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The historical dictionaries present essential information on a broad range of subjects, including American and world history, art, business, cities, countries, cultures, customs, film, global conflicts, international relations, literature, music, philosophy, religion, sports, and theater. Written by experts, all contain highly informative introductory essays of the topic and detailed chronologies that, in some cases, cover vast historical time periods but still manage to heavily feature more recent events.

Brief A–Z entries describe the main people, events, politics, social issues, institutions, and policies that make the topic unique, and entries are cross-referenced for ease of browsing. Extensive bibliographies are divided into several general subject areas, providing excellent access points for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more. Additionally, maps, photographs, and appendixes of supplemental information aid high school and college students doing term papers or introductory research projects. In short, the historical dictionaries are the perfect starting point for anyone looking to research in these fields.
Historical Dictionaries of Literature

and the Arts

Jon Woronoff, Series Editor

Science Fiction Literature, by Brian Stableford, 2004.

Hong Kong Cinema, by Lisa Odham Stokes, 2007.

American Radio Soap Operas, by Jim Cox, 2005.

Japanese Traditional Theatre, by Samuel L. Leiter, 2006.

Fantasy Literature, by Brian Stableford, 2005.

Australian and New Zealand Cinema, by Albert Moran and Errol Vieth, 2006.

African-American Television, by Kathleen Fearn-Banks, 2006.

Lesbian Literature, by Meredith Miller, 2006.

Scandinavian Literature and Theater, by Jan Sjåvik, 2006.

British Radio, by Seán Street, 2006.

German Theater, by William Grange, 2006.

African American Cinema, by S. Torriano Berry and Venise Berry, 2006.

Sacred Music, by Joseph P. Swain, 2006.

Russian Theater, by Laurence Senelick, 2007.

French Cinema, by Dayna Oscherwitz and MaryEllen Higgins, 2007.

Postmodernist Literature and Theater, by Fran Mason, 2007.

Irish Cinema, by Roderick Flynn and Pat Brereton, 2007.

Australian Radio and Television, by Albert Moran and Chris Keating, 2007.

Polish Cinema, by Marek Haltof, 2007.

Old Time Radio, by Robert C. Reinehr and Jon D. Swartz, 2008.

Renaissance Art, by Lilian H. Zirpolo, 2008.

Broadway Musical, by William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird, 2008.

American Theater: Modernism, by James Fisher and Felicia Hardison Londré, 2008.

German Cinema, by Robert C. Reimer and Carol J. Reimer, 2008.

Horror Cinema, by Peter Hutchings, 2008.

Westerns in Cinema, by Paul Varner, 2008.

Chinese Theater, by Tan Ye, 2008.

Italian Cinema, by Gino Moliterno, 2008.

Architecture, by Allison Lee Palmer, 2008.

Russian and Soviet Cinema, by Peter Rollberg, 2008.

African American Theater, by Anthony D. Hill, 2009.

Postwar German Literature, by William Grange, 2009.

Modern Japanese Literature and Theater, by J. Scott Miller, 2009.

Animation and Cartoons, by Nichola Dobson, 2009.

Modern Chinese Literature, by Li-hua Ying, 2010.

Middle Eastern Cinema, by Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard, 2010.

Spanish Cinema, by Alberto Mira, 2010.

Film Noir, by Andrew Spicer, 2010.

French Theater, by Edward Forman, 2010.

Choral Music, by Melvin P. Unger, 2010.

Westerns in Literature, by Paul Varner, 2010.

Baroque Art and Architecture, by Lilian H. Zirpolo, 2010.

Surrealism, by Keith Aspley, 2010.

Science Fiction Cinema, by M. Keith Booker, 2010.

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Children's Literature, by Emer O'Sullivan, 2010.

German Literature to 1945, by William Grange, 2011.

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Holocaust Cinema, by Robert C. Reimer and Carol J. Reimer, 2012.

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Beat Movement, by Paul Varner, 2012.

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Crime Films, by Geoff Mayer, 2013.
Historical Dictionary of Crime Films

Geoff Mayer

The Scarecrow Press, Inc.

Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

2012
Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc.

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2012 by Geoff Mayer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

All photos are courtesy of Photofest.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mayer, Geoff.

Historical dictionary of crime films / Geoff Mayer.

p. cm. — (Historical dictionaries of literature)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8108-6769-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-7900-3

(ebook)

1. Crime films—Dictionaries. I. Title.

PN1995.9.C66M39 2013

791.43'655603—dc23

2012017334

 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America
Contents

Contents

Editor's Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Chronology

Introduction

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

S

T

U

V

W

Y

Bibliography

About the Author
Editor's Foreword

As anyone who watches crime films will realize, the term is not quite as simple as it at first appears, since it covers, among other things, both detective and gangster films—depending on whose side you focus on—as well as suspense thrillers, police procedurals, and other subgenres. And, depending on who scripted the film (or more likely, who wrote the original source), you may be dealing with a rather sedate classical detective film or a rougher, grittier hard-boiled version, just to mention two variations. To this, of course, can be added more specialized genres such as the caper film and film noir. Moreover—and this is increasingly the case—you may have trouble figuring out who the good guy is. Once, it was obviously the detective or policeman, but nowadays it could just as well be the felon, who was almost always the villain when things were simpler and perhaps there was a code to follow. This makes crime films a much richer source of entertainment and instruction—yes, instruction, because many people in the audience base their views of life, who is right and who is wrong, who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, on what they see on the silver screen.

Crime film was there at the birth of cinema, and it has accompanied cinema over more than a century of history, passing from silent film to talkies, from black-and-white to color. Once the domain of Americans and Europeans, such movies are now produced around the world. During this time, they have involved countless writers, directors, and actors who are just too numerous to mention. But the best are certainly included in the dictionary section, with hundreds of entries on those who contributed to making the films and a fair number on the most memorable films themselves, as well as some particularly interesting ones on the different genres and the most popular film detectives. As this is a long history, it is certainly handy to have a rather extensive chronology to follow the evolution year by year. The introduction then provides a useful overview, helping to put things in context. Film buffs, and especially those interested in crime film, may find that this Historical Dictionary of Crime Films just whets their appetite and, if they want to read more, the ideal place to get started is the very substantial bibliography.

This volume was written by Geoff Mayer, who teaches film history and film genre in the Cinema Studies Program at La Trobe University in Australia. There, he is a reader and associate professor as well as the head of the School of Communication, Arts, and Critical Enquiry. Aside from teaching, he has done considerable writing, both as author and editor, on subjects ranging quite widely. His books include, among others, The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand, a Guide to British Cinema, and closer to the core of this book, the Encyclopedia of Film Noir. His present focus is on film serials. Among Mayer's leisure activities, as must be obvious from his intimate knowledge of the field, is the reading of crime fiction and viewing of crime films. This all makes him an excellent guide to one of the most popular, initially rather predictable, but increasingly varied and intriguing sides of cinema.

Jon Woronoff

Series Editor
Preface

In 1940, Dutch diplomat Robert van Gulik, an antiquarian book collector and expert in Oriental languages, was interned by the Japanese while serving in the Far East. During this period, he found a copy of an anonymous 18th-century manuscript, Wu tse t'ien ssu ta ch'i an. The manuscript outlined the real-life activities of a Chinese jurist known as Judge Dee, or Ti Jen-chieh, who served in the seventh-century Tang dynasty. It described how the judge solved three interrelated crimes, one of which was the brutal rape and murder of a young woman. In 1949, Gulik published an English translation as Dee Goong An: Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee. Later, in 1956, Gulik translated another Chinese manuscript, T'ang-yin-pi-shih. These two manuscripts provided the inspiration for his series of Judge Dee crime novels, beginning with The Chinese Bell Murders (first published in 1958).

In 2011, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn won the Best Director award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival for his gangster/neo-noir hybrid film Drive. The film elicited a polarized response from the critics. Some rejected its violence and obvious influences from other crime films (such as Walter Hills's The Driver [1978] and the 1953 western Shane). Others lavishly praised the film.

While film criticism is necessarily subjective, an informed response takes into account the role of genre and the influence of culture. This is one purpose of this book. There are obvious differences between Gulik's re-creation of crime in seventh-century China and the violent, contemporary world presented in Winding Refn's film. But there are common elements that underpin both forms. In each, a moral order is violated. This is addressed and resolved, and a form of moral and dramatic equilibrium emerges at the end of each story—however transitory and problematic.

This desire informs most, if not all, crime stories. It is central to melodrama, and the crime genre is a facet of melodrama. Crime films from the early years of the industry to at least the 1960s were described as melodramas—or "mellers," a term used for all films that relied on "action, adventure, and thrills"—by industry papers and trade journals. Steve Neale convincingly demonstrates this in his 1993 empirical study of the American trade press from 1938 to 1960, with some examples from the early years of the industry.1 Crime melodramas included all types of crime films: gangster, boxing, classical detective, and hard-boiled detective films; the "rogue cop" cycle of the early 1950s; gothic crime, prison, police procedural, and semidocumentary films; as well as suspense thrillers. Crime films described as melodramas include Nick Carter and the Acrobats (1910), Sherlock Holmes (1916), Alias Jimmy Valentine (1920), Manhattan Melodrama (1934), King of Alcatraz (1938), The Maltese Falcon (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), Phantom Lady (1944), Double Indemnity (1944), Gilda (1946), Detour (1946), The Killers (1946), The Lone Wolf in Mexico (1947), Out of the Past (1947), Secret beyond the Door (1947), He Walked by Night (1948), Cry of the City (1948), The Set-Up (1949), White Heat (1949), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), Pickup on South Street (1953), The Big Heat (1953), Rogue Cop (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1955), The Big Combo (1955), Slightly Scarlet (1956), The Shadow on the Window (1957), and The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960)—plus more than a thousand films reviewed in Variety between January 1938 and December 1959. Additional modifiers were sometimes added, as for the "psychological melodrama" The Gangster (1947); My Name is Julia Ross (1945), a mystery melodrama with "psychological twists"; the "psycho-meller" Possessed (1947); The High Wall (1947), part of the "psycho-melodrama cycle"; and even a "neurotic meller" (On Dangerous Ground, 1953).

Both Robert van Gulik's fiction and Nicolas Winding Refn's film operate within the same parameters, the field of the "melodramatic imagination," a term coined by Peter Brooks.2 The quest in all melodrama is for the hidden moral legibility, the need to forge a common or shared moral basis. Brooks describes the period since the French Revolution as the "post-sacred world," where moral and social order is no longer linked to the sacred (the Church and/or monarchy). Melodrama, he says, including crime fiction, exists to establish and reaffirm the "moral occult": the "domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality."3 Melodrama, including the crime genre,

takes as its concern and raison d'être the location, expression and imposition of basic ethical and psychic truths. It says them over and over in clear language, it rehearses their conflicts and combats, it reenacts the menace of evil and the eventual triumph of morality made operative and evident.4

This is why the crime film is important.

Notes

1. Steve Neale, "Melo Talk: On the Meaning and Use of the Term 'Melodrama' in the American Trade Press," Velvet Light Trap 32 (Fall 1993): 66–89.

2. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).

3. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 5.

4. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 15.
Acknowledgments

I wish to thank my wife Lesley Mayer and my daughter Rebecca, who spent many frustrating hours proofreading the manuscript and trying to simplify my convoluted prose. Similarly my colleague at La Trobe University, Kevin Brianton, who graciously read the manuscript just prior to completion and made a number of valuable suggestions. Mistakes that have slipped through this net are all mine. Also, I would like to thank Jon Woronoff at Scarecrow Press for his assistance.
Acronyms and Abbreviations

3-D | Three-dimensional

---|---

BAFTA | British Academy of Film and Television Arts

BBC | British Broadcasting Corporation

CBS | Columbia Broadcasting System

CIA | Central Intelligence Agency

DA | District Attorney

FBI | Federal Bureau of Investigation

HUAC | House Committee on Un-American Activities

MGM | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

MPPDA | Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America

NYPD | New York City Police Department

OSS | Office of Strategic Services

PCA | Production Code Administration

POW | Prisoner of war

PRC | Producers Releasing Corporation

RKO | Radio-Keith-Orpheum

SRC | Studio Relations Committee

SWAT | Special Weapons and Tactics
Chronology

1900 United States: Sherlock Holmes Baffled, released by Biograph Studios.

1901 France: L'histoire d'un crime, an early crime film from Ferdinand Zecca concerning a condemned man in a prison cell and his dreams.

1903 United States: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, released by Vitagraph.

1906 Australia: The Story of the Kelly Gang, which is often cited as the first feature film. It celebrates Australia's best known bushranger, Ned Kelly.

1908 France: Nick Carter le roi des detectives, the first film to feature the long-running literary detective. There were six separate short films.

1910 Denmark: Denhvide slavhandels sidste offer, involving white slavery.

1911 Denmark: Bedraget I døden, featuring the Oriental master criminal Gar el Hama. A sequel was released the following year.

1912 United States: The Musketeers of Pig Alley, directed by D. W. Griffith, one of the first gangster films. The Gangster and the Girl, starring Charles Ray as an undercover detective.

1913 France: Fantômas, the first of five films featuring the supercriminal Fantômas. Le mystère de la chamber jaune, based on the novel by Gaston Leroux. United States: Traffic in Souls, depicting white slavery.

1915 Denmark: Haevnens nat, a crime melodrama about a circus artist. United States: Alias Jimmy Valentine, an early American crime film, remade in 1920 and 1929. Regeneration, directed and cowritten by Raoul Walsh about crime in the slums of New York.

1916 France: Judex, the highly popular film serial directed by Louis Feuillade featuring a female criminal.

1917 United States: Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, released as a feature film. First screen version of Joseph Vance's The Lone Wolf, starring Bert Lytell.

1918 Russia: Maliutka Ellie, concerning a town mayor who murders a young girl.

1919 United States: The second film version of The Mystery of the Yellow Room.

1920 United States: The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is enacted on 17 January prohibiting the manufacture, transport, and sale of alcoholic beverages.

1921 Great Britain: The Hound of the Baskervilles, released by Stoll Pictures with Eille Norwood as Sherlock Holmes.

1922 Germany: Fritz Lang's first crime film, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler: Ein Bild der Zeit (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler). Great Britain: The first screen version of Bulldog Drummond, starring Carlyle Blackwell as Drummond. United States: Sherlock Holmes, a Goldwyn release starring John Barrymore as Holmes, shot on location in London.

1923 Germany: Karl Grune's Die Strasse (The Street), the first in the cycle of Strassenfilm (street film) depicting the descent of seemingly respectable citizens into a world of crime.

1924 United States: The Bedroom Window, a silent detective film starring Ethel Wales as a mystery writer. Buster Keaton in the comedy spoof Sherlock, Jr.

1925 Germany: G. W. Pabst's Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street), a key film in the Strassenfilm cycle.

1926 Brazil: O tesouro perdido, Humberto Mauro's tale of murder and a treasure map. Germany: Henrik Galeen's Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) introduces the cinematic doppelganger to the screen. Great Britain: Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger.

1927 United States: The debut of Charlie Chan on the screen, in Universal's The Chinese Parrot with Japanese actor Kamiyama Sojin as Chan. Underworld, directed by Josef von Sternberg and released by Paramount, starring George Bancroft as gangster "Bull" Weed.

1928 Australia: The Far Paradise, a thriller written, produced, and directed by the McDonagh sisters. Germany: Fritz Lang's Metropolis. United States: Josef von Sternberg's The Docks of New York. The Racket, based on the play by Bartlett Cormack that attacks corrupt government officials in Chicago and includes a gangster modeled on Al Capone.

1929 Great Britain: Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail, part sound, part silent (also released in a silent version). United States: S. S. Van Dine's The Bishop Murder Case, featuring his detective Philo Vance. The first screen appearance of Philo Vance, with William Powell as Vance in The Canary Murder Case. Ronald Colman as the titular ex-British army officer in Bulldog Drummond. Trent's Last Case, directed by Howard Hawks, based on E. C. Bentley's 1913 novel (remade in 1952 in Great Britain). Edward G. Robinson's first gangster film, The Hole in the Wall. W. R. Burnett's gangster novel, Little Caesar. Behind That Curtain, another appearance by Charlie Chan as a minor character. Chester Morris as a gangster in Alibi.

1930 Australia: The Cheaters, a silent crime drama written, produced, and directed by the McDonagh sisters, Paulette and Phyllis. France: The third film version of Gaston Leroux's novel Le mystère de la chambre jaune. Germany: Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), starring Marlene Dietrich as the nightclub entertainer Lola Lola, an early femme fatale. Great Britain: Alfred Hitchcock's Murder! United States: The Doorway to Hell, a gangster film starring Lew Ayres. A month later, Little Caesar starring Edward G. Robinson.

1931 France: Jean Renoir's La Chiene (The Bitch), an important precursor to the development of film noir. Paris-Béguin, starring Jean Gabin as a criminal. Germany: Fritz Lang's M: Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (M: A City Searches for a Murderer), starring Peter Lorre as the child killer. Robert Siodmak's Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht (The Man Who Searched for His Own Murderer). Great Britain: The Ringer, based on the Edgar Wallace play. United States: The first screen version of The Maltese Falcon, starring Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade, released by Warner Bros. Warner Oland's first appearance as Charlie Chan in Charlie Chan Carries On. City Streets, starring Gary Cooper and based on a story by Dashiell Hammett. Quick Millions, starring Spencer Tracy. The Public Enemy, starring Jimmy Cagney. The Secret Six, the first in a cycle of films advocating vigilante action against gangsters.

