In their heyday, pulp westerns were one of America's most popular forms of entertainment. Often selling for less than 50 cents, the paperback books introduced generations to the ?exploits? of Billy the Kid and Jesse James, brought to life numerous villains (usually named ?Black? something, e.g., Black Bart and Black Pete), and created a West that existed only in the minds of several talented writers. It was only natural that filmmakers would look to the pulps for stories, adapting many of the works for the big screen and shaping the Western film genre. The adaptations of seven of the pulps?...

On June 29, 1908, U.S. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte ordered the creation of a special force within the Department of Justice. Consisting of 28 agents and eight former Treasury Department investigators, it was designed to stop interstate crimes yet had no power to arrest perpetrators or carry firearms. Named the Bureau of Investigation, the agency was soon bogged down with its own inherent problems, becoming an object of corruption and contempt--until May 19, 1924. On that date, President Calvin Coolidge appointed J. Edgar Hoover to replace the corrupt director. Hard-working with a...

An examination of the careers of communist and liberal actors, screenwriters, playwrights, and directors in Hollywood from the late 1920s to the present, this book uses studio and PCA correspondence, FBI files, film and theater reviews, and other sources to reveal how these artists were concerned with and active in the cinema of social protest--Provided by publisher.

Drawing on studio files, newspaper critiques, internet sources and scholarly studies of Mexican cinema, this critical history focuses on film depictions, in Hollywood and in Mexico, of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The political and military battles of the revolution are discussed in detail, and contrasted with the film industry's mostly uninformative take on the conflict. Important figures of Mexican history are discussed - Benito Juqrez, Porfirio Diaz, Francisco Madero Jr., Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata - as well as non-Latinos whose actions were influential. Performers, production...

The history of American Indians on screen can be compared to a light shining through a prism. We may have seen bits and pieces of the genuine culture portrayed, but rarely did we see a satisfying and informative whole picture. Savages and Saints deals with the changing image of the American Indian in the Western film genre, contrasting the fictionalized images of native Americans portrayed in classic films against the historical reality of life on the American frontier. The book tells the stories of frontier warriors, Indian and white, revealing how their stories were often drastically...

For more than 80 years, images of the Third Reich have appeared in newsreels, documentaries, and fictional stories--from comedies and musicals to war, horror and science fiction films. Many of these representations say as much about the filmmakers as they do about Nazism itself. Hollywood often used the brutal Nazi as an all-purpose villain in escapist adventures set during and after the war, but just as often used him to attack the evil he symbolized. Drawing on studio files, correspondence of the Production Code office and the writings of noted historians and critics, this book...