From one of our finest cultural historians, The Noir Forties is a vivid reexamination of America's postwar period, that "age of anxiety" characterized by the dissipation of victory dreams, the onset of the Red Scare, and a nascent resistance to the growing Cold War consensus. Richard Lingeman examines a brief but momentous and crowded time, the years between VJ Day and the beginning of the Korean War, describing how we got from there to here. It evokes the social and cultural milieu of the late forties, with the vicissitudes of the New Deal Left and Popular Front culture from the end of one hot war and the beginning of the cold one -- and, longer term, of a cold war that preoccupied the United States for the next fifty years. It traces the attitudes, sentiments, hopes and fears, prejudices, behavior, and collective dreams and nightmares of the times, as reflected in the media, popular culture, political movements, opinion polls, and sociological and psychological studies of mass beliefs and behavior.

Focussing on five of the most interesting contemporary directors, the author plaes their films in an ideological perspetive that illuminates their relationship to eah other an to larger currents in our culture, and emphasizes the commentary their films make on American society.

The only comprehensive guide to the crime films of the forties and fifties, this volume focuses on the major events that shaped and molded the genre: war, alienation, drugs, and organized crime. The body of the work offers over 1,200 entries that feature concise summaries, analyses, and credits. The volume is a continuation of the author's earlier work, A Guide to American Crime Films of the Thirties (Greenwood, 1995). The book includes those stars that the public had already embraced as gangsters in the thirties such as James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward G. Robinson and brings them into a new era in which they are transformed into enforcers of the law. This work will be of interest to scholars, students, and film buffs alike. The work demonstrates the shift from the simpler gangster modes of the 1930s as it takes the reader forward to the more sophisticated films of the late fifties. Although the book is organized alphabetically, the introduction alerts the reader to the major social phenomena that influenced the genre of these decades. Also offered are credits that cover titles, release dates, distributors, directors, screenwriters, and major players. The 1,200 entries include detailed plot summaries and thematic analyses as well as relevant information on sources, remakes, and sequels.

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XIII. MISSION WORK IX BETHNAL GREEN. I Was acquainted at this time with a young' curate, with whem I had somo time boforo made a pedestrian tour through somo of the most beautiful portions of the beautiful county of Kent, and who had lately exchanged his first curacy at Haverstock Hill for a similar engagement in the district of SL Philip, Bcthnal Green. On tho occasion of my first visit to him after this change, our conversation turned upon hemo missions, and I was led to make some remarks, derived from my own observation, upon the incompetency of many of thc Beripture-readora, whose mission-fields were the' industrial quarters of our large towns, for the accomplishment of the end for which they wero appointed. They may be tolerably well qualified to deal with the indifferent and the ignorant, I observed; but they are utterly incompetent to remove the doubts or meet the arguments of the many intelligentmen to bo found in largo towns who reject the ISible as a divine revelation. They way be useful nn.xiliaries of the clergy in visiting the poor inein- Ihts of u congregation, and tolerably successful in bringing into the fold of the Chureh the ignorant and the indifferent; but they don't realize my idea nf whut a Christian missionary in the homo field hhould Ihi in tin ngc like the present. There is great difliculty in obtaining men whe would, returned the curate. It is true they are not very highly paid; but many of them, notably those employed by the City Missionary Society, are as well paid as a largo proportion of curates, whe are drawn from a higher and more educated class. The Churehes, said I, in continuance of the thought that was in my mind, send to the ignorant heathen of Africa and Malaysia men qualified by education for the ministr...