1932 France: Jean Renoir's La nuit du carrefour (Night at the Crossroads), Julien Duvivier's La tête d'un homme (A Man's Neck), and Jean Tarride's Le chien jaune (The Yellow Dog)—all crime films based on novels by Georges Simenon. Great Britain: The Hound of the Baskervilles, released by Gainsborough. United States: Howard Hawks's Scarface, the Shame of the Nation encounters protracted censorship problems, resulting in a delayed release and the insertion of an alternative ending into some prints. RKO Radio Pictures releases The Penguin Pool Murder, based on the 1931 novel by Stuart Palmer. Universal releases Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Old Dark House, two films that combine crime with horror. MGM releases Beast of the City, another film advocating vigilante action against gangsters, and The Mask of Fu Manchu, with Boris Karloff as the diabolical Chinese master criminal who imprisons and tortures members of a British expedition searching for the tomb of Genghis Khan, based on the novel by Sax Rohmer. Warner Bros. releases I Am a Fugitive from the Chain Gang, a critique of the chain gang system.

1933 Brazil: Ganga Bruta, Humberto Mauro's film concerning a man who murders his wife when he discovers she is not a virgin. Germany: Adolf Hitler assumes power, leading to the systematic emigration of many key filmmakers, including Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, and, later in the 1930s, Douglas Sirk. United States: Rowland Brown's Blood Money, a crime tale involving a kinky heiress and an ex-cop turned bail bondsman. The Story of Temple Drake, based on William Faulkner's Sanctuary, a controversial novel because of its rape sequence. This film, along with Baby Face (1933), resulted in the tightening of the Production Code and the depiction of sexual content in films. Lady Killer starred James Cagney as a former cinema doorman on the run from gangsters. Gabriel over the White House, part of the vigilante cycle.

1934 Mexico: La mujer del puerto (The Woman of the Port), a noir-influenced crime film. United States: Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, with Ronald Colman returning as Drummond. The first Perry Mason film, The Case of the Howling Dog, starring Warren William as Mason, released by Warner Bros. William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles in MGM's adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett novel The Thin Man. Manhattan Melodrama, released by MGM; gangster John Dillinger is shot down outside the Chicago Biograph Theater after attending a screening of this film on 22 July.

1935 France: Le crime de Monsieur Lange, Jean Renoir's political drama. Crime and Punishment, first film adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1867 novel. Great Britain: The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes, starring Arthur Wontner as Holmes and Lyn Harding as Moriarty. Ralph Richardson in The Return of Bulldog Drummond. Sanders of the River, Zoltan Korda's celebration of the contribution of the British in Africa, based on a story by Edgar Wallace. United States: The Spanish Cape Mystery, the first film based on an Ellery Queen story. The Lone Wolf Returns, from Columbia, a revival of the Lone Wolf series starring Melvyn Douglas as Michael Lanyard. First screen version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, starring George Raft. First installment of MGM's long-running crime series Crime Does Not Pay. James Cagney in "G" Men.

1936 France: Les bas-fonds (The Lower Depths) with Jean Gabin, an important film in the cycle known as "poetic realism." United States: Meet Nero Wolfe, a Columbia release, starring Edward Arnold as Wolfe. Fritz Lang's Fury, starring Spencer Tracy as an innocent man persecuted by an unjust legal system. The Petrified Forest, based on Robert Sherwood's play, with Humphrey Bogart as gangster Duke Mantee.

1937 France: Pépé le Moko, directed by Julien Duvivier, starring Jean Gabin as the criminal (remade in Hollywood in 1938 as Algiers). Great Britain: The Green Cockatoo (Four Dark Hours in the United States), an early British film noir based on a story by Graham Greene. United States: The first of a new series of Bulldog Drummond films from Paramount, beginning with Bulldog Drummond Escapes, starring Ray Milland, followed by Bulldog Drummond Comes Back, starring John Howard. The Shadow Strikes, based on the long-running radio and pulp fiction character created by Maxwell Grant (Walter B. Gibson), released by Grand National and starring Rod La Rocque. Marked Woman, starring Bette Davis, a Warner Bros. release based on the 1936 prosecution of Lucky Luciano on charges of "compulsory prostitution." Dick Tracy, the first screen appearance of the popular comic-strip detective, in a 15-episode serial from Republic. Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once, with Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney as the couple on the run.

1938 Finland: Nyrki Tapiovaara's Varastettu kuolema (Stolen Death), an early film noir. France: Marcel Carne's Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows), the most successful French film released in 1938 and a key entry in the poetic realism cycle of films, starring Jean Gabin. Great Britain: They Drive by Night, a tough crime film based on the novel by James Curtis, directed by Arthur Woods. United States: Bonita Granville as a teenage detective in Nancy Drew, Detective. Sidney Toler's debut as Charlie Chan, after the death of Warner Oland in August, in Charlie Chan in Honolulu. The first appearance of the Saint on the screen, The Saint in New York, based on the 1935 novel by Leslie Charteris. Angels with Dirty Faces, starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.

1939 France: Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève (Daybreak), starring Jean Gabin. Robert Siodmak's Pièges (Traps). Pierre Chenal's Le dernier tournant (The Last Turn), the first adaption of James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Great Britain: On the Night of the Fire (released in the United States as The Fugitive), directed by Brian Desmond Hurst, an early film noir. United States: The Roaring Twenties with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for 20th Century-Fox. Nick Carter, Master Detective, the first film in a short-lived MGM series starring Walter Pidgeon. Warren William as Michael Lanyard in The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt, the first film in a new series. The Saint Strikes Back, with George Sanders taking over as The Saint, Simon Templar.

1940 Great Britain: Thorold Dickinson's gothic crime film Gaslight (remade in 1944 in Hollywood). United States: The first of 20th Century-Fox's series of Mike Shayne films, Mike Shayne, Private Detective. Alfred Hitchcock's first American film, Rebecca, followed in September by an early film noir, Stranger on the Third Floor. Ralph Bellamy in the title role in Ellery Queen, Master Detective, the first film in a new series.

1941 Denmark: The morbid crime film En forbryder (A Criminal). France: Henri-Georges Clouzot's debut film, concerning the police investigation into a series of murders in Paris, L'assassinat du père Noël, a mystery involving the murder of Father Christmas in a French village. United States: High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart—a change in the gangster film. The third, and most influential, version of The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston. Meet Boston Blackie, starring Chester Morris, the first of a 13-film revival by Columbia of Jack Boyle's reformed jewel thief Boston Blackie. The first film in the Falcon series, The Gay Falcon starring George Sanders. Alfred Hitchcock's suspense film Suspicion, starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine. Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. Hugh Sinclair as Simon Templar in The Saint's Vacation, filmed in London.

1942 Great Britain: The psychological thriller The Night Has Eyes, starring James Mason as a troubled soldier returning from the Spanish Civil War to live on the Yorkshire moors. Italy: Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (Obsession), an unauthorized version of the James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Stasera Niente di Nuovo, a gangster film produced during the Fascist regime. United States: All through the Night, a transformation of the gangster film from its rise-and-fall pattern into a patriotic vehicle for Humphrey Bogart as "Gloves" Donohue. Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire as the hit man and also in Paramount's second version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key. Basil Rathbone in Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, the first in a series of 12 Holmes films for Universal that update the setting to the 1940s. The Falcon's Brother, in which George Sanders leaves the Falcon series and is replaced by his real-life brother Tom Conway. Street of Chance, a Paramount adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's novel The Black Curtain. The first Val Lewton RKO film, Cat People, one of RKO's most financially successful films in 1942.

1943 France: Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Corbeau (The Raven). Mexico: Fernando de Fuentes's Doña Bárbara and La mujer sin alma (The Woman without a Soul). United States: Alfred Hitchcock's film Shadow of Doubt starring Joseph Cotten as a serial killer. Three more successful and influential suspense films produced by Val Lewton: I Walked with a Zombie; The Leopard Man, based on the 1942 Cornell Woolrich novel Black Alibi; and the poetically morbid thriller The Seventh Victim. Crime Doctor, with Warner Baxter as Dr. Robert Ordway, the first film in a series of 10 films.

1944 United States: The second film based on Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, released in Minneapolis under that title. The Whistler, a Columbia release based on the popular CBS radio program, the first in a series of seven films. A film version by Paramount of James M. Cain's 1936 novella Double Indemnity, starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. Otto Preminger's adaptation of Vera Caspary's novel Laura, starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews. Director Robert Siodmak's film version of Cornell Woolrich's novel Phantom Lady. John Brahm's remake of Hitchcock's 1926 film The Lodger. Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window.

1945 Great Britain: Pink String and Sealing Wax, Robert Hamer's film involving repression and murder. United States: Dillinger, a low-budget but highly profitable gangster film based on the life of John Dillinger. And Then There Were None, the first screen version of Agatha Christie's 1939 novel Ten Little Niggers (retitled Ten Little Indians in subsequent editions). 20th Century-Fox's The House on 92nd Street, directed by Henry Hathaway and produced by Louis de Rochemont, the first in the semidocumentary style of crime films. Jean Renoir's 1931 film La Chiene remade by Fritz Lang as Scarlet Street, starring the same three actors from Woman in the Window: Joan Bennett, Edward G. Robinson, and Dan Duryea. Edgar Ulmer's low-budget film noir Detour. Mildred Pierce, a Warner Bros. adaptation of the James M. Cain novel. Alfred Hitchcock's psychological suspense thriller Spellbound. Leave Her to Heaven, the first film noir in color, starring Gene Tierney as a mentally disturbed femme fatale. RKO rereleases Farewell, My Lovely as Murder, My Sweet.

1946 France: Les portes de la nuit (The Gates of the Night). On ne meurt pas comme ça, starring Erich von Stroheim. The term films noirs is used for the first time by French critic Nino Frank. Germany: Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us). Great Britain: Sidney Gilliat's mystery Green for Danger, based on Christianna Brand's novel set in a wartime British hospital. Wanted for Murder, starring Eric Portman. Italy: Alberto Lattuada's Il bandito (The Bandit). United States: Long-delayed release of The Big Sleep in August, having begun production in December 1944 with additional scenes between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall filmed in late 1945. The Killers, based on Ernest Hemingway's short story. Raymond Chandler's only original screenplay The Blue Dahlia, released by Paramount. Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford as the disturbed lovers. The first Hollywood adaptation of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. Two crime films directed by Robert Siodmak: The Killers and the gothic thriller The Spiral Staircase.

1947 France: Quai des orfèvres (Jenny Lamour) and Panique (Panic). Great Britain: Brighton Rock, released in the United States as Young Scarface, based on Graham Greene's 1938 novel. Dear Murderer, starring Greta Gynt and Eric Portman. They Made Me a Fugitive, starring Trevor Howard and Sally Gray. Lance Comfort's Temptation Harbour, starring Robert Newton. Roy Ward Baker's debut film October Man, starring John Mills. Italy: Tombolo, paradiso nero (Tombolo, Black Paradise) and Caccia tragica (Tragic Pursuit). Mexico: El reino de los gangsters, Juan Orol's melodramatic gangster film. United States: Crossfire, a controversial crime film involving the killing of a Jewish man by a soldier. Out of the Past, starring Robert Mitchum. Dead Reckoning, starring Humphrey Bogart. Ride the Pink Horse, based on the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes. Kiss of Death, starring Victor Mature and Richard Widmark. The adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Lady in the Lake, with director Robert Montgomery adopting a literal point of view. Adaptations of three stories by Cornell Woolrich in low-budget films: Fall Guy, Fear in the Night, and The Guilty. Body and Soul, starring John Garfield, produced by the newly formed Enterprise Studios. The House Committee on Un-American Activities holds a public inquiry into the Hollywood film industry. After the death of Sidney Toler on February 12, Roland Winters is cast as Charlie Chan in the remaining six films of the series, beginning with The Chinese Ring. Al Capone dies.

1948 France: Dédée d'Anvers (Woman of Antwerp). The fourth version of Le mystère de la chamber jaune, based on Gaston Leroux's novel. Germany: Affaire Blum, based on a 1926 murder of an accountant by fascists. Great Britain: Daybreak, starring Eric Portman. Mine Own Executioner, starring Burgess Meredith. Lance Comfort's Brighton Rock, starring Richard Attenborough as the psychotic young gangster, and Silent Dusk. So Evil My Love, a Paramount Studios production filmed in London with Ray Milland as a criminal who seduces Ann Todd, based on the novel by Joseph Shearing. Italy: Senza pietà (Without Pity). Japan: Director Akira Kurosawa's crime film Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel). United States: Robert Siodmak's Cry of the City, starring Victor Mature as the policeman and Richard Conte as the criminal. Force of Evil, produced at Enterprise Studio and directed by Abraham Polonsky, and I Walk Alone, early crime films linking large corporations with organized crime. Key Largo, featuring Edward G. Robinson in his last major gangster role as Johnny Rocco. They Live by Night, Nicholas Ray's debut film. Anthony Mann's semidocumentary crime film T-Men, followed by his Raw Deal with a female voice-over (by Claire Trevor). Jules Dassin's police thriller The Naked Street, filmed on the streets of New York. John Farrow's The Big Clock, starring Ray Milland. Night Has a Thousand Eyes, based on the Cornell Woolrich novel. Pitfall, starring Dick Powell as the husband involved in murder.

1949 France: Une si jolie petite plage (Riptide) and Manèges (The Cheat). Great Britain: Obsession (American title The Hidden Room), one of three films made by Hollywood director Edward Dmytryk in London, starring Robert Newton. The Small Back Room, with David Farrar as a psychologically disturbed bomb disposal expert in Michael Powell's film adaptation of Nigel Balchin's novel. The Third Man, Carol Reed's highly popular film set in Vienna. Kind Hearts and Coronets, Robert Hamer's masterpiece combining murder and black comedy. Japan: Akira Kurosawa's Nora inu (Stray Dog). Mexico: Aventurera (The Adventuress). United States: White Heat, James Cagney's return to the gangster genre as the mentally disturbed Cody Jarrett. Two noir films from director Robert Siodmak: Criss Cross and The File on Thelma Jordan. Exiled French director Max Ophuls's story of marital violence, Caught, starring Robert Ryan. Robert Wise's The Set-Up, also starring Ryan as an aging boxer. Jules Dassin's Thieves Highway, starring Richard Conte and based on A. I. Bezzerides's novel Thieves Market, also published in 1949, with Bezzerides also writing the script for the film.

1950 Great Britain: Night and the City, filmed in London by American Jules Dassin. The Blue Lamp, a popular British police film, introducing Police Constable Dixon (Jack Warner), who would be revived for Dixon of Dock Green, a long-running television series (1955–76). Italy: Michelangelo Antonioni's Cronaca di un amore (Chronicle of a Love). Mexico: Luis Buñuel's Los olvidados (The Forgotten Ones). Spain: Brigada Criminal, a noir film set in Madrid. Apartado de correos (Post Office Box), involving the police investigation of the murder of a young woman in Barcelona. United States: Joseph Lewis's Gun Crazy, a "doomed couple" film, which went unnoticed in 1950 but later became a cult film. The Asphalt Jungle, John Huston's adaptation of W. R. Burnett's 1949 novel, the first fully developed caper film. Rudolph Maté's D.O.A., starring Edmond O'Brien as the doomed man trying to find the man who poisoned him. Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, starring Humphrey Bogart as the disturbed screenwriter. Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends, starring Dana Andrews as the cop who accidentally kills a former war hero. Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. Fritz Lang's period gothic crime film House by the River.

1951 Argentina: El pendiente, a film noir based on "The Earring," a short story by Cornell Woolrich. Germany: Der Verlone (The Lost One), directed by and starring Peter Lorre. Great Britain: The Ealing comedy caper film The Lavender Hill Mob. Italy: Carlo Lizzani's debut film, Achtung banditi, a gangster film financed by a worker's cooperative. United States: M and The Prowler, both directed by Joseph Losey before leaving Hollywood because of the blacklist. Warner Bros. production of I Was a Communist for the FBI. The remake of the 1928 film The Racket, starring Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, and Lizabeth Scott; Howard Hughes was involved in the production of both versions. Robert Parrish's debut film The Mob, starring Broderick Crawford as a government agent fighting gangsters on the waterfront.

1952 Argentina: Two films directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen: No abras nunca esa puerta (Don't Ever Open That Door) and Si muero antes de despertar (If I Should Die before I Awake), both based on stories by Cornell Woolrich. Germany: Die Spur Führt nach Berlin (Adventures in Berlin), Franz Cap's crime drama involving counterfeiters. Great Britain: Cosh Boy, Britain's first X-certificate film. Whispering Smith Hits London (Whispering Smith versus Scotland Yard in the United States), starring Richard Carlson, the first in a series of crime films produced in Britain with Hollywood actors in the lead roles as part of an association between Hammer and American producer Robert Lippert. Italy: Processo alla città, directed by Luigi Zampa, involving corruption in southern Italy. United States: Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, starring Robert Ryan as the troubled cop. Phil Karlson's Scandal Sheet, based on the novel The Dark Page by Sam Fuller, and Kansas City Confidential, starring John Payne. The Captive City, the first film to exploit the publicity from the revelations of the Kefauver Committee concerning the infiltration of "the Syndicate" into American municipal life. John Wayne's production Big Jim McLain, involving Communist activities in Hawaii. Richard Fleischer's low-budget crime film The Narrow Margin, set on a train traveling from Chicago to California. The Thief, starring Ray Milland, an anticommunist film with no dialogue.

1953 France: La Môme vert-de-gris, based on the novel by Peter Cheyney, starring Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution. Great Britain: The Flanagan Boy (U.S. title Bad Blonde), starring Hollywood actress Barbara Payton in a Hammer and Lippert adaptation of Max Catto's novel. Face the Music, starring Alex Nicol. United States: Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Graham. I, the Jury, adapted from the novel by Mickey Spillane. Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street, starring Richard Widmark. Man in the Dark, starring Edmond O'Brien, and Second Chance, starring Robert Mitchum—3-D films from Columbia and RKO. The Hitch-Hiker, filmed on location at Lone Pine, California, by Ida Lupino, the only woman director working in Hollywood in the 1950s.

