Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film

by Lee Grieveson (Editor), Esther Sonnet (Editor), Giorgio Bertellini (Contributor)

Sinister, swaggering, yet often sympathetic, the figure of the gangster has stolen and murdered its way into the hearts of American cinema audiences. Despite the enduring popularity of the gangster film, however, traditional criticism has focused almost entirely on a few canonical movies such as Little Caesar, Public Enemy, and The Godfather trilogy, resulting in a limited and distorted understanding of this diverse and changing genre.

Mob Culture offers a long-awaited, fresh look at the American gangster film, exposing its hidden histories from the Black Hand gangs of the early twentieth century to The Sopranos. Departing from traditional approaches that have typically focused on the "nature" of the gangster, the editors have collected essays that engage the larger question of how the meaning of criminality has changed over time. Grouped into three thematic sections, the essays examine gangster films through the lens of social, gender, and racial/ethnic issues.

Destined to become a classroom favorite, Mob Culture is an indispensable reference for future work in the genre.

326 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2005

About the author

Lee Grieveson is the director of the graduate program in film studies at University College London and the author of Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America.

Reviews

[Tom Leland]

5 out of 10. If you're fine with writing like this: "Stanfield examines the economic conditions of production and argues that the films are typified by their reliance on formulaic fictional strategies, again connecting race to criminality but also, at least partially, reworking these strategies to offer counterhegemonic and antiesssentialist black self-representation and a black view on American possibility", then perhaps you'll enjoy this work much more than I did.

[TSStechAngel]

Horrible. Way too academic for my brain to even begin digesting the contents. Although, I had to force myself to do so. This was read for a class. I am glad I'll never have to read this one again afterward.