Onscreen And Undercover
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Onscreen and Undercover
Author: Wesley Britton
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Release Date: 2006-10-30
Wes Britton's Spy Television (2004) was an overview of espionage on the small screen from 1951 to 2002. His Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film (2004) wove spy literature, movies, radio, comics, and other popular media together with what the public knew about actual espionage to show the interrelationships between genres and approaches in the past century. Onscreen and Undercover, the last book in Britton's Spy Trilogy, provides a history of spies on the large screen, with an emphasis on the stories these films present. Since the days of the silent documentary short, spying has been a staple of the movie business. It has been the subject of thrillers, melodramas, political films, romances, and endless parodies as well. But despite the developing mistrust of the spy as a figure of hope and good works, the variable relationship between real spying and screen spying over the past 100 years sheds light on how we live, what we fear, who we admire, and what we want our culture—and our world—to become. Onscreen and Undercover describes now forgotten trends, traces surprising themes, and spotlights the major contributions of directors, actors, and other American and English artists. The focus is on movies, on and off camera. In a 1989 National Public Radio interview, famed author John Le Carre said a spy must be entertaining. Spies have to interest potential sources, and be able to draw people in to succeed in recruiting informants. In that spirit, Wes Britton now offers Onscreen and Undercover.
Gangsters and G-Men on Screen
Author: Gene D. Phillips
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Release Date: 2014-09-26
While the gangster film may have enjoyed its heyday in the 1930s and ’40s, it has remained a movie staple for almost as long as cinema has existed. From the early films of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson to modern versions like Bugsy, Public Enemies, and Gangster Squad, such films capture the brutality of mobs and their leaders. In Gangsters and G-Men on Screen: Crime Cinema Then and Now, Gene D. Phillips revisits some of the most popular and iconic representations of the genre. While this volume offers new perspectives on some established classics—usual suspects like Little Caesar, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Godfather Part II—Phillips also calls attention to some of the unheralded but no less worthy films and filmmakers that represent the genre. Expanding the viewer’s notion of what constitutes a gangster film, Phillips offers such unusual choices as You Only Live Once, Key Largo, The Lady from Shanghai, and even the 1949 version of The Great Gatsby. Also included in this examination are more recent ventures, such as modern classics The Grifters and Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. In his analyses, Phillips draws on a number of sources, including personal interviews with directors and other artists and technicians associated with the films he discusses. Of interest to film historians and scholars, Gangsters and G-Men on Screen will also appeal to anyone who wants to better understand the films that represent an important contribution to crime cinema.
Policing the World on Screen
This book analyzes Hollywood storytelling that features an American crimefighter—whether cop, detective, or agent—who must safeguard society and the nation by any means necessary. That often means going “rogue” and breaking the rules, even deploying ugly violence, but excused as self-defense or to serve the greater good. This ends-justifies-means approach dates back to gunfighters taming the western frontier to urban cowboy cops battling urban savagery—first personified by “Dirty” Harry Callahan—and later dispatched in global interventions to vanquish threats to national security. America as the world’s “policeman often means controlling the Other at home and abroad, which also extends American hegemony from the Cold War through the War on Terror. This book also examines pioneering portrayals by males of color and female crimefighters to embody such a social or national defender, which are frustrated by their existence as threats the white knight exists to defeat.