1954 France: Touchez pas au grisbi (Honor among Thieves), starring Jean Gabin, revitalizes the French gangster film. Les diaboliques, Henri-Georges Clouzot's ingenious thriller. Great Britain: The thriller Impulse, starring Arthur Kennedy, directed by American exiled director Cy Endfield. The Good Die Young, a fatalistic crime film featuring a mixture of American and British actors, such as Laurence Harvey, Gloria Grahame, Richard Basehart, Joan Collins, John Ireland, and Stanley Baker. More Hammer and Lippert releases: Five Days (U.S. title Paid to Kill), starring Dane Clark; The House across the Lake (U.S. title Heatwave), starring Alex Nicol; The Stranger Came Home (U.S. title The Unholy Four), starring Paulette Goddard; and Thirty-Six Hours (U.S. title Terror Street), starring Dan Duryea. Joseph Losey's The Sleeping Tiger, featuring Dirk Bogarde. Mexico: Bajo la influencia del miedo, a gangster film directed by Juan Orol. United States: On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando, who also stars as the motorcycle gang leader in The Wild One—a film banned in Great Britain until 1968. Dragnet, Jack Webb's spin-off from his popular radio and television series. Fred MacMurray in Pushover. Rogue Cop, with Robert Taylor. Shield for Murder, starring Edmond O'Brien in the cycle of rogue cop films.

1955 France: The influential caper film Du rififi chez les hommes (Rififi), which resurrects the career of blacklisted American director Jules Dassin. Publication of the first detailed study of film noir: Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton's Panorama du film noir americáin. Great Britain: The Ladykillers, starring Alec Guinness, one of the last films produced by Ealing. Montgomery Tully's The Glass Cage, starring John Ireland in the last production by the partnership of Hammer and Lippert. Ken Hughes's Joe MacBeth, filmed in Great Britain despites its setting in the United States. Spain: El ojo de cristal, based on Cornell Woolrich's short story "Through a Dead Man's Eye." Juan Antonio Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist). United States: The Desperate Hours, Humphrey Bogart's last gangster film. Samuel Goldwyn's production of the Broadway hit musical Guys and Dolls, based on Damon Runyon's stories. House of Bamboo, Samuel Fuller's crime film shot on location in Japan. I Died a Thousand Times, the Warner Bros. remake of the 1941 gangster film High Sierra. Illegal, starring Edward G. Robinson, in Warner's third remake of its 1932 film Mouthpiece. Robert Aldrich's adaptation of the Mickey Spillane novel Kiss Me Deadly, starring Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer.

1956 France: Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur (Bob the Gambler). Great Britain: Roy Ward Baker's adaptation of the Margery Allingham thriller Tiger in the Smoke. House of Secrets, scripted by Hollywood veteran Robert Buckner, a British crime thriller set in Paris starring Michael Craig as a merchant marine officer arrested for counterfeiting. Hollywood actress Faith Domergue as a femme fatale who seduces Canadian-born actor Lee Patterson in Soho Incident. Japan: Mahiru no ankoku, concerning the murder of two elderly people in 1951. Spain: The Spanish gangster film Delincuentes, with French actors Raymond Bussières and Ginette Leclerc. United States: Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, reworking the basic premise of The Asphalt Jungle. The Killer Is Loose, directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Wendell Corey as an escaped convict. Nightmare, Maxwell Shane's remake of his 1947 film Fear in the Night, based on the 1941 Cornell Woolrich novelette And So to Death. Slightly Scarlet, Allan Dwan's adaptation of James M. Cain's novel Love's Lovely Counterfeit, starring John Payne as the ambitious gangster and Rhonda Fleming and Arlene Dahl as the two women in his life, with bold, lurid color cinematography by John Alton. Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, featuring Henry Fonda as a man arrested for a crime he did not commit.

1957 France: Rafles sur la ville (Trap for a Killer), based on the novel by Auguste le Breton. Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'echafaud, involving a love triangle that leads to murder. Germany: Gefäehrdete Mäedchen (Dolls of Vice), directed by Wolfgang Glueck, part of a cycle of German exploitation crime films. Robert Siodmak's Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (The Devil Strikes at Night). Great Britain: Ken Hughes's The Long Haul, featuring Victor Mature. Cy Endfield's Hell Drivers, starring Stanley Baker. American actor John Derek in The Flesh Is Weak, one of the first British films dealing with prostitution. Japan: Gangster film Akatsuki no hijosen (Cordon at Dawn), directed by Kiyoshi Komori. Spain: Distrito quinto. United States: Phil Karlson's The Brothers Rico. My Gun Is Quick, based on Mickey Spillane's novel. Nightfall, an adaptation of the David Goodis novel. James Cagney's only film as a director, Short Cut to Hell, a remake of the 1942 film This Gun for Hire. Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success.

1958 Argentina: El jefe. Germany: Schwarze Nylons, with Peter Van Eyck as a villain involved in drug trafficking and the white-slave trade. Grabenplatz 17/17 Canal Square, about a boy who witnesses the murder of his mother. Das Mädchen Rosemarie, based on the murder of Rosie Nittribitt, a Frankfurt call girl. Great Britain: John Ford's day in the life of a Scotland Yard detective: Gideon's Day starring Jack Hawkins. Seth Holt's Nowhere to Go, starring George Nader as a criminal on the run. Italy: La sfida, based on a real event in Naples in 1955. Japan: Akai hatoba (The Left Hand of Jiro), featuring Japanese star Toshio Masuda as a young man who murders five gangsters. Futeki na otoko (The Lowest Man), directed by Yasuzo Masumura, about a young criminal, played by Hiroshi Kawaguchi, who murders two men before the police kill him. Joôbachi no Ikari (Queen Bee), following two crime gangs in competition for control of a port, one of which is controlled by a woman, played by Naoko Kubo. United States: Don Siegel's Baby Face Nelson, tracing the career of gangster Lester Gillis, played by Mickey Rooney. Dorothy Provine in The Bonnie Parker Story, directed by William Witney. Charles Bronson as a man turned vigilante after his wife is murdered by a gangster in Gang War and as gangster George R. "Machine Gun" Kelly in Roger Corman's Machine Gun Kelly. High School Confidential, starring Russ Tamblyn as an FBI agent who goes undercover to expose drug trafficking in a California high school. Roger Corman's I, Mobster, with Steve Cochran as a criminal who confesses to a Kefauver-like Commission on Crime. Vince Edwards as a contract killer hired to kill a woman in Murder by Contract. Nicholas Ray's gangster film Party Girl, set in 1930s Chicago, starring Robert Taylor as a crippled lawyer. Robert Mitchum as a bootlegger who evades federal agents in the Tennessee hills in Thunder Road. Touch of Evil, directed by Orson Welles, often cited as the last film noir in its classic period.

1959 France: Robert Bresson's low-key drama Pickpocket. La prostitution (The White Slavers), tracing the descent of a young girl (Evelyne Dassas) into prostitution. Germany: Am Tag als der Regen kam, directed by Gert Oswald, depicting street crime in Berlin. Great Britain: A remake of The Hound of the Baskervilles, with Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes and Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville. Robert Siodmak's last film noir, The Rough and the Smooth. Val Guest's police drama Hell Is a City, with Stanley Baker as a cop with marital problems. Sapphire, Basil Dearden's social crime film. Italy: I maglari, Francesco Rosi's drama starring Alberto Sordi as a man who comes into conflict with a gang boss. Japan: Ankokugai no kaoyaku, a gangster film concerning two young men—one a gangster and the other a singer. Guitar o motta wataridori (The Wandering Guitarist), focusing on a young detective in the northern port of Hakodate. Kuromaku wa dareda (Who Is in the Background?), about a master criminal and his counterfeit racket. Shimizu no abarenbo, another youth-oriented crime film involving a radio operator who uncovers a narcotics gang in Tokyo. United States: Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot. Al Capone, starring Rod Steiger and tracing the gangster's career, ending with his arrest for income tax evasion. The F.B.I. Story, Mervyn Le Roy's celebratory film about the work of the bureau, starring James Stewart. Odds against Tomorrow, starring Robert Ryan and Harry Belafonte and based on William P. McGivern's novel, exploring the issue of racism within the format of a caper film. Robert Blake as a neurotic young gangster in Detroit during Prohibition in The Purple Gang. Phil Karlson's The Scarface Mob, the pilot for the long-running television series The Untouchables, starring Robert Stack as Eliot Ness; it was released in theaters outside of the United States. Otto Preminger's courtroom drama Anatomy of Murder, starring James Stewart. Compulsion, based on the thrill killing committed by Leopold and Loeb.

1960 France: Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de soufflé (Breathless), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo as a small-time thief. François Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player), based on the novel by David Goodis. Alain Delon as Patricia Highsmith's amoral criminal Ripley, brought to the screen by director Réne Clément, in Plein Soleil (Purple Noon). British actor Tony Wright as the Irish detective Callaghan in Callaghan remet ça, a French adaptation of the novel by Peter Cheyney. Michel Simon as a hit man in Pierrot la tendresse (Pete the Tender). Phillipe Clay in Touchez pas aux blondes, an adaptation of the book by prolific British-born Australian writer Alan Geoffrey Yates. Germany: Fritz Lang's final film, Die tausend Augen des Dr Mabuse (The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse). Great Britain: Joseph Losey's study of alienation The Criminal, starring Stanley Baker as a doomed gangster. Basil Dearden's popular caper film The League of Gentleman, with Jack Hawkins as a retired army officer turned criminal. John Guillermin's Never Let Go, with Richard Todd as a salesman out for revenge. Italy: Carlo Lizzani's Il gobo. Japan: Toshiro Mifune as a detective who eradicates the criminal control of the Japanese city of Kogin in Ankokugai no taiketsu (The Last Gunfight). Nyotai uzumaki-shima (Girl without Return Tickets), concerning the mistress (played by Yôko Mihara) of a smuggler involved in narcotics and prostitution. Nukiuchi no Ryu (Ryuji the Gun Slinger), with Keiichiro Akagi as a professional killer. Orega jigoku no teijin ashida (Hell's Juggler), featuring Koji Tsuruta as an escaped convict. Shiroi kona no kyofu (The Chase after Opium), following Inspector Sugawa's (Rentaro Mikuni) war on a narcotics organization. Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru (The Bad Sleep Well), Akira Kurosawa's bleak film detailing a man intent on avenging the death of his father. Spain: Han matador a un cadaver (A Corpse Has Been Killed), featuring twin sisters both played by Colette Ripert. United States: Murder Inc., a semidocumentary account of a young couple pursued by hit men. Lewis Milestone's lightweight caper film Ocean's Eleven, with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Peter Lawford. Budd Boetticher's The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, starring Ray Danton as the Prohibition-era gangster in New York. Sam Fuller's Underworld, U.S.A., starring Cliff Robertson as an embittered young man determined to avenge the death of his father.

1961 France: Eddie Constantine in Cause toujours mon lapin, as a ventriloquist falsely accused of murder in an adaptation of Day Keene's Strange Witness; in a parody of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, En pleine bagarre; and as Peter Cheyney's hero Lemmy Caution in Lemmy pour les dames. Du rififi á Tokyo, the third Rififi film. The caper film Le cave se rebiffe. Germany: Das Geheimnis der Gelben Narzissen, an adaptation of an Edgar Wallace story featuring Chinese detective Ling Chu. Great Britain: Herbert Lom as the accountant who brings together various gangs in The Frightened City, with Sean Connery as an Irish crook. Payroll, starring Billie Whitelaw as the vengeful wife of a guard killed during a robbery. Victim, a groundbreaking film involving the murder of a gay man, starring Dirk Bogarde. Japan: The caper movie Hakuchu no buraikan, following a gang of various nationalities planning to rob a U.S. Air Force cash transport. Hana to arashi, shifting the gangster genre to rural areas in Japan. American actors John Bromfield and James Griffith in Morgan Keibu to nazo no otoko, with locations in Arizona and Hong Kong. Spain: Fuga desesperada, about a French escapee framed for murder. United States: The George Raft Story, featuring Ray Danton as George Raft in this fanciful account of Raft's association with gangsters during the Prohibition period. King of the Roaring Twenties: The Story of Arnold Rothstein, tracing the life of gambler and criminal Arnold Rothstein played by David Janssen. Vic Morrow as mobster Arthur "Dutch Schultz" Flegenheimer in Portrait of a Mobster. The second Hollywood filming of William Faulkner's controversial novel Sanctuary, directed by British filmmaker Tony Richardson.

1962 France: Jean-Paul Belmondo as an informer in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le doulos. Eddie Constantine in two popular crime films: L'empire de la nuit and Les femmes d'abord. Jean Gabin's return to the crime genre in Mélodie en sous-sol as a safecracker. Landru, based on the career of serial killer Desiré Landru. Italy: La banda Casaroli, based on a real-life event concerning a gang that controlled Bologna in 1950. Francesco Rosi's study of the Sicilian Mafia, Salvatore Giuliano. Japan: Nagisa Oshima's Taiyô no hakaba (The Sun's Burial), with Masahiko Tsugawa as a gang leader. Kiri no minato no akai hana (Love at the Foggy Harbor), a doomed love affair set in the underworld. Great Britain: Crooks Anonymous, with Leslie Phillips as a petty crook who tries to reform by signing up with a self-help group. Poland: Roman Polanski's Nóz w wodzie (Knife in the Water). Gangsterzy I Filantropi, a crime comedy. United States: John Frankenheimer's film of Richard Condon's novel The Manchurian Candidate. Blake Edwards's Experiment in Terror, with Glenn Ford as an FBI agent pursuing a psychopath.

1963 Brazil: Porto das caixas, based on a murder case in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s. France: La drogue du vice, featuring a blind narcotic boss played by Hans Werner. Maigret voit rouge, with Jean Gabin as Inspector Maigret. Germany: Der Shwarze Koba. Great Britain: The Informers, with Nigel Patrick as a chief inspector who relies on informers. Cairo, another adaptation of the W. R. Burnett novel The Asphalt Jungle, this time set in Egypt with George Sanders and Richard Johnson. The Wrong Arm of the Law, with Peter Sellers as gang leader Pearly Gates. Japan: Tengoku too jigoku (High and Low), Akira Kurosawa's masterly crime film based on a novel by American Ed McBain (Evan Hunter). Kawaita hana, based on the best-selling novel by Shintaro Ishihara. A yakuza investigates a series of murders in Yaju no seishun.

1964 France: Robert Hossein's La mort d'un tueur, with Hossein as an ex-convict who returns to his home in Nice. L'amour à la chaîne, looking at the prostitution racket. Japan: Makkana koi to monogatari, a noir film involving a cop seduced by a beautiful woman. Mexico: A gangster restores order after returning to Mexico from Chicago in El gangster. United States: A House Is Not a Home, which did not seek censorship approval before its release despite complaints from the Catholic Legion of Decency. Don Siegel's remake of Robert Siodmak's The Killers. Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth in their final film together, The Money Trap. The Naked Kiss, Sam Fuller's drama of a former prostitute trying to escape her past. Topkapi, Jules Dassin's comic caper film involving the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul. Seven Days in May, John Frankenheimer's political thriller with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas.

1965 France: Compartiment tueurs (The Sleeping Car Murders), a mystery set on the Marseilles–Paris train. Germany: Schüsse aus dem Geigenkasten, the first in a series of eight crime films featuring Jerry Cotton. Great Britain: The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, an adaptation of John Le Carré's novel with Richard Burton as the hapless agent. Traitor's Gate, Freddie Francis's thriller based on a story by Edgar Wallace. Japan: Hideo Sekigawa's Himo (The Procurer), a mixture of social criticism, sex, and crime. Shigehiro Ozawa's Kanto Yakuzamono (The Gambler), a period yakuza film. Spain: Despues del gran robo, a comedy caper film. United States: Arthur Penn's Mickey One, starring Warren Beauty as an entertainer sought by the mob. Once a Thief (Les Tueurs de San Francisco), an American-French coproduction that launches French actor Alain Delon in the United States. Nick Adams as Young Dillinger. The caper film Assault on a Queen, with Frank Sinatra.

1966 France: Jean-Pierre Melville's Le deuxième souffle, with Lino Ventura as an aging crook. Germany: Mord und Totschlag, Volker Schlöndorff's noir film concerning a woman who kills her ex-lover. Italy: Operazione San Gennaro, a comedy gangster film with Nino Manfredi. Carlo Lizzani's Svegliati e uccidi, with Lisa Gastoni as a singer who marries a thief. United States: The Moving Target, based on Ross Macdonald's first Lew Archer novel, sparks a revival in the hard-boiled private-eye film.

1967 France: Le samourai, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. American blacklisted director John Berry's À tout casser, starring Eddie Constantine. Un choix d'assassins, based on William P. McGivern's novel A Choice of Assassins. La pacha, starring Jean Gabin as a policeman out for revenge. Le soleil des voyous, featuring Gabin and Robert Stack in a tale of a robbery gone wrong. Great Britain: Robbery, Peter Yates's caper film based on the real-life Great Train Robbery. Hong Kong: Yingxiong Bense, featuring Xie Xian as a burglar trying to go straight. Japan: Arappoinowa gomendaze, with Koji Tsuruta as a professional killer. Aru koroshiya, based on the novel Zenya by Shinji Fujihara, with Raizo Ichikawa as a pilot turned hit man. Koroshi no rakuin, directed by Seijun Suzuki. Abashiri bangaichi fubuki no torso, part of the long-running Abashiri series starring Ken Takakura. Netherlands: To Grab the Ring, with Ben Carruthers as a young man persecuted by a gangster. United States: Arthur Penn's box-office hit and gangster film Bonnie and Clyde, with Warren Beauty and Faye Dunaway. In the Heat of the Night, with Sidney Poitier as a big-city detective who investigates a murder in the Mississippi town of Sparta; two sequels followed. John Boorman's Point Blank, based on the novel The Hunter by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake)—an early neo-noir film starring Lee Marvin. Roger Corman's The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, featuring Jason Robards as Al Capone. Richard Brooks's true-crime film In Cold Blood.

