre as film noir and modernist and postmodernist film; in its relationship to masculinity and masochism; and in terms of ethos and ethics. The Films of Joseph H. Lewis offers a thorough assessment of Lewis's career and also provides insight into film and television making in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Scholars of film and television studies and fans of Lewis's work will appreciate this comprehensive collection.

When viewers think of film noir, they often picture actors like Humphrey Bogart playing characters like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, the film based on the book by Dashiell Hammett. Yet film noir is a genre much richer. The authors first examine the debate surrounding the parameters of the genre and the many different ways it is defined. They discuss the Noir City, its setting and backdrop, and also the cultural (WWII) and institutional (the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, and the Production Code Administration) influences on the subgenres. An analysis of the low budget and series film noirs provides information on those cult classics. With over 200 entries on films, directors, and actors, the Encyclopedia of Film Noir is the most complete resource for film fans, students, and scholars.

Drawing on previously untapped archival materials including letters, interviews, and more, Bernard F. Dick traces the history of Columbia Pictures, from its beginnings as the CBC Film Sales Company, through the regimes of Harry Cohn and his successors, and ending with a vivid portrait of today's corporate Hollywood. The book offers unique perspectives on the careers of Rita Hayworth and Judy Holliday, a discussion of Columbia's unique brands of screwball comedy and film noir, and analyses of such classics as The Awful Truth, Born Yesterday, and From Here to Eternity. Following the author's highly readable studio chronicle are fourteen original essays by leading film scholars that follow Columbia's emergence from Poverty Row status to world class, and the stars, films, genres, writers, producers, and directors responsible for its transformation. A new essay on Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood rounds out the collection and brings this seminal studio history into the 21st century. Amply illustrated with film stills and photos of stars and studio heads, Columbia Pictures is the first book to integrate history with criticism of a single studio, and is ideal for film lovers and scholars alike.

Joseph H. Lewis's 'Gun Crazy' is the story of two young lovers who embark on a crime spree. For this book, Kitses researched widely into the film production's history and explored its connection to the crime film tradition and to the dark underside of American society.

Famous features such as "Sherlock Holmes Faces Death," "Johnny Allegro," "My Forbidden Past," "His Kind of Woman," "The Big Carnival," and "After the Thin Man" are examined, plus the "Bulldog Drummond" series, and a number of serials including "The Clutching Hand," "Chick Carter, Detective," "Panther Girl of the Congo," "Holt of the Secret Service" and "The Last of the Mohicans." Two bonus features are monographs on Robert Siodmak (of "Cobra Woman," "The Phantom Lady," "The Spiral Staircase," etc.) and Otto Preminger, who made "Laura," "Fallen Angel," "Whirlpool," "Where the Sidewalk Ends," "The 13th Letter" and "Angel Face."

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of American Horror Film Shorts chronicles for the first time over 1,500 horror and horror-related short subjects theatrically released between 1915, at the dawn of the feature film era when shorts became a differentiated category of cinema, and 1976, when the last of the horror-related shorts were distributed to movie theaters. Individual entries feature plot synopses, cast and crew information, and – where possible – production histories and original critical reviews. A small number of the short subjects catalogued herein are famous; such as those featuring the likes of Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck; but the bulk are forgotten. The diverse content of these shorts includes ghosts, devils, witches, vampires, skeletons, mad scientists, monsters, hypnotists, gorillas, dinosaurs, and so much more, including relevant nonfiction newsreels. Their rediscovery notably rewrites many chapters of the history of horror cinema, from increasing our understanding of the sheer number horror films that were produced and viewed by audiences to shedding light on particular subgenres and specific narrative and historical trends.

One of the most powerful forces in world culture, American cinema has a long and complex history that stretches through more than a century. This history not only includes a legacy of hundreds of important films but also the evolution of the film industry itself, which is in many ways a microcosm of the history of American society. Historical Dictionary of American Cinema, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries covering people, films, companies, techniques, themes, and subgenres that have made American cinema such a vital part of world culture.

One of the most visually striking traditions in cinema, for too long Expressionism has been a neglected critical category of research in film history and aesthetics. The fifteen essays in this anthology remedies this by revisiting key German films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922), and also provide original critical research into more obscure titles like Nerven (1919) and The Phantom Carriage (1921), films that were produced in the silent and early sound era in countries ranging from France, Sweden and Hungary, to the United States and Mexico.An innovative and wide-ranging collection, Expressionism in the Cinema re-canonizes the classical Expressionist aesthetic, extending the critical and historical discussion beyond pre-existing scholarship into comparative and interdisciplinary areas of film research that reach across national boundaries.

In this book the author takes a fresh look at horror film series as series and presents an understanding of how the genre thrived in this format for a large portion of its history. It sheds light on older films such as the Universal and the Hammer series films on Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy as well as putting more recent series into perspective, such as The Nightmare on Elm Street films. A well rounded review of these films and investigation into their success as a format, this useful volume, originally published in 1991, offers an attempt to understand the marriage of horror and the series film, with its pluses as well as minuses.

A comparative analysis of key Islamic ity platforms and their debates.