This comprehensive film guide lists the screen credits and provides synopses of more than 5,400 silent western features, documentaries, shorts and serials released from the 1890s through 1930. Numerous one-, two- and three-reelers are included in this guide. These westerns came from both the major and lesser known American film studios, many long defunct.

The term western is hard to define; someone once commented that a western had to have a horse in it. The genre generally applies to that post-Civil War period beginning with the great cattle drives and ending around 1890. But the...

Recent crime films such as "Scarface," the Dirty Harry series, and "The Godfather" have captured the American imagination, but they owe a large debt to the early crime talkies such as "The Public Enemy," Paul Muni's" Scarface," and "Little Caesar." More than 1,000 entries are featured in this volume, complete with the names of directors, screen writers, and major players offering a wealth of data supported by plot evaluations. For the serious student of crime films, this work provides a comprehensive treatment of the genre. It is the only one-volume work that includes all crime sub-genres...

Examining 40 cycles or themes and more than 1,000 silent films, the author attempts to discern how the screen reflected contemporary social, political, and national trends during the silent years. The period has been divided into the early silent years (1900-1919), with films of one or two reels dominating for the first 15 years, and the later silent period (1920-1929), known as the Golden Age of the Silents, in which feature-length films dominated. One of the author's goals is to establish the success, and sometimes the failure, of these films to capture the social and political times of...

From the 1920s and 1930s, when American cinema depicted the South as a demi-paradise populated by wealthy landowners, glamorous belles, and happy slaves, through later, more realistic depictions of the region in films based on works by Erskine Caldwell, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Robert Penn Warren, Hollywood's view of the South has been as ever-changing as the place itself. This comprehensive reference guide to Southern films offers credits, plot descriptions, and analyses of how the stereotypes and characterizations in each film contribute to our understanding of a most...

The immense popularity of movies has its roots in the silent films of the early 1900s, this being especially true of the crime genre. The authors of this Guide have compiled for the first time in one volume an entire history of the crime genre during the silent era, preserving the memories of these films for their own generation and introducing these works to a new generation thirsty for entertainment and knowledge. This Guide includes more than 2,000 film entries, complete with names of directors, screenwriters, and major players and offers a wealth of data supported by plot evaluations...

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...