1968 Argentina: Interpol's fight against drug trafficking in Humo de marihuana. Denmark: Olsen-Banden. France: Caper film Le clan des Siciliens. François Truffaut's La mariée était en noir, based on Cornell Woolrich's 1940 novel The Bride Wore Black. Claude Chabrol's film of infidelity and murder La femme infidèle. Great Britain: Basil Dearden's comic caper film Only When I Larf, with David Hemmings and Richard Attenborough. David Greene's study of police corruption The Strange Affair. Italy: Carlo Lizzano's Banditi a Milano, based on the real-life Cavellaro gang that operated in Milan. Il giorno della divetta, featuring Lee J. Cobb as a Mafia boss opposed by Franco Nero's police captain. Japan: Sochu tobaku, a key yakuza film with Koji Tsuruta and Tomisaburo Wakayama. Daikanbu-burai, based on Goro Fujita's novel featuring his reluctant yakuza played by Tetsuya Watari. Spain: They Came to Rob Las Vegas, a caper film with Gary Lockwood and Elke Sommer. United States: Richard Widmark as a cop seeking a killer in New York in Don Siegel's Madigan. Frank Sinatra as a cop investigating the murder of a homosexual man in The Detective. Clint Eastwood as an Arizona cop searching the streets of New York for an escaped killer in Coogan's Bluff. Bullitt, with Steve McQueen as an obsessive cop, and McQueen again in Norman Jewison's caper film The Thomas Crown Affair. Richard Fleischer's The Boston Strangler, tracing the career of serial killer Albert DeSalvo.

1969 Brazil: O anjo nascenu, concerning a gangster who believes an angel will wipe away his crimes. France: La siréne du Mississippi (Mississippi Mermaid), François Truffaut's adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's Waltz into Darkness. Claude Chabrol's revenge film Que la bête meure. Germany: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's low-key gangster film Liebe ist Käelter als der Tod. Great Britain: The caper film The Italian Job. Crooks and Coronets, a comic crime film starring Telly Savalas and Edith Evans. Italy: John Cassavetes, Brit Eckland, and Peter Falk in Gli intoccabili (Machine Gun McCain), concerning four Mafia bosses who commission a robbery in Las Vegas. Turkey: The Hungry Wolves, a tale of a brigand pursued by the police. United States: James Garner as Philip Marlowe in Marlowe, an updated version of Raymond Chandler's novel The Little Sister.

1970 Brazil: Matou a familia e foi ao cinema, inspired by Albert Camus's 1942 novel L'étranger. France: Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo as two ambitious gangsters in Borsalino. Jean-Pierre Melville's Le cercle rouge (The Red Circle), with Delon as a doomed criminal who forms an alliance with an escapee. Claude Chabrol's Le boucher, with Jean Yanne as a tormented killer. Un conde, featuring Michel Bouquet as a brutal police inspector. Great Britain: Performance, codirected by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, starring James Fox as a gangster who seeks refuge in Mick Jagger's house. Stanley Baker, cast against type as the repressed bank manager, in the caper film Perfect Friday. Italy: Bernardo Bertolucci's political thriller Il conformista (The Conformist). Japan: Yasuzo Masumura's clever crime film Shibire kurage. Spain: Un aller simple, José Giovanni's adaptation of Edward Henry Helseth's novel The Chair for Martin Rome (previously filmed as Cry of the City in 1948 by Robert Siodmak). United States: Bloody Mama, Roger Corman's gangster film starring Shelley Winters as "Ma" Barker, with Robert De Niro as one of her criminal sons. Chester Himes's Harlem detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnston are brought to the screen in Cotton Comes to Harlem. Crime novelist Elmore Leonard scripts, from his own novel, The Moonshine War with Richard Widmark.

1971 France: Claude Chabrol's Juste avant la nuit (Just before Nightfall). Papa les petits barteaux . . . , a comedy involving gangsters. Great Britain: Get Carter, with Michael Caine as the hit man who seeks revenge when his brother is murdered in Newcastle. Richard Burton as a gay gangster in Villain. Italy: Sacco e Vanzetti, based on the real-life arrest and execution of two men in Massachusetts. United States: Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood (followed by four sequels). Shaft, a key film in the cycle of "blaxploitation" crime films, based on the 1970 novel by Ernest Tidyman. The French Connection, with Gene Hackman as James "Popeye" Doyle, based on a 1961 arrest involving $32 million worth of heroin. Jane Fonda as a call girl under threat in Klute. Heist, a caper film, with extensive location filming in Hamburg. The Anderson Tapes, Sidney Lumet's variation on the caper film with Sean Connery. Robert Aldrich's The Grissom Gang, an American remake of the 1948 British film No Orchids for Miss Blandish, based on the novel by James Hadley Chase.

1972 Argentina: La Mafia, a story of internal battles in the Mafia in the 1930s. France: Jean-Pierre Melville's last film Un Flic, starring Alain Delon as a cop and Richard Crenna as a criminal. Great Britain: Sidney Lumet's The Offence, a downbeat police drama with Sean Connery as a troubled policeman. Alfred Hitchcock's return to Britain for a suspense thriller involving a serial killer in Frenzy. Italy: Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair), a political thriller. The Valachi Papers, concerning revelations against the Mafia. Japan: Kanto hizakura ikka, a yakuza film with Junko Fuji. United States: The Godfather, a huge critical and commercial success (followed by two sequels). The Getaway, director Sam Peckinpah's adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1959 novel. Prime Cut, Michael Ritchie's gangster film set in Kansas. Martin Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha, with David Carradine and Barbara Hershey as a couple who robs trains in Arkansas in the 1930s. Cool Breeze, an African-American version of The Asphalt Jungle. Michael Winner's The Mechanic, with Charles Bronson as a hit man and Jan-Michael Vincent as his ambitious apprentice. Slaughter, a violent film with Jim Brown as an ex-Vietnam soldier seeking revenge. Superfly, with Ron O'Neal as a drug pusher. The publication of Paul Schrader's highly influential Notes on Film Noir.

1973 Brazil: A Rainha Diaba, concerning a gay mobster who controls crime in Rio de Janeiro. France: Alain Delon trying to retire from the Mafia in Tony Arzenta. L'affaire Dominici, starring Jean Gabin in his last major performance as a man accused of mass murder. Claude Lelouch's La bonne année, a downbeat crime film told in flashback, with Lino Ventura as a man just released from prison. L'horloger de Saint-Paul, Bertrand Tavernier's debut film. Italy: Lucky Luciano, tracing the activities of this real-life gangster after his deportation from the United States. Japan: Jingi naki tatakai, a box-office success that initiates a new series of gangster films. United States: Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese's first major crime film, starring Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. Black Caesar, Larry Cohen's blaxploitation film with Fred Williamson. The Outfit, based on Donald Westlake's novel, with bank robber Robert Duvall taking on Robert Ryan's syndicate. Robert Altman's radical reworking of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. Phil Karlson's violent Walking Tall, starring Joe Don Baker as Buford Pusser. Sidney Lumet's Serpico, chronicling high-level police corruption, starring Al Pacino as the street cop under threat from his colleagues, and the similar Busting, with Elliot Gould and Robert Blake as Los Angeles detectives. Don Siegel's Charlie Varrick, starring Walter Matthau as the likable criminal in New Mexico threatened by the Mafia. Cleopatra Jones, with Tamara Dobson. Warren Oates as John Dillinger in John Milius's version of that gangster's story. Robert Mitchum as the small-time crook battling for survival in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Robert Redford and Paul Newman as con men in The Sting. Badlands, Terence Malik's re-creation of an incident in Nebraska in 1958 in which Charles Starkweather murdered the family of his 13-year-old girlfriend and then went on the run with her.

1974 Brazil: O amuleto de Ogum, a gangster film concerning a young boy and the amulet given by his mother to protect him. France: Borsalino and Co., a sequel to the 1970s gangster film Borsolino. Great Britain: A big-budget screen version of Agatha Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express; the success of this film revives interest in Christie's fiction. Poland: Zapis zbrodni, depicting teenage crime. United States: Roman Polanski's Chinatown, with Jack Nicholson as a private detective in Los Angeles in 1937. Two paranoid thrillers: Francis Ford Coppola's low-key The Conversation, with Gene Hackman, and The Parallax View, with Warren Beatty. Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us, a remake of the 1948 Nicholas Ray film They Live by Night. The first Death Wish film, starring Charles Bronson (followed by four sequels). Coppola's The Godfather Part II. McQ, starring John Wayne as a cop, set in Seattle. The Elmore Leonard–scripted Mr. Majestyk, starring Charles Bronson as a melon farmer out for revenge. Steven Spielberg's first theatrical film, the chase thriller Sugarland Express, with Goldie Hawn and William Atherton as a husband and wife trying to prevent the adoption of their son. The first, and best, of three versions of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three with Walter Matthau trying to prevent a disaster in the New York underground rail network. Robert Mitchum goes to Japan to help a friend in Sydney Pollack's crime thriller The Yakuza.

1975 Australia: In The Man from Hong Kong, Wang Yu travels to Sydney to extradite a Chinese drug dealer. France: Adieu, poulet, based on an actual killing during an election campaign. Flic Story, produced by and starring Alain Delon as a police inspector. Great Britain: Filmed in Los Angeles for ITC, a British company, the third version of Raymond Chandler's novel Farewell, My Lovely, starring Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe. India: Deewar, starring Amitabh Bachchan as a policeman forced to pursue his younger brother. United States: Arthur Penn's Night Moves, with Gene Hackman as a detective caught up in a murder in Florida. Roger Corman's production of Capone, with Ben Gazzara as the gangster. Hustle, Robert Aldrich's downbeat cop film with Burt Reynolds. Sam Peckinpah's Killer Elite, starring James Caan. Tony Curtis as the Jewish gangster Louis Lepke Buchalter in Lepke. Jan-Michael Vincent cleaning up a small town in Vigilante Force.

1976 Brazil: O dia das profissionais, a thriller involving diamond smugglers. Denmark: Gangsterens laerling, about drug trafficking in Copenhagen. France: Le gang, Alain Delon's follow-up to Flic Story. Germany: Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend), an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game by director Wim Wenders. Great Britain: Alan Parker's gangster film Bugsy Malone, set in 1929 New York and performed by children (including Jodie Foster). Spain: Pascal Duarte, concerning a serial killer. United States: John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, reworking the basic premise of Howard Hawks's western Rio Bravo. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, starring Robert De Niro as a mentally disturbed cabbie. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, with Ben Gazzara directed by John Cassavetes. Burt Kennedy's adaptation of Jim Thompson's confronting novel The Killer inside Me, starring Stacy Keach as a psychotic rural sheriff (remade in 2010). Family Plot, Alfred Hitchcock's last film.

1977 France: Mort d'un pourri, an Alain Delon–produced political thriller. Violette Nozière, Claude Chabrol's film that begins in Paris in 1933 and involves a willful woman. Great Britain: Michael Apted's The Squeeze, with Stacy Keach as an ex-cop trying to rescue his ex-wife and daughter after they have been kidnapped. Italy: Io ho paura, featuring Gian Maria Volonte who is appointed bodyguard to a judge. Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of Dr. Oyenusi, about a thief who operated in Lagos in the early 1970s. Spain: Camada negra, a political thriller involving murder and attempted rape; the film was attacked by Franco supporters. United States: Robert Benton's reworking of the hard-boiled private-eye film, with Art Carney as an aging private detective investigating the murder of his ex-partner (Howard Duff). Robert Aldrich's The Choirboys. Gene Hackman hired to kill a politician in The Domino Principle. James Toback's crime drama Fingers, involving a concert pianist. Ted Kotcheff's comedy thriller Fun with Dick and Jane, starring Jane Fonda and George Segal as a middle-class couple who turns to crime. Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, starring Broderick Crawford as Hoover.

1978 Argentina: La parte del león, an homage to the Hollywood thriller. Great Britain: The period caper film The Great Train Robbery, with Sean Connery. United States: Walter Hill's existential thriller The Driver, starring Ryan O'Neal. Capricorn One, a political thriller involving the Apollo moon landings. William Friedkin's re-creation of a real-life robbery in The Brinks Job.

1979 Australia: Bruce Beresford's brutal caper film Money Movers. France: La femme flic, featuring Miou-Miou as a cop investigating the murder of a young girl in a small town in northern France. Great Britain: The Long Good Friday, with Bob Hoskins as a British gangster under threat from the Irish Republican Army. Hong Kong: Jiafa, reworking aspects of The Godfather. Japan: Fukushû suru wa ware ni ari (Vengeance Is Mine), Shôhei Imamura's study of a murderer. Philippines: Jaguar, a crime thriller directed by Lino Brocka. Spain: El crimen de cuenca, a political crime film concerning the arrest and torture of two shepherds in 1913. United States: Lewis Teague's study of the woman associated with John Dillinger's death in Chicago in The Lady in Red. Harold Becker's The Onion Field, featuring James Woods as a criminal who kidnaps two Los Angeles policemen.

1980 Brazil: Ato do violence, a re-creation of an actual event in which a man strangles a woman and mutilates her body. France: Atlantic City, Louis Malle's elegiac gangster film featuring Burt Lancaster as a small-time criminal. Germany: Engel aus Eisen, a crime drama set during the blockade of Berlin during the late 1940s. Hong Kong: Diyi leizing weixian, depicting the repercussions after three men acquire a parcel of drugs. New Zealand: John Laing's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, based on a true story involving a miscarriage of justice. Philippines: Angela Markado, Lino Brocka's rape-revenge thriller. Spain: La verdad sobre el caso Savolta, a political crime thriller set in Barcelona between 1917 and 1923. Deprisa deprisa, involving a teenage delinquent. United States: Cruising, with Al Pacino as a cop who goes undercover to catch a serial killer in the gay community. Gloria, directed by John Cassavetes, featuring his wife Gena Rowlands as the former mistress of a gangster pursued by local hoods. Richard Gere as a male prostitute caught up in murder in Paul Schrader's American Gigolo.

1981 Australia: Phillip Noyce's Heatwave, reworking the real-life events of crooked property developers and murder in Sydney's inner suburbs; The Killing of Angel Street covers the same events. Richard Franklin's thriller Roadgames, with Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis stalked by a killer across the Australian Outback. France: Jacques Beineix's dreamlike noir film Diva. Alain Delon directing Pour la peau d'un flic for his own production company while also starring as an ex-cop turned private eye framed for murder. Japan: Gaki teikoku, concerning a vendetta. New Zealand: Bad Blood, British director Mike Newell's account of the 1941 killing of police in New Zealand by farmer Stanley Graham. Spain: Putapela, about the struggle between rival gangs. United States: Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat, a success that revives interest in film noir. Bob Rafelson's remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange as the lovers. Prince of the City, Sidney Lumet's study of police corruption. Burt Reynolds directing and starring (as a cop) in a tale of vigilante justice in Sharky's Machine. Michael Mann's Thief, with James Caan as a professional thief. Ulu Grosbard's True Confessions, based on John Gregory Dunne's novel concerning two men—a priest, played by Robert De Niro, and his brother, a policeman played by Robert Duvall. Sydney Pollack's Absence of Malice, with Paul Newman; Newman also stars as a street cop in Fort Apache, the Bronx.

1982 Australia: Squizzy Taylor, a biography of the notorious Melbourne criminal. France: La balance, France's most commercially successful local production in 1982. François Truffaut's final film, Vivement dimanche!, based on the novel The Long Saturday Night by American crime author Charles Williams. Cap Canaille, directed by Juliet Berto, one of the few French female directors. L'Indie, an adaptation of Roger Borniche's, novel. Netherlands: De stilte rond Christine M, Marleen Gorris's polemical film concerning three women who kill a shop manager. Poland: Vabank, a tale of revenge set in Warsaw in the 1930s. United States: Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's blend of science fiction and film noir, set in Los Angeles in 2019. Hammett, based on the novel by Joe Gores, the first American film directed by Wim Wenders.

1983 Australia: Goodbye Paradise, with Ray Barrett as a disillusioned investigator. Brazil: A proxima vitima, involving an investigation into the killing of a number of prostitutes. France: La lune dans le caniveau, a big-budget adaptation of the David Goodis novel The Moon in the Gutter. Alain Delon directing and starring in Le battant, playing an ex-convict involved in the pursuit of stolen diamonds. Mexico: Motel, a film noir set in a rundown motel. Nocaut, a noir film about a boxer told in flashbacks. United States: Brian De Palma's Scarface, with Al Pacino.

1984 Colombia: Cóndores no entierran todos los días, tracing the rise and fall of a petty criminal. Denmark: Lars Von Trier's noir film Forbrydelsens element. France: Les ripoux, a comedy crime film featuring Philippe Noiret as a crooked cop. Great Britain: Stephen Frear's The Hit, about two assassins, played by John Hurt and Tim Roth, sent to Spain. Hong Kong: Sheng gang qi bing (Long Arm of the Law), depicting gangsters as victims of economic circumstances. Japan: Shonben raidda, with teenagers confronting gangsters. New Zealand: Vincent Ward's moody, downbeat drama Vigil. United States: The Coen brothers' Texas-based crime film Blood Simple. Against All Odds, a remake of the 1947 film noir Out of the Past. Clint Eastwood as a troubled cop in Tightrope. Francis Ford Coppola's re-creation of the famous nightclub populated by gangsters in The Cotton Club. Italian director Sergio Leone's gangster masterpiece Once upon a Time in America, released in the United States in a heavily edited version.

1985 France: Gerard Depardieu as a cop in love with a crook (Sophie Marceau) in Police. Great Britain: Dance with a Stranger, Mike Newell's film tracing the tragic life of Ruth Ellis, who fired six bullets into her lover, racing car driver David Blakely. Norway: Blackout, with Heinrik Steele as a private eye. Spain: Tras el cristal, involving revenge against a Nazi child torturer. United States: F/X, featuring Australian actor Bryan Brown as a special-effects man caught up in murder. Prizzi's Honor, John Huston's black comedy involving gangsters, with Jack Nicholson as a hit man. Australian director Peter Weir's first American film Witness, with a detective (Harrison Ford) visiting an Amish community as part of his investigation into a murder.

1986 France: Claude Chabrol's Inspecteur Lavardin, featuring Jean Poiret as a police inspector who investigates a murder in a small coastal town. Descente aux enfers, based on the novel The Wounded and the Slain by David Goodis. Great Britain: Mona Lisa, Neil Jordan's touching tale of a small-time crook in love with a call girl. Hong Kong: Yingxiong bense (A Better Tomorrow), John Woo's gangster film starring Chow Yun-Fat and Ti Lung as Triad friends in the first in a new subgenre known as "heroic bloodshed." Mexico: Los ases de contrabando, an action film involving drug traffickers. Los motivos de luz, Felipe Cazals's controversial film based on the real-life killing of four children. United States: The first appearance of Hannibal Lecter in Michael Mann's Manhunter. David Lynch's Blue Velvet. John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, based on the confessions of a convicted serial killer. Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher as a serial killer traveling the rural highways.

1987 Australia: Murder and sexual harassment in a small Outback town in Shame. Brazil: A dama do cine Shanghai involving a femme fatale who solicits a real estate agent to kill her husband. Hong Kong: Long hu feng yun (City on Fire), with Chow Yun-Fat as an undercover cop investigating jewel thieves. Japan: Marusa no onna, concerning the tax investigation of a gangster. United States: Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, based on the 1959–62 television series, with Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness. Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon, with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as maverick cops. Dutch director Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop, starring Peter Weller as a cyborg cop in Detroit. Alan Parker's neo-noir film Angel Heart, with Mickey Rourke as a private eye. Fatal Attraction, with Michael Douglas as the husband terrorized by Glenn Close.

1988 Australia: Fred Schepisi's Evil Angels, based on the true-life killing of a baby by a dingo near Ayers Rock. Phillip Noyce's thriller Dead Calm, with Nicole Kidman as a woman threatened by a mysterious stranger on a stranded yacht. Grievous Bodily Harm, with Colin Friels as an investigative reporter on the trail of a murderer. Great Britain: A Fish Called Wanda, directed by Ealing veteran Charles Crichton, starring John Cleese. Stormy Monday, Mike Figgis's low-key crime film, with Tommy Lee Jones as an American gangster trying to take control of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Poland: Krotki film o zabijaniu, a bleak film concerning the murder of a taxi driver. United States: Cat Chaser, scripted by Elmore Leonard and directed by Abel Ferrara. Colors, directed by Dennis Hopper. The first Die Hard film, with Bruce Willis as a Los Angeles cop threatened by gangsters led by Alan Rickman. Married to the Mob, Jonathan Demme's parody of family life within the Mafia, starring Michele Pfeiffer as the widow of a mob boss. Mississippi Burning, Alan Parker's account of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. The first Naked Gun, a parody of cop films, starring Leslie Nielsen. The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris's documentary about an innocent man arrested for the murder of a police officer in Dallas in 1976. The Accused, starring Jodie Foster as a woman who demands her day in court after being raped.

1989 Great Britain: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Peter Greenaway's mixture of sex, gluttony, food, and murder. Hong Kong: Du shen (God of Gamblers), featuring Chow Yun-Fat as a gambler with amnesia. Dip huet seung hung (The Killer), directed by John Woo with Chow Yun-Fat as a hit man who forms a bond with a cop, played by Danny Lee. Japan: Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki (Violent Cop), directed by actor Kitano Takeshi, revitalizes the yakuza film. Portugal: Nuvem, similar to Graham Greene's Brighton Rock. United States: Tim Burton's large-budget revival of the Batman franchise, with Michael Keaton as Batman and Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Black Rain, Ridley Scott's police thriller with Michael Douglas as the jaded New York cop assigned to take a Japanese criminal back to Osaka. Kill Me Again, John Dahl's clever reworking of classic film noir, with Val Kilmer as the private eye and Joanne Whalley as a femme fatale.

1990 Finland: I Hired a Contract Killer, with Jean-Pierre Léaud as the man who seeks a hit man to kill him before he changes his mind. France: La femme Nikita, involving a female assassin, directed by Luc Besson. Docteur Petiot, about a French doctor who murdered Jews during World War II. Great Britain: Peter Medak's The Krays, concerning real-life London gangsters. Italy: Dimenticare Palermo, with John Belushi, following the consequences when a New York mayor decides to decriminalize the drug trade. South Korea: Kwok-taek Im's noir film Janggunui adeul (followed by two sequels). Spain: Amantes (Lovers), Vincente Aranda's crime film with political undertones. United States: Blue Steel, Kathryn Bigelow's morally complex study of a female cop with a gun fetish, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. Desperate Hours, Michael Cimino's remake of the 1955 Humphrey Bogart film about three criminals who take over a suburban house. Dick Tracy, the Warren Beatty–directed adaptation of Chester Gould's comic strip. Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part III. Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, with Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, and Joe Pesci. Two adaptations of Jim Thompson novels: The Grifters, by British director Stephen Frears, and James Foley's After Dark, My Sweet. Internal Affairs, involving police and moral corruption, directed by British director Mike Figgis. King of New York, Abel Ferrara's film with Christopher Walken as a gangster determined to wipe out his opposition after his release from prison. Miami Blues, an adaptation of Charles Willeford's novel involving an unorthodox cop (Fred Ward) on the trail of a ruthless killer (Alec Baldwin). Miller's Crossing, a gangster film from the Coen brothers. State of Grace, in which Sean Penn returns to the tenement section of New York. Dennis Hopper's neo-noir film The Hot Spot. Presumed Innocent, based on the novel by Scott Turow, with Harrison Ford as a deputy prosecutor implicated in the murder of his mistress.

1991 Japan: Tenkawa densetsu satsujin jiken, a mystery film set in the traditional Noh theater schools. Spain: Todo por la pasta and Beltenebros. United States: Billy Bathgate, an adaptation of E. L. Doctorow's novel of a young man who becomes involved with gangster Dutch Schultz in 1930s New York. The Silence of the Lambs, a remake of 1986's Manhunter (followed by a sequel and a prequel). Quentin Tarantino's caper film Reservoir Dogs. Boyz 'n the Hood, a semiautobiographical film about three friends in South Central Los Angeles. Warren Beatty as the doomed gangster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, the man who pioneered the development of casinos in Las Vegas, in Bugsy. Mario Peebles's New Jack City, with Wesley Snipes as a drug baron pursued by cops, Ice T, and Judd Nelson. Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break, with Keanu Reeves as the FBI agent who infiltrates Patrick Swayze's gang. A Rage in Harlem, based on characters created by Chester Himes.

1992 France: L'ombre du doute, concerning sexual abuse within a family. Hong Kong: Xia dao gao fei, the last collaboration between Chow Yun-Fat and director Ringo Lam, with Chow as a violent loner. Lashou shentam (Hard Boiled), with Chow again in a John Woo film as a cop who forms an alliance with a Triad hit man played by Tony Leung. Iceland: Sodoma Reykjavik, a crime comedy about two rival smuggling gangs. Japan: Minbo no onna minbo, Juzo Itami's critique of Japanese gangsters. New Zealand: Crush, Canadian-born director Alison Maclean's drama involving madness, lust, and death. United States: A trio of noir-based crime films: Paul Verhoeven's erotic thriller Basic Instinct; Carl Franklin's One False Move, involving a cop, criminals, and a mother determined to see her son in a small community; and Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, with Harvey Keitel. American Me, a film detailing the rise and fall of a Hispanic gang in Los Angeles, directed by and starring Edward James Olmos. Batman Returns, Tim Burton's continuation of the franchise, with Michael Keaton as Batman and Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman. Night and the City, Irwin Winkler's reworking of the 1950 Jules Dassin film, relocating the story from London to New York with Robert De Niro as a small-time crook. Michael Apted's Thunderheart, inspired by real events on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

1993 Australia: Anthony LaPaglia as a cop who needs money to save his marriage in The Custodian. Estonia: Finnish director Ilkka Järvi-Laturi's Tallinn pimeduses, a caper film. Japan: Sonatine, Takeshi Kitano's gangster film about a successful yakuza boss in Tokyo. Waga jinsei saiaku no toki, filmed in black and white, concerning the efforts of a private eye to assist a Taiwanese immigrant. United States: A Bronx Tale, a Robert De Niro–directed film based on an off-Broadway play by Chazz Palminteri with Palminteri as an aging Mafia leader. Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way, with Al Pacino as an ex-convict trying, unsuccessfully, to go straight. The Firm, the first adaptation of the legal thrillers by author John Grisham. Rising Sun, an adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel, with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes as cops investigating the murder of a prostitute in the boardroom of a Japanese company. True Romance, a Quentin Tarantino–scripted lovers-on-the-run film. Peter Medak's bleak noir film Romeo Is Bleeding. Michael Douglas as a mentally unstable unemployed man in Falling Down. Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery, starring Allen and Diane Keaton as the married couple who suspect that their neighbor has killed his wife.

1994 Great Britain: Shallow Grave, Danny Boyle's noir film involving three friends who discover a body and a suitcase full of money in their house. New Zealand: Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson's re-creation of the tragic events when two schoolgirls murdered the mother of one of the girls. United States: Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, coscripted by Quentin Tarantino. Pulp Fiction, Tarantino's crime film featuring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson as a pair of philosophical hit men. Woody Allen's Bullets over Broadway. John Dahl's The Last Seduction, with Linda Fiorentino as a femme fatale.

1995 France/Vietnam: Cyclo, tracing the development of a young man's criminal career. Hong Kong: Duo lo tian shi (Fallen Angels), Kar Wai Wong's presentation of two stories involving hit men in Hong Kong. India: Bandit Queen, Shekar Kapoor's controversial film based on the true story of Phoolan Devi, India's female bandit warrior. United States: Michael Mann's Heat, starring Al Pacino as a cop who pursues criminal Robert De Niro after a major robbery. Devil in a Blue Dress, with Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins in Carl Franklin's adaptation of the Walter Mosley novel. Se7en, David Fincher's police film with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt as cops trying to stop a series of killings predicated on the seven deadly sins. Steven Soderbergh's Underneath, reworking the 1948 Robert Siodmak film Criss Cross. Martin Scorsese's Casino, with Robert De Niro as a gambler sent by the mob to Las Vegas to run a casino in the 1970s. Bound, a feminist noir film with Gina Gershon as a criminal who enlists the aid of Jennifer Tilly to rob a mobster. Kiss of Death, Barbet Schroeder's reworking of the 1947 noir film, with Nicholas Cage and David Caruso. The Usual Suspects, Bryan Singer's convoluted heist film featuring Kevin Spacey as a master criminal.

1996 Australia: Back of Beyond, a low-budget crime film involving a local garage mechanic and a group of thieves who infiltrate a small town after a successful heist. Denmark: Nicolas Winding Refn's commercially successful noir film Pusher, which is followed by two sequels. United States: Fargo, a police procedural from the Coen brothers. Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard's novel about a criminal with dreams of making it in Hollywood brought to the screen with John Travolta. Walter Hill's violent Last Man Standing, with Bruce Willis as the loner who plays one gang off against another in a small Texas town. Heaven's Prisoners, Phil Joanou's adaptation of the James Lee Burke novel, with Alec Baldwin as Burke's cop Dave Robicheaux.

1997 Australia: Kiss or Kill, Bill Bennett's crime film involving a series of murders in the Outback. Japan: Kitano Takeshi's Hana-bi, with Takeshi as a retired policeman. Norway: Erik Skjoldbjærg's Insomnia (remade in Hollywood in 2002). Spain: Pedro Almodóvar's Carne trémula, based on a Ruth Rendell novel. United States: Donnie Brasco, a factually based gangster film with Johnny Depp and Al Pacino. An adaptation of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential. Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard, featuring Pam Grier as a flight attendant running drugs for her boyfriend. The life of Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson featured in Hoodlum, with Laurence Fishburne as the gangster who operated in Harlem in the early 1930s.

1998 Australia: Alex Proyas's Dark City, a mixture of science fiction and film noir, with Rufus Sewell as a suspected serial killer with telekinetic powers. Germany: Tom Tykwer's frenetic thriller Lola rennt (Run Lola Run). Great Britain: The return of director Mike Hodges to the world of film noir with Croupier, starring Clive Owen as the writer turned croupier.

1999 Australia: Heath Ledger as a courier for a gangster, played by Bryan Brown, in Two Hands. United States: The first Matrix film, written and directed by the Wachowski brothers and starring Keanu Reeves as a computer hacker caught in an illusionary world (followed by two sequels in 2002 and 2003).

2000 Argentina: Fabián Bielinsky's Nueve reinas (Nine Queens), a clever thriller about a con man who teams up with an experienced crook in Buenos Aires. Australia: Andrew Dominik's Chopper, with Eric Bana as the Australian criminal Mark "Chopper" Read. France: Claude Chabrol's Merci pour le chocolat (Nightcap). Great Britain: Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast as a retired criminal living in Spain who cannot resist attempts to lure him back to his former life. United States: Guy Pearce as an amnesiac avenging his wife's murder in Christopher Nolan's reverse-narrative film Memento.

2001 United States: David Lynch's mixture of murder, sex, and fantasy Mulholland Drive, starring Naomi Watts. The Coen brothers' black-and-white film noir The Man Who Wasn't There, starring Billy Bob Thornton as a dentist caught up in murder. Denzel Washington as a corrupt narcotics cop in Training Day.

2002 Australia: Scott Robert's caper film The Hard Word, with Guy Pearce and Rachel Griffiths. Brazil: Cidade de Deus (City of God), Fernando Meirelles's bleak portrait of violence in the favelas (slums) of Rio de Janeiro, based on Paulo Lins's novel. Hong Kong: Mou gaan dou (Infernal Affairs), depicting parallel infiltration of the police and a criminal gang; the film broke domestic box-office records in Hong Kong and was remade in Hollywood as The Departed. Italy: Liliana Cavani's Il gioco di Ripley (Ripley's Game), an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel, starring John Malkovich as her amoral protagonist. United States: Erik Skjoldbjærg's 1997 Norwegian thriller Insomnia remade in Hollywood with Al Pacino as a Los Angeles detective who goes to Alaska to seek a killer, played by Robin Williams. Steven Spielberg's mixture of science fiction and film noir in Minority Report. The Bourne Identity, starring Matt Damon as the CIA assassin with amnesia (followed by two sequels).

2003 Great Britain: I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, Mike Hodge's noir film with Clive Owen seeking revenge for the death of his brother. South Korea: Oldboy, the second part of Chan-wook Park's crime trilogy. United States: Clint Eastwood's adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel Mystic River, tracing the aftermath of a tragic incident in Boston.

2004 France: 36 Quai des Orfèvres, Olivier Marchal's tough crime film involving revenge, passion, and police corruption. Italy: Paolo Sorrentino's Le conseguenze dell'amore (The Consequences of Love). Netherlands: De dominee, a gangster film based on the career of real-life drug baron Klaas Bruinsma. New Zealand: Brad McGann's adaptation of the Maurice Gee novel In My Father's Den, concerning the repercussions of a man's return to his small town. United States: Tom Cruise as a hit man in Michael Mann's Collateral. The Manchurian Candidate, an updating of the 1962 film.

2005 Argentina: El aura (The Aura), concerning a taxidermist involved in a failed robbery. France: The 1978 American offbeat thriller Fingers reworked by Jacques Audiard as De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté (The Beat My Heart Skipped). United States: Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, based on Frank Miller's graphic stories. Christopher Nolan's revitalization of the Batman franchise, Batman Begins, with Christian Bale as the troubled hero. David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, starring Viggo Mortensen as the small-town hero with a dark past. Brick, Rian Johnson's film noir involving California high school students.

2006 Finland: Laitakaupungin valot (Lights in the Dusk). South Korea: Biyeolhan geori, a gangster film. United States: The Departed, Martin Scorsese's adaptation of the Hong Kong film Mou gaan dou (Infernal Affairs), shifting the setting to Boston. Miami Vice, Michael Mann's screen adaptation of his 1980s television series. Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia, based on the novel by James Ellroy involving the infamous killing of a starlet in Los Angeles in 1947.

2007 France: MR73, Olivier Marchal's crime film set in Marseilles. Hong Kong: Sun taam, a police procedural film. Italy: La ragazza del lago, an award-winning police procedural. Mexico: Fuera del cielo, a bleak revenge story set in a 24-hour period. United States: Ridley Scott's American Gangster, with Denzel Washington as Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas and Russell Crowe as the cop who pursues him. No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers' Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel.

2008 Australia: Nash Edgerton's reworking of a familiar noir plot in The Square. France: Truands, a gangster film. Germany: Chiko, a gangster film set in Hamburg's tough Dulsberg district. Great Britain: The Bank Job, Roger Donaldson's version of the 1971 heist that created unease within the British Establishment due to the contents of the private deposit boxes stolen from the bank. In Bruges, playwright-turned-director Martin McDonagh's black comedy involving two hit men sent to the Belgian tourist city of Bruges. South Korea: Chugyeogja, a violent crime film tracing the attempt of an ex-cop turned pimp trying to rescue one of his prostitutes from a serial killer. United States: The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's second Batman film, featuring Heath Ledger's bravura performance as the Joker. An adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel The Spirit. Wanted, featuring James McAvoy as a young man sought by a society of assassins.

2009 Great Britain: Sherlock Holmes, Guy Ritchie's comedy-mystery with Robert Downey as Holmes and Jude Law as Doctor Watson. South Korea: Madeo (Mother) with Hye-ja Kim as the strong-willed mother who tries to extricate her son from a murder charge. Sweden: Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), the first film based on the Millennium series by novelist Stieg Larsson, featuring a journalist (Michael Nyqvist) and a hacker (Noomi Rapace) investigating the disappearance of a girl 40 years earlier (Nyqvist and Rapace returned for two sequels: Flickan som lekte med elden [The Girl Who Played with Fire] and Luftslottet som sprängdes [The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest]). United States: Michael Mann's Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as gangster John Dillinger pursued by G-man Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). Kevin Macdonald's screen adaptation of the British miniseries State of Play, starring Russell Crowe as an investigative reporter. Duplicity, starring Clive Owen and Julia Roberts as lovers and enemies in a tale of corporate greed. In the Electric Mist, French director Bertrand Tavernier's adaptation of the James Lee Burke novel, starring Tommy Lee Jones as Burke's jaded policeman Dave Robicheaux.

2010 Australia: David Michôd's crime film Animal Kingdom, with Jackie Weaver as the matriarch of a Melbourne crime family; the film won eight awards at the 2010 Australian Film Institute Awards. China: Di renjie (Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame), director Tsui Hark's mystery set in 689 during the Tang dynasty with popular Chinese detective Dee (Andy Lark) recalled from prison by the empress regent Wu Zetian to investigate officials who suddenly burst into flame. France: The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski's paranoid thriller, scripted by Robert Harris based on his novel The Ghost, with Ewan McGregor as the hapless ghostwriter for a disgraced politician. Great Britain: Brighton Rock, the second filming of Graham Greene's novel concerning a young gangster who marries a waitress so she cannot testify against him. United States: Martin Campbell's Edge of Darkness, a Hollywood remake of a 1985 BBC miniseries, with Mel Gibson as a Boston detective seeking the men who killed his daughter. British director Michael Winterbottom's The Killer inside Me, the second film version of Jim Thompson's 1952 novel concerning a psychotic rural sheriff (Casey Affleck). The Town, starring and directed by Ben Affleck, a heist film based on a group of thieves living in the Charlestown area of Boston.
Introduction

What Is a Crime Film?

What is a crime film? The critically acclaimed Chinese production Feng sheng (2009) would not normally be considered a crime film. The film is set in Nanking in 1942, and the plot involves the interrogation and torture of five Chinese nationals by the Japanese military. One of the suspects is the leader of the resistance movement. Feng sheng would more commonly be considered a wartime spy film—which it is. But generic films are rarely pure, and Feng sheng is also a crime film—or, at least, a spy thriller that adapts the essential idea underpinning one of Agatha Christie's most famous novels, And Then There Were None. The key attributes of Christie's novel involve a small number of people brought together in a remote setting, whereupon they die, one by one, until the surprise ending where the killer is exposed. This plot has been used many times in fiction and film, directly and indirectly. There are, for example, five authorized film adaptations of Christie's novel (in Hollywood, Russian, and British productions) and countless unofficial adaptations.

In Feng sheng, screenwriters Kuo-fu Chen and Jialu Zhang (based on the novel by Jia Mai), who also codirected the film, rework Christie's formula by changing the setting and characterizations while retaining her basic premise. Five Chinese suspects are taken by the Japanese to a remote setting in the mountains where, after interrogation and torture, they die, one by one, until the final "surprise" reveals the identity of the leader of the resistance movement. The film's narrative, as per the conventions of classical detective fiction, is an ingenious mixture of obscure clues (including songs), red herrings, and "false" characters. Each change, however, is undertaken for ideological reasons. But it remains a crime film.

Crime films featured strongly at the very beginning of cinema with titles such as A Career in Crime (1900), Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1901), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1903), The Bold Bank Robbery (1904), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1905), and The Lonely Villa (1909). This introduction will provide an overview of the genre and highlight the difficulties in providing a definitive definition. In the crime genre, as with all film genres, narrative and formal conventions and culture are paramount.

In Crime Movies: An Illustrated History, Carlos Clarens distinguishes between the "crime film" and the "thriller."1 Crime films, he argues, emphasize broad, socially symbolic characters such as the Criminal, the Law, and Society. The thriller, on the other hand, is more concerned with violence or a disturbance in the private sphere, such as the emphasis on the personal in film noir. Colin McArthur, in Underworld USA, adopts a different perspective and considers the crime genre in terms of a spectrum, with the gangster film at one end and the thriller at the other and many variations in between.2

Phil Hardy, in his introduction to The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: The Gangster Film, refines Clarens's model. He retains the broad division between the public and the private sphere and argues that the gangster genre, for example, is "devoted to public crime by organized groups of people, to mobsters and G-Men, to rogue cops and corrupt city officials, and to capers." Hardy maintains that the "activities depicted in gangster films take place in public—on the streets, you might say—those of noir films take place in private."3

Steve Neale, in Genre and Hollywood, is more specific. He puts forward three subgenres—the detective film, the gangster film, and the suspense thriller—although he admits that this division is largely academic, as crime films rarely fit into neat categories and "often overlap and cross-fertilize in individual cycles and films."4 Hence, a film such as Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) is part police procedural, part gangster film, and all film noir. Neale's categorization depends on the focus within the story. If the story emphasizes the criminal, it is a gangster film; if the focus is on the agent of law and order, it is a detective film; and if it is on the victim, it is a thriller.

Detective Films

Neale highlights the role of detective fiction in the late 18th and 19th centuries in establishing the characters, plots, and milieu of the crime film.5 Crime fiction emerged out of the social and political changes that accompanied the industrial revolution of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Newgate Calendar; or, Malefactors Bloody Register . . . from . . . 1700 to the Present Time (1773), a catalog of "real-life" crimes, was an important milestone, despite the fact that it did not have a detective. This was rectified in William Godwin's Things as They Are; or, Adventures of Caleb Williams (1774) with its amateur sleuth, the secretary of a wealthy squire, who uncovers evidence that his employer is a murderer. In 1809, Eugène François Vidocq convinced officials in France that plainclothes agents, especially those with criminal records, would be more effective than uniformed officers in catching villains. After his resignation from the police, Vidocq published his four-volume Mémoires de Vidocq (1828–29). Later he established the first private detective agency, the Bureau des Renseignements.

A crucial figure in the development of crime fiction was Edgar Allan Poe. Poe introduced the term ratiocination, an essential characteristic of the classical form of detective fiction. Essentially, it emphasizes a cerebral process where the detective logically and systematically sorts through the facts of the case to reach the correct solution—a solution not reached by others. The emphasis on ratiocination and puzzle-centered stories formed one strand of the American and European detective film. It was the most significant form of crime film until 1940, rivaled only by those crime films that emphasized action, adventure, and romance as much as the crime puzzle. This subbranch emerged out of the dime novel, which began as a series of paper-covered books called Beadle's Dime Novels in 1860, and pulp literature, which emerged later in the 19th century. The first weekly detective hero, Nick Carter, appeared in 1891, and the French were the first to produce a series of films based on his exploits.

Later, in the early 1920s, the hard-boiled private eye and the hard-boiled thriller first appeared in Black Mask and other pulp magazines, and this style introduced a radically different crime formula that strongly influenced the cinema in the 1940s. Neale argues that studies of the detective film have focused almost exclusively on this hard-boiled tradition.6 Little attention has been paid to the classical detective films. Yet this type of detective film has a long and prolific history. Sherlock Holmes appeared at the beginning of the cinema in 1901 (Sherlock Holmes Baffled), and S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance first appeared on the screen in The Canary Murder Case in 1929, followed by a lengthy series of films featuring Vance. Nero Wolfe's debut came in Meet Nero Wolfe in 1936, and Herman Cyril McNeile's Bulldog Drummond appeared in both British and Hollywood films from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Amateur sleuths also appeared on screen in both the United States and Great Britain. Stuart Palmer's schoolteacher turned detective Hildegarde Withers featured in a series of films in the 1930s beginning with The Penguin Pool Murder in 1932. Warner Bros. developed its own series based on Nancy Drew, a teenage amateur detective created by Edward L. Stratemeyer. Erle Stanley Gardner's lawyer Perry Mason was adapted to the screen by the same studio for a series of films in the 1930s. Earl Derr Biggers's Honolulu detective Charlie Chan enjoyed a huge following throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, while John Marquand's Japanese adventurer Mr. Moto flourished until anti-Japanese sentiment—and Peter Lorre's refusal to continue the series—brought it to an end in 1939. RKO embarked on a series of films based on Leslie Charteris's adventurer the Saint in 1938, and the studio continued to film the series in both Hollywood and London until it discovered it could continue the series in the guise of the Falcon without the need to pay royalties to Charteris. Louis Joseph Vance's Lone Wolf, a character similar to E. W. Hornung's gentleman thief Raffles, first appeared on screen in 1917 courtesy of Lewis J. Selznick, with Bert Lytell in the role; films based on this character continued until 1949. France's "Prince of Thieves," Arsène Lupin, the creation of Maurice Leblanc, first appeared in 1907 in the novel Arsène Lupin: Gentleman-Cambrioleur; film adaptations in Europe and Hollywood began in 1917 and continued until MGM's 1932 production Arsène Lupin with John Barrymore as the gentleman thief and Lionel Barrymore as the prefect of police.

This mixture of classical detectives (Philo Vance, Charlie Chan, Nancy Drew, Hildegarde Withers, Nero Wolfe, and others) and adventurers (the Saint, the Lone Wolf, Arséne Lupin) dominated the screen until 1938. The release of Arsène Lupin Returns and The Lone Wolf in Paris virtually signaled the end of the classical detective and the gentleman adventurers in major films. Thereafter, these characters would be consigned to low-budget films produced by the poverty-row studios such as PRC until these studios went out of business in the late 1940s. The 1940s were characterized by the dominance of the hard-boiled detective and the hard-boiled thriller (film noir).

While the financial success of the lavish 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, with Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot, revived interest in the classical detective in Hollywood, Great Britain, and France, this revival did not last long, and fitful attempts to revive characters such as Bulldog Drummond have not been successful. Big-budget presentations of The Saint (1997) and Le mystère de la chambre jaune (2003), a locked-room mystery based on the 1907 novel by French journalist Gaston Leroux, did not attract large audiences. Miss Jane Marple enjoyed a brief revival in Britain in the 1960s, due to the expertise of Margaret Rutherford, but attempts to revive Charlie Chan, Nick Carter, and Hercule Poirot on the big screen failed. Instead, Miss Marple, Poirot, Holmes, and other classical detectives found their home on television.

Gangster Films

In the 1960s and 1970s, the gangster film, along with the western, provided the basis for a serious revaluation of the Hollywood genre film. Two decades earlier, Robert Warshow's 1948 essay "The Gangster as Tragic Hero" began this process. However, Warshow and subsequent writers based their conclusions on a very small sample of gangster films, such as Little Caesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1932), and Scarface (1932). In a circular argument these films, with their rise-and-fall narrative pattern, defined the gangster genre for many years. Jack Shadoian's 1977 study Dream and Dead Ends extended the sample and the time period by tracing the genre from the early 1930s to the early 1970s. He, like Warshow, attributes shifts in the gangster film to the changes in American society, "from the world of the Depression in the early 1930s to the world of corporations and anonymous bureaucracy in the 1950s, the 1960s, and early 1970s."7

Their studies neglected, as Neale argues, less well-known cycles such as the "Chinatown gangster films of the late 1920s and early 1930s and the Rubber racketeer films of the early 1940s."8 Rural gangsters such as John Dillinger (Dillinger [1945] and Public Enemies [2009]), female gangsters (The Bonnie Parker Story [1958], Bloody Mama [1970]), and the lovers-turned-criminals-on-the-run films (You Only Live Once [1937], They Live by Night [1949], Gun Crazy [1950], Thieves Like Us [1974]) are also ignored except when they involve well-known directors like Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray, and Joseph H. Lewis. There are other cycles such as gangster-as-cop films, where such actors as James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson moved from playing gangsters to playing law enforcement officers. There is also the "Cain-and-Abel" variation, a product of the censorship policy in the 1930s, where strong social figures (such as lawyers or priests) provided a virtuous contrast to the gangsters that emerged from the same social setting. Other cycles include the syndicate film, the hit-man film, the caper film, and the Mafia film (such as The Godfather [1972], Goodfellas [1990], and Donnie Brasco [1997]). Thus, as Neale concludes, the history of the genre should be seen as being "marked more by abrupt and intermittent transformations and short-lived cycles than by smoothly evolving continuities."9

Suspense Thrillers

One filmmaker dominated the suspense thriller—Alfred Hitchcock—and his influence extended to many film cultures. Hitchcock transformed this type of film into a morally complex, visually sophisticated art form. Charles Derry, in his book The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock, identifies six types of suspense thrillers.10 The first of these is the political thriller—films that focus on conspiracies to kill politicians and other eminent people. Examples of this category are Hitchcock's 1934 British film The Man Who Knew Too Much and his 1956 Hollywood remake, as well as films from other directors such as The Tall Target (1951), Suddenly (1954), Seven Days in May (1964), The Day of the Jackal (1971) and the 1997 remake The Jackal, The Domino Principle (1977), Blow Out (1981), In the Line of Fire (1993), and Shooter (2007).

Another category involves dual identities, as in The Running Man (1963), or twin brothers or sisters, one good and one evil, as in Among the Living (1941) and The Dark Mirror (1946). "Psychotraumatic" thrillers, the third category, are based on the negative effect of a traumatic incident. This is a favorite plot used in film noir, where a character suffers from amnesia in such films as Street of Chance (1942) or with maladjusted victims of military conflicts such as The Fallen Sparrow (1943), The High Wall (1947), The Crooked Way (1949), and the British film The Night Has Eyes (1942). Both versions of The Manchurian Candidate (1962 and 2004) follow the same plot, although they utilize different wars.

The next category concerns itself with moral confrontation. These films focus on the similarities between a "good" character and a "bad" character, as found in many of Hitchcock's films, especially Stranger on a Train (1951). This motif is also evident in a number of Clint Eastwood's films, especially Tightrope (1984). The Joseph H. Lewis suspense thriller So Dark the Night (1946) combines both attributes in one character, a French policeman. Derry's fifth category is the innocent-on-the-run thriller, a Hitchcock specialty in such films as The 39 Steps (1935), Saboteur (1942), and Frenzy (1972).

The most popular type of suspense thriller, in terms of Derry's categories, is the thriller of murderous passions. This is the world of film noir and one of its favorite narrative paradigms: an adulterous spouse, her lover, and an unfortunate husband. This paradigm was developed in novels by James M. Cain in the 1930s, especially Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. The first film version of the latter, unauthorized, was produced in Italy in 1943 by director Luchino Visconti under the title Ossessione; authorized versions were filmed in Hollywood in 1946 and 1981. Double Indemnity was released in 1944.

There are, however, many film variations on Cain's formula. In 1984, for example, the Coen brothers produced their own idiosyncratic story of murder, greed, and adultery with Blood Simple. In 2009, Chinese director Zhang Yimou, the director of Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and the House of Flying Daggers (2004) as well as the spectacular opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, produced a Chinese version of Blood Simple under the title San qiang pai'an jingqi. This film, which was released overseas as A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, demonstrates how the same plot can be interpreted differently in different cultures. Both films, in different ways, present a view that the universe is intrinsically absurd. Zhang, who regards the 1984 film as one of his favorites, transferred the setting from the Texas badlands to a noodle shop in Gansu province. While retaining the basic narrative ingredients of greed, adultery, and murder, Zhang's rendering is highly theatrical, unlike the low-key film produced by the Coens. Everything in San qiang pai'an jingqi is larger than life—the acting, the broad slapstick humor, the bright costumes, and the stunning visuals. While the film was popular with Chinese audiences, grossing 261 million yuan (approximately $38 million) in the first six weeks after its release, the critical reaction outside China was mixed, and the box office was not strong.

The 1940s: Nihilism, Moral Ambiguity, and Film Noir

Most attempts to define the crime genre result in various kinds of taxonomies. Another way of approaching this issue is to draw a broad, flexible, imaginary line between those films produced prior to the beginning of World War II and those produced after 1940 or 1941. In simple terms, the post-1940 period is the terrain of film noir, a shift in sensibilities and outlook that permeated every type of crime film as well as other genres (such as the western). In the gangster film, for example, High Sierra (released on 4 January 1941) signaled a change. Similar films, such as The Big Shot (1942) and The Gangster (1947), followed.

A similar shift took place in the suspense thriller. Stranger on the Third Floor (released on 1 September 1940), with its emphasis on psychological disturbance and vulnerability, shares many thematic similarities with High Sierra.11 The shift in the detective film is even more clear-cut with the October 1941 release of The Maltese Falcon. This film, according to Alain Silver and James Ursini, marked the "official" beginning of the noir movement.12

What is the basic difference between pre-1940 and post-1940 crime film? This is best explained by Dashiell Hammett scholar Steven Marcus, the George Delacorte Professor Emeritus in Humanities at Columbia University, who first saw John Huston's The Maltese Falcon when he was 12 years old. The impression was a lasting one:

What was striking about the event was that it was one of the first encounters I can consciously recall with the experience of moral ambiguity. Here was this detective you were supposed to like—and did like—behaving and speaking in peculiar and unexpected ways. He acted up to the cops, partly for real, partly as a ruse. He connived with crooks, for his own ends and perhaps even for some of theirs. He slept with his partner's wife, fell in love with a lady crook, and then refused to save her from the police, even though he could have. Which side was he on? Was he on any side apart from his own? And which or what side was that? The experience was not only morally ambiguous; it was morally complex and enigmatic as well.13

The experience of 12-year-old Marcus in the United States was shared, independently, by a group of French writers and critics in 1945 and 1946. These critics were in a unique place to make a judgment. They had been denied American films during the German occupation of France in World War II from May 1940 to December 1944. After the Germans left, an influx of Hollywood films produced in the period from 1940 to 1945 was released. Critics such as Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier argued that films such as The Maltese Falcon, Murder, My Sweet (1944), Laura (1944), and Double Indemnity (1944) represented a profound ideological and formal shift in the Hollywood cinema—although this change was, for Chartier, not a positive one:

"She kisses him so that he'll kill for her." Emblazoned on the movie posters, over a blood stain, is that description of Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. The same line would work just as well for Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet. It would hold true again for The Postman Always Rings Twice, which is currently a big hit in the U.S. We understood why the Hays Office had previously forbidden film adaptations of James M. Cain's two novels from which Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice are drawn. It is harder to understand, given this censor's moral posture, why this interdiction was lifted, as it's hard to imagine story lines with a more pessimistic or disgusted point of view regarding human behavior.14

Frank, on the other hand, was more positive. He argued that while Double Indemnity, Laura, The Maltese Falcon, and Murder, My Sweet would, in the past, "belong to a class that we used to call the crime film," there was now a need to refine this broad category into terms such as "criminal adventures or, better yet, criminal psychology."15 He also refers to these films as "noir films."16 This shift in the crime genre, Frank argues, is structural and ideological. Films such as The Maltese Falcon and Murder, My Sweet had nothing in common with the pre-1940 crime films. Now, in the mid-1940s, the nihilistic worldview of Dashiell Hammett permeated the genre as the "preeminence of S. S. Van Dine has ceded to that of Dashiell Hammett."17 Frank continues:

Since Poe, since Gaboriau, since Conan Doyle, we've become familiar with the formula for detective stories: an unsolved crime, some suspects, and in the end the discovery of the guilty party through the diligence of an experienced observer. This formula had long been perfected: the detective novel (and film) have substituted for the Sunday crossword puzzles and become overshadowed by boring repetition. I don't know of any enlightened devotees of the genre who could not nowadays plumb the mystery from the first fifty pages or the first two reels.18

He concludes by pointing out that the "essential question is no longer "who-done-it?" but "how does the protagonist act?"19

Émigrés and Expressionism

Visually, the 1940s crime film looked different. This was due, in part, to an increase in the use of chiaroscuro lighting to intensify the darker, often psychological, emphasis in the 1940s films. This type of lighting involves a greater emphasis on low-key and frontal lighting setups and an absence of fill lights, producing the familiar high-contrast look of the 1940s. There were large areas of darkness on the screen punctuated by patches of extreme brightness. This shift was due, in part, to techniques introduced by German expressionism that found their way into the crime genre via the 1930s horror films. The result was a hybrid crime film, such as Stranger on the Third Floor. The aim was to convey a dislocated world by fragmenting screen space through unstable lines and surfaces. This was achieved by changes to set design and (off-center) camera compositions.

The influx of European, mainly German, émigrés played a major part in this transformation. After Adolf Hitler took control of Germany, many filmmakers left the country, among them John Brahm, André De Toth, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Billy Wilder. Alfred Hitchcock also arrived in Hollywood in 1939 from Great Britain, but he was not, of course, fleeing Nazism. Nor was Jacques Tourneur—he wanted to establish a film career independent of his famous father, French director Maurice Tourneur. And it was not only film directors arriving in Hollywood—so did cinematographers such as John Alton; actors such as Peter Lorre, Ida Lupino, and Peggy Cummins; composers such as Miklós Rózsa; and producers such as Joan Harrison.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Blacklist

In 1946, the Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress, and President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, ordered that government employees must take a loyalty oath. In 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act expelled communists from the unions, and the Waldorf Declaration, announced in December following a meeting of studio film executives at the Waldorf Hotel in New York, declared the blacklisting of communist, left-wing, and other "troublesome" filmmakers. This declaration was accompanied by a sustained congressional attack, orchestrated by the Republican-controlled Congress, on the Left in Hollywood. In 1947 and 1951, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) conducted public hearings in Washington. The Communist victory in China in 1949 and the beginning of the Korean War intensified this tense political climate, which had a profound effect on the crime genre.

Some directors—for example, Jules Dassin, Cy Endfield, and Joseph Losey—left the United States for Europe and Great Britain. Others remained in the United States only to watch their careers die unless they were prepared to provide names of "fellow travelers" to HUAC. Lee J. Cobb, Sterling Hayden, Elia Kazan, Larry Parks, and Robert Rossen took this option. Edward Dmytryk testified after spending time in jail. Others—such as Howard Duff, John Garfield, and Edward G. Robinson—were victims of the graylist, an insidious campaign of gossip and innuendo that denied employment to many filmmakers.

The immediate effect was to eliminate such films as Crossfire (1947) that assimilated overt social issues into the genre. These films were replaced by a short-lived cycle of anticommunist crime films like the Howard Hughes production I Married a Communist (1949). Losey was one of 13 contract directors employed by RKO, which was owned by Hughes, who refused to direct this film. The caper film also came into existence as a reaction to these political attacks on Hollywood.

The Caper Film

By 1949, many members of the Hollywood community, including Dmytryk, Huston, Kazan, Losey, Ray, Rossen, and Abraham Polonsky, realized that their dream of a tolerant liberal democracy was not feasible. James Naremore argues that some of these people, notably Huston and Dassin, "responded to the threat of political repression by creating what amounted to a subgenre."20 The caper film, an offshoot of the gangster film, shifted sympathy toward the criminals and away from the forces of law and order. As Naremore argues, after 1947, "many leftist filmmakers were treated as outlaws, and it is not surprising that they made some of their best pictures from the point of view of criminals."21

Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) was the first fully formed caper film, and it gave each of the criminals involved in the robbery his own story. The Asphalt Jungle was based on a three-part narrative structure that was copied by subsequent caper films. The first phase, involving the recruitment of the criminals, is followed by a rehearsal and the robbery before the final phase, the death or capture of the group due to fate or human weakness or both. Dassin's 1955 French film Rififi followed the same pattern with an extended (30-minute) robbery sequence that is presented without sound—no music or dialogue.

Censorship and the Crime Film

Frank Krutnik attributes the dearth of hard-boiled films in the 1930s to the "strengthening of the Hays Code self-regulatory form of censorship in 1933 and 1934 which required the studios to 'play it safe' in matters of sexual content and violence."22 However, censorship was not merely a matter of moving from repression to liberalization, as the cinema was more liberal with regard to censorship prior to 1934 than it was during the period from 1934 to the 1950s. This can be demonstrated by comparing the first (1931) and third versions (1941) of The Maltese Falcon. The 1931 film shows the femme fatale, Miss Wonderly, sleeping in Sam Spade's bed after they have had sex together. While she is sleeping, he leaves to search her apartment. Later in the film, Spade forces Wonderly to take off her clothes in a hotel room to ascertain whether she has secreted a $1,000 note given to Spade by the villain Casper Gutman. Both scenes are missing from the 1941 film.

Censorship also affected the production of gangster films. The popularity of films such as Little Caesar (1930) and The Public Enemy (1931) attracted the attention of the state censorship boards. Dr. James Wingate, the head of the influential Motion Picture Division of the State of New York Education Department, objected to Little Caesar: "Children . . . see a gangster riding around in a Rolls-Royce and living in luxury, and even though some gangster gets him in the end, the child unconsciously forms the idea that he will be smarter and will get away with it."23 Consequently, Wingate demanded extensive cuts to the film, and the Pennsylvania state censors followed suit.

The studios, on the other hand, desperate for revenue in the years of the Depression, increased their production of gangster films. In 1931, Fox released Quick Millions, Paramount allocated a large budget to City Streets, MGM released The Secret Six, and Warner Bros. had Beer and Blood in production. The latter film was released as The Public Enemy, the most popular gangster film of this period. It provoked protests from many church and community groups, including Daughters of the American Revolution. Hence, the gangster film was banned. Only Howard Hughes continued to fight the censors with his gangster epic Scarface (1932).

Beyond Hollywood

France

The French serial Fantômas (1913) was the first crime film masterpiece. It was based on monthly stories featuring the supercriminal Fantômas. Louis Feuillade's next crime film, Les Vampires (1915), was a 10-part serial. In this film, the Vampires are a criminal gang controlled by a woman, Irma Vep (Musidora). Feuillade went on to make more crime serials, including La nouvelle mission de Judex (1917), Tih Minh (1918), and Barrabas (1919).

French poetic realism, a term that was first used in 1933 to describe urban-based crime films featuring working-class or lower-middle-class characters in doom-laden stories, emerged in France the early 1930s. This strand of doomed romanticism has never entirely disappeared from the French cinema. These films also prefigured film-noir Hollywood in the 1940s. An important creative partnership in the development of this cycle was scriptwriter Jacques Prévert and director Marcel Carné, who made seven films, including Quai des brumes (1938) and Le jour se lève (1939).

The morally complex, sometimes perverse, stories from French author Georges Simenon were important to the genre. Adaptations of his stories provided continuous material, beginning in 1932 with Jean Renoir's La nuit du carrefour, Julien Duvivier's La tête d'un home, and Jean Tarride's Le chien jaune. A recurring theme in the 1930s involved dangers emanating from sexual desire as manifested through the presence of the femme fatale. An influential film in this regard was Renoir's second sound film, La chiene, in 1931—a film so controversial it was not shown in the United States until 1975. A sanitized Hollywood version, Scarlet Street, directed by Fritz Lang and featuring Edward G. Robinson as the pliable husband, Joan Bennett as the prostitute, and Dan Duryea as the pimp, was released in 1945.

The French gangster film Pépé le Moko (1937), directed by Duvivier with Jean Gabin as the gangster Pépé, is a key film that consolidated the actor's status in France and cemented his image as the archetypal doomed antihero. It was remade in Hollywood the following year as Algiers (1939), with Charles Boyer as the Parisian jewel thief, and as a musical in 1948. The French gangster, as presented by Gabin in films such as Pépé le Moko, La belle équipe (1936), Guele d'amour (1937), La bandera (1935), Les bas-fonds (1936), Quai des brumes, and Le jour se lève, differed from the Hollywood model. The French films presented a vulnerable gangster, a trait that did not appear in Hollywood films until the 1940s, beginning with High Sierra.

The German occupation of France interrupted the development of the genre. Then, in the 1950s, there was a shift from the prewar patterns of downtrodden working-class criminals to more affluent gangsters living in luxurious apartments and wearing tailored suits, in films such as Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur (1956). The French New Wave directors in the early 1960s, especially Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut, borrowed heavily from American sources. There was also an overt political strand in the early 1970s with such films as L'attentat (1972) and Chabrol's Nada (1974).

One of France's biggest box-office successes was Le clan des Siciliens (1968, released overseas as The Sicilian Clan), but Borsalino, released in 1970, surpassed it; based on Eugène Saccomano's book, this flashy, lighthearted buddy movie was dependent on the charismatic star power of Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Corrupt cops, or sometimes just troubled cops, featured in the 1970s and 1980s in such films as Un condé (1970), Max et les ferrailleurs (1971), and Police Python 357 (1976). The apotheosis of this cycle was Philippe Noiret as a psychotic cop who kills without any sense of guilt in Coup de torchon (1981). Aside from the highly stylized films from director Jacques Beineix, such as Diva (1981) and La lune dans le carniveau (1983), the French crime film retained its noir-based themes, characterizations, and style with such films as Les rivières pourpres (2000); Sur mes lèvres (2001); Irréversible (2002); 36 quai des Orfèvres (2004); Feux rouges (2004), based on the novel by Simenon; De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté (2005); and MR 73 (2008).

Germany

The German crime film, unlike those of Hollywood, France, and Great Britain, is not characterized by a great tradition of gangster or detective films. Instead, there has been a sustained interest in the macabre and the perverse. The first major cycle was the Strassenfilm, or street film, a series of stylized, urban-based crime films released between 1923 and 1930. The cycle began with Karl Grune's Die Strasse (1923), a cycle that prefigured many of the themes that appear in film noir. The most influential film in this cycle was Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel (1930), which elevated the career of Marlene Dietrich as the femme fatale Lola Lola.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the German film industry adapted stories by British writer Edgar Wallace. Five were produced between 1927 and 1934 before the Nazis terminated the production of crime films; production resumed in 1959, with 32 film adaptations in the next decade. These later films, mainly police procedurals set in Great Britain, began with Der Frosch mit der Maske (1959).

Between 1965 and 1969, a series of eight films were based on FBI agent Jerry Cotton, played by American actor George Nader. Cotton, a favorite literary figure in Germany since 1954, first appeared in Schüsse aus dem Geigenasten (1965) and Mordnacht in Manhattan (1965), directed by Harald Reinl. In 2010, Cyrill Boss and Philipp Stennert directed a new version, entitled Jerry Cotton, with Christian Tranitz in the title role.

The 1960s marked the appearance of German exploitation films that assimilated sex and nudity with crime. These included the St Pauli series directed by Rolf Olsen, such as Der Arzt von St Pauli (1968) and Der Pfarrer von St Pauli (1970). In 1972, Olsen directed the violent caper film Blutiger Freitag (released overseas as Bloody Friday).

The production of crime films in the 1920s and early 1930s concerning psychologically aberrant characters, including Fritz Lang's M (1931), ended when the Nazis assumed control. This resulted in directors such as Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, John Brahm, and Robert Siodmak, together with such actors as Peter Lorre, leaving Germany. Lorre returned to Germany after the war to direct and star in Die Verlorene (1951). Siodmak, too, returned for Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (1957), based on the actual case of Bruno Luedke (Mario Adorf), who murdered more than 50 women between 1928 and his arrest in 1943. Lang left Hollywood and made his final film in Germany, the production Die tausend Augen des Mabuse (1960), a fantasy-thriller with anti-Nazi sentiments. And Brahm also returned for a series of crime films, including Schwarzer Kies (1961).

Directors Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders reworked American neo-noir in the 1970s and 1980s as the means of providing a critique of German society, especially the social dislocation that followed postwar economic changes, the American influence, and apathy toward atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. Mainstream crime films in recent years include the commercially successful Lola rennt (1998, released overseas as Run, Lola, Run); directed by Tom Tykwer, this high-concept film, starring Franka Potente as Lola, presents three different endings. Potente also starred in Anatomie (2000, released overseas as Anatomy), in which she played Munich medical student Paula Henning, who accepts a place at the prestigious University of Heidelberg Medical School, where everything is not what it seems. Anatomie was followed in 2003 by Anatomie 2. The German penchant for the macabre continued with Tannöd (2009, released overseas as The Murder Farm), based on an actual event in 1922 when six people were slaughtered at a remote Bavarian farm about 40 miles north of Munich.

Great Britain

The crime film has a long history in the British film industry. In 1912, the French Éclair film company filmed eight Sherlock Holmes films in Great Britain starring Georges Treville as Holmes. In 1922, the American company Goldwyn filmed Sherlock Holmes with John Barrymore as Holmes, Roland Young as Doctor Watson, and Gustav von Seyffertitz as Professor Moriaty. American companies filming in Britain, or financing British films with American stars, was common practice throughout the history of the industry.

Later, in the 1930s, a fine series of Sherlock Holmes movies were produced in Britain starring Arthur Wontner as Holmes and Ian Fleming as Watson. The Sleeping Cardinal (1931) was the first and, with a different title (Sherlock Holmes's Fatal Hour), it won the New York Cinema Award as the best mystery film of the year. A different, more sensational, side of the British crime film emerged from macabre adaptations of the stories of Edgar Wallace, and more than 50 films were produced from his work. A more prestigious series of crime films, beginning in the mid-1920s and continuing throughout the 1930s, came from director Alfred Hitchcock, including The Lodger (1926), Blackmail (1929), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Young and Innocent (1937), and The Lady Vanishes (1938).

In the late 1930s, the British crime film, like its Hollywood counterpart, began to move away from the themes and characterizations of the 1920s and 1930s toward a more fatalistic, bleak view of human nature with films such as The Green Cockatoo (1937), They Drive by Night (1938), and On the Night of the Fire (1939). This shift was temporarily halted during the early years of World War II, except for a few films such as The Night Has Eyes (1942). However, the end of the war and the immediate postwar period saw a vigorous resumption of this cycle, beginning with Lance Comfort's Great Day (1945) and followed by Wanted for Murder (1946), The Upturned Glass (1947), The October Man (1947), Mine Own Executioner (1947), Dear Murderer (1947), They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), Daybreak (1948), Brighton Rock (1948), The Small Back Room (1949), The Third Man (1949), and Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950).

Throughout the 1950s, the British crime film was relegated to the B-movie category, often produced in conjunction with American independent producers such as Robert L. Lippert. The industry was energized by a small influx of talented blacklisted American directors, including Cy Endfield and Joseph Losey. It was also sustained by a cycle of expert crime films from such local genre directors as Val Guest, Lance Comfort, and Ken Hughes. Thereafter, the British crime film careened between periodic peaks and lows that characterized the industry as a whole, as production was generally reliant on foreign, mostly American, funding for films; examples include The Strange Affair (1968), Get Carter (1971), and The Offence (1973).

Later, in the post-1990 period, there was a revival, with films such as Shallow Grave (1995), Face (1997), Sexy Beast (2000), and Mike Hodges's exemplary reworking of classic noir themes involving alienation in Croupier (1998) and I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2003). The gangster film, however, has fared well in Britain, with films such as The Long Good Friday (1980), The Hit (1981), Mona Lisa (1987), Stormy Monday (1987), Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1999), Essex Boys (2000), Sexy Beast (2000), Snatch (2001), Gangster No. 1 (2001), and In Bruges (2008).

Hong Kong

Violence is central to the Hong Kong cinema, where, since the end of World War II, Triad gangs have controlled extortion, gambling, prostitution, and drugs. After the comic-book violence of Bruce Lee's kung fu films, the industry reinvented itself in the mid-1980s with action-based films depicting Triad gangsters as heroic figures. John Woo's Yingxione bense (A Better Tomorrow, 1986) and Ringo Lam's Longhu fengyun (City on Fire, 1987), both starring Chow Yun-Fat, were key films in the development of a subgenre known as "heroic bloodshed." Its basic characteristics include violent, stylized action sequences combined with stories that celebrate loyalty, duty, honor, and redemption. In these films, Triad members, especially hit men with multiple weapons (including submachine guns), move from one action set piece to another in a series of carefully choreographed, visually spectacular sequences played out amid a blaze of primary colors. In Xia dao gao fei (Full Contact, 1992), for example, the camera follows successive bullets from gun to target, including one that seemingly penetrates a man's head.

Yingxione bense made Chow a major star. With his long black coat, his Ray-Bans, and a matchstick in his mouth, he steals the film with his cool demeanor during the action scenes. With its stylish violence, shifting identities, and flexible moral boundaries, this film set the pattern for subsequent films. It was a massive success, breaking box-office records in Hong Kong and throughout Asia. Two sequels followed. Shuang diang (The Killer, 1989) repeats the formula from Yingxione bense where a cop bonds with a hit man. Chow plays the hit man and Danny Lee the cop. It includes the same plot elements involving Triad killings, betrayal, and corrupt cops, leading to a violent climax—a prolonged gun battle in a church where the cop and the hit man join forces against superior odds.

Chow also worked with director Lam in the On Fire series, beginning with Longhu fengyun (City on Fire). In this film, he is an undercover cop assigned to expose a gang of jewel thieves. The film also employs the same motif of a cop (Chow) bonding with a criminal (Lee). Four films starring Chow and directed by Lam followed: Gam yuk fung wan (Prison on Fire, 1987), Ban wo chuang tian ya (Wild Search, 1989), Jain yu feng yun II: Tai fan (Prison on Fire II, 1991), and Xia dao gao fei (Full Contact).

This positive, romanticized depiction of the Triads culminated in a series of films directed by Andrew Lau, beginning with Gu huo zi: Zhi ren zai jiang hu (Young and Dangerous) in 1996. In these films, Lau promoted Triad members as pop stars complete with rock music soundtracks, rapid editing, and flamboyant camera work. He directed seven sequels and one prequel in this popular series. In 2002, Lau joined with codirector Alan Mak for the highly influential crime film Mou gaan dou (Infernal Affairs), the film that almost single-handedly lifted the Hong Kong film industry out of its financial recession. It was followed by a prequel and a sequel and an American version, The Departed (2006), directed by Martin Scorsese. An equally effective crime film was Sun taam (2007), directed by Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai, concerning the ability of a policeman to detect "hidden ghosts" and "inner personalities."

Italy

Although crime fiction had a long history in Italy, with the publication of Francesco Mastriani's The Blind Woman from Sorrento in 1852 followed by Emilio De Marchi's The Priest's Hat in 1858, the gangster film was absent until the downfall of the Fascist government at the end of World War II—unless it was set in the United States. The official policy was that there was no such thing as organized crime.

In reality, the major crime families in Italy are centered in different parts of the country: the Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples, the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, and the Sacra Corona Unità, which originated in Apulia in southern Italy. However, unlike the yakuza in Japan, they are rarely mentioned in Italian films. One of the first films to establish an association between the Mafia and corrupt politicians was A ciascuno il suo (1967), directed by Elio Petri. This was followed by Colpo in canna (1975) and Napoli spara (1977). La scorta (1993) was based on the 1992 assassination of Judge Giovanni Falcone.

Director Francesco Rosi, a key figure in the genre, produced a body of films documenting the pervasive influence of criminal families in virtually all aspects of Italian life. This theme emerged in his debut film La sfida (1958), followed by Salvatore Giuliano (1962); Le mani sulla città (1963), which details the tragic consequences of land speculation by a corrupt local official, played by Rod Steiger; Lucky Luciano (1973); and especially Cadaveri eccellent (1976). This latter picture, a powerful political drama based on Leonardo's Sciascia's novel Il contesto, took the systematic murder of magistrates assigned to cases involving the Mafia as its subject matter. The film ends with the death of the central character and another government cover-up. Matteo Garrone's 2008 film Gomorrah, based on a book by Roberto Saviano, continued this bleak presentation, showing a city where crime is endemic and there is little hope.

Japan

In Japan, unlike Italy, the yakuza were perceived as part of everyday life and regularly appeared in films. As a genre, the yakuza has been central to the Japanese film industry since the 1950s, often addressing issues concerned with social dislocation. The genre was a response to the rapid modernization and westernization in Japan after World War II. This created an ideological impasse between the past and the present. The yakuza originated as "chivalrous outlaws." They epitomized such traditional values as loyalty, honor, and courage in a highly stratified feudal society. Their enemies were the agents of modernity—most notably businessmen. The genre can be traced back to the middle of the 18th century and a strict code of chivalry known as jingi.

As a film genre, yakuza films emerged in the 1920s. In the postwar period, nationalist commentators celebrated the anti-Western, antimodernization bias of these films, and they became a major genre after the American occupation of Japan ended in 1952. By 1960, the yakuza film was the most important Japanese genre. A favorite plot involves two gangs. One gang represents traditional values, while the other, the "false" gang, epitomizes corporate culture. The films normally concluded with the true representative of feudal Japan—the lone yakuza armed only with a sword—killing members of the false gang before dying. Hundreds of yakuza films were churned out by such studios as Nikkatsu and Toei—Toei released 37 yakuza films in 1967 alone. Most were highly formulaic, although in the 1960s a few directors, including Seijun Suzuki and Nagisa Oshima, challenged the romantic, predictable nature of the genre.

The golden period of the genre was over by the mid-1970s, and the romanticized image of the yakuza was replaced by a new cycle of "realist" films that were characterized by the intensity of their violence. Kinji Fukasaku emerged as a key director in the genre and presided over a major ideological shift as the long-standing code of chivalry was abandoned. Now the yakuza were redefined as ruthless gangsters, as in Fukasaku's Jingi naki tatakai series, which featured actors such as Bunta Sugawara. Sugawara presented a less romantic image of the yakuza compared with Ken Takakura's in the previous decade.

By 1980, the genre was largely dead as the Japanese studio system collapsed. Studios like Nikkatsu turned to sex movies, and yakuza films went straight to video. However, in the late 1980s, Beat Takeshi, an actor and comedian, revived the genre. As Takeshi Kitano, he took directorial control of Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki (1989) after the original director left the film due to illness. In the next 20 years, Kitano redefined the yakuza film almost single-handedly and transformed it from a predictable, formulaic genre to the realm of the art cinema. With Autoreiji (2010), for example, Kitano treats yakuza codes with disdain, demonstrating that there is no honor among thieves and that the crime syndicate is just another manifestation of corporate culture.

Notes

1. Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies: An Illustrated History of the Gangster Genre from D. W. Griffith to Pulp Fiction (New York: Da Capo, 1997).

2. Colin McArthur, Underworld USA (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972).

3. Phil Hardy, ed., The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: The Gangster Film (New York: Overlook Press, 1998), 7.

4. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000), 72.

5. Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 73.

6. Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 72–73.

7. Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 77.

8. Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 77.

9. Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 79.

10. Charles Derry, The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock (Jefferson: MacFarland, 1988).

11. See, for example, Andrew Spicer, Film Noir (Harlow, England: Longman, 2002), 49.

12. Alain Silver and James Ursini, Film Noir (Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2004), 186.

13. Steven Marcus, introduction to Dashiell Hammett, The Continental Op (London: Pan Books, 1977), 12.

14. Jean-Pierre Chartier, "Les Américains aussi font des films 'noirs,'" La Révue du Cinema (November 1946). Translated as "Americans Also Make Noir Films," Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight, 1999), 21.

15. Nino Frank, "Un Nouveau Genre 'Policier': L'Aventure Criminelle," L'Ecran Francaise (28 August 1946). Translated as "A New Kind of Police Drama: The Criminal Adventure," in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader 2, 15.

16. Frank, "Un Nouveau Genre 'Policier,'" 17–18.

17. Frank, "Un Nouveau Genre 'Policier,'" 15.

18. Frank, "Un Nouveau Genre 'Policier,'" 15.

19. Frank, "Un Nouveau Genre 'Policier,'" 16.

20. James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 124; see also pp. 128–30.

21. Naremore, More than Night, 128.

22. Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1991), 35–36.

23. Quoted in Mark A. Vieira, Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 30.
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AKMAREUL BOATDA (2010). Directed by Kim Ji-woon Kim, this controversial South Korean police procedural film was released overseas as I Saw the Devil and premiered in the United States at the Sundance Film Festival in June 2011. It subsequently polarized opinion due to its graphic depiction of violence, especially toward women, after screening at various film festivals around the world, including the Toronto International Film Festival. It was named one of the 10 best films of 2011 by the British film magazine Total Film. While overseas audiences were able to view the uncut version, the Korea Media Rating Board forced the director to reedit the film for theatrical release in South Korea.

The plot involves a serial killer, Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik), who rapes, tortures, and murders Joo-yun (Oh San-ha), the pregnant fiancée of special agent Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun). Joo-yun's father, police chief Jang (Jeon Kuk-hwan), gives Soo-hyun a list of potential killers, and the enraged agent tracks down and maims the first two suspects. After gaining valuable information from Kyung-chul's son, Soo-hyun finds the serial killer as Kyung-chul is in the process of raping a schoolgirl. The agent captures, tortures, and, surprisingly, releases Kyung-chul, after placing a GPS tracking pill with a tiny microphone attached to it down the killer's throat while he is unconscious. This allows Soo-hyun to track Kyung-chul's movements.

A dangerous, sadistic cat-and-mouse game follows whereby Soo-hyun repeatedly captures, tortures, and releases Kyung-chul. The agent, however, is seemingly oblivious to the collateral damage, innocent victims caught up in their twisted game. Eventually Kyung-chul outsmarts Soo-hyun after discovering the tracking device. He retaliates by brutally attacking Jang and killing his remaining daughter, Joo-yun's sister, Se-yun (Kim Yun-seo). Soo-hyun now realizes the terrible consequences of his game with Kyung-chul and enacts a terrible retribution by beheading Kyung-chul in front of his young son and parents.

At one point in the film, Se-yun pleads with Soo-hyun to stop his obsessive pursuit of Kyung-chul as it will not bring her sister back. She points out that "revenge is for the movies." The film, however, remains ambivalent on this point. It shows the transformation of Soo-hyun from grieving fiancé to a monster similar to the sadistic killer. Yet the graphic depiction of violence inflicted by the "good" character, Soo-hyun, blurs the demarcation between good and evil.

ALDRICH, ROBERT (1918–1983). This stylish American director was born in Cranston, Rhode Island, and entered the film industry at RKO in 1941. Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, Aldrich worked as an assistant to directors such as Charles Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Lewis Milestone, Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, and Joseph Losey. His films with Rossen and Polonsky were produced at the short-lived Enterprise Studio in the late 1940s. In 1952, he directed episodes of the television series China Smith starring Dan Duryea, and this resulted in a feature film spin-off, World for Ransom (1954), which was Aldrich's second feature film as director.

His career lasted for more than three decades, and he worked in a variety of genres with films such as Attack (1956), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and The Dirty Dozen (1967). His films were characterized by a powerful sense of melodrama involving emotionally damaged or vulnerable characters placed in extreme situations. This is evident in one of his best films, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), in which Aldrich and writer A. I. Bezzerides subverted the macho premise of Mickey Spillane's novel featuring detective Mike Hammer, played to perfection by a swaggering Ralph Meeker. Aldrich followed with The Big Knife (1955), adapted from Clifford Odets's play that exposed the dark side of Hollywood. In 1971, he directed The Grissom Gang, starring Kim Darby as an heiress captured by a gang of demented gangsters; this was the second film version of British crime writer James Hadley Chase's controversial 1939 novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish (the first, released under the original title, was a British film directed by St. John Leigh Clowes in 1948).

Aldrich directed a trio of unconventional films in the latter part of his career, beginning with Hustle (1975), starring Burt Reynolds as the troubled police detective in a problematic relationship with an expensive prostitute (Catherine Deneuve). Despite studio pressure, Aldrich fought for the film's bleak ending. He followed with Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), starring Burt Lancaster, a strong social melodrama involving a disturbed Air Force officer who takes over a missile silo in Montana to force the president to tell the truth about the Vietnam War. The last of this trio of films was The Choirboys (1977), an uneven adaptation of the Joseph Wambaugh novel concerning the off-duty habits, mainly sexual, of Los Angeles cops.

ALTON, JOHN (1901–1996). Highly talented, outspoken Hollywood cinematographer John Alton spent much of his career working on low- and medium-budget genre films. He was born in Hungary and entered the American film industry in 1924 as a technician at MGM before moving to Paramount as a cameraman. Alton left Hollywood for France and then Argentina, where he wrote, photographed, and directed several Spanish-language films. He returned to Hollywood in 1937 and in late 1940s formed a creative collaboration with director Anthony Mann on four crime films: T-Men (1947), Raw Deal (1948), He Walked by Night (1949), and Border Incident (1949). Utilizing high-contrast lighting, unusual compositions, and deep focus, Alton challenged the classical Hollywood visual form and transformed these low-budget films into superior crime films. Alton and Mann intensified this approach in their next film, the French Revolution drama Reign of Terror (U.K. title The Black Book, 1949). They jettisoned the usual picture-postcard approach to period melodrama by fracturing the imagery to capture the terror instigated by Maximilian Robespierre (Richard Basehart) in the late 18th century.

Alton was promoted to higher budgeted films when producer Dore Schary moved from RKO to MGM in 1950. However, Alton's MGM films lacked the intensity of his work with Mann, and it was not until director Joseph H. Lewis's film noir The Big Combo (1955) for Allied Artists that Alton regained the visual artistry evident in his films with Mann. Alton followed The Big Combo with one of his most visually arresting films, Slightly Scarlet (1956), directed by Allan Dwan for RKO. Based on the James M. Cain novel Love's Lovely Counterfeit, Dwan and Alton were, due to the strict censorship regime in Hollywood at that time, inhibited from literally depicting the perverse basis of Cain's novel, although Alton's bold use of garish colors such as pink, orange, and green suggest a world that is morally sick.

In 1951, Alton and Alfred Gilks won an Academy Award for color photography for An American in Paris. After the big-budget religious melodrama Elmer Gantry (1960), starring Burt Lancaster as a fast-talking evangelical preacher, Alton retired from the film industry, returning briefly to work on the television pilot for the Mission: Impossible series in 1966.

AMBLER, ERIC (1909–1998). British writer Eric Ambler transformed the thriller genre with six novels published between 1936 and 1940: Dark Frontier (1936), Uncommon Danger (1937), Epitaph for a Spy (1938), Cause for Alarm (1938), The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), and Journey into Fear (1940). The last of these was the first to be filmed, in 1943 with Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles in a story involving intrigue in Istanbul and Nazi agents. Background to Danger, adapted by W. R. Burnett from Ambler's Uncommon Danger, was filmed in 1943 by director Raoul Walsh, starring George Raft and Sydney Greenstreet on a train heading for Ankara. More ambitious was the 1944 production of The Mask of Dimitrios with Peter Lorre, Greenstreet, and Zachary Scott as the mysterious Dimitrios who fakes his death. These adaptations were American productions, although in 1944 Lance Comfort directed a British version of Ambler's novel Epitaph for a Spy, titled Hotel Reserve, starring James Mason.

Amber joined the British army in 1940 and finished up as a writer at the Army Kinematograph Service's Film Production Unit headed by filmmaker Thorold Dickinson. In this unit, which was set up to produce information and propaganda films, Ambler met Roy Ward Baker. After the war, Baker joined Ambler at Denham Studios, where they planned to adapt the Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu gothic novel Uncle Silas, but production difficulties prevented its filming. Ambler then wrote an original screenplay, The October Man (1947), with Baker making his directorial debut on this film. This intense film noir concerns a troubled young man, Jim Ackland (John Mills), who has to continually fight a powerful desire to commit suicide after the death of a young child in his care. His situation deteriorates following the murder of a fashion model living at the same boardinghouse in London. In 1964, Jules Dassin directed the caper film Topkapi, starring Dassin's wife Melina Mercouri, based on Ambler's 1962 novel The Light of Day.

ANDREWS, DANA (1909–1992). American actor who, in the 1940s, perfected a recessive style of acting that epitomized the flawed protagonists that populated film noir. These tortured, psychologically flawed characters supplanted the energetic, outward-directed gangsters and detectives of the 1930s as played by actors such as James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and William Powell. The son of a Baptist minister, Andrews was born Carver Dana Andrews in rural Mississippi and moved to Los Angeles in 1931. His film break came with a small part in William Wyler's The Westerner (1940) and, after 20th Century-Fox purchased half of his contract from Samuel Goldwyn, he was cast in a succession of large-budget films throughout the 1940s. This included his obsessive police detective in love with a "dead" woman (Gene Tierney) in Laura (1944) and the morally ambiguous drifter Eric Stanton in Fallen Angel (1945). In 1950, Andrews took his flawed screen persona even further as the troubled cop Mark Dixon who accidentally kills a war hero in Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950). In 1956, Andrews starred in two films for director Fritz Lang: as the ruthless television reporter in While the City Sleeps and the killer in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. Although he continued working in films and television for another two decades, his career declined from the mid-1950s, due in part to his alcoholism, a fact that he publicly acknowledged later in his life. His other crime films include Boomerang! (1947), Edge of Doom (1950), The Fearmakers (1968), and Brainstorm (1965).

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (1945). This Hollywood production of Agatha Christie's 1939 novel Ten Little Niggers—already altered for the American publishing market to Ten Little Indians—changed the title to And Then There Were None. The film, directed by French director René Clair and scripted by Dudley Nichols, was also influenced by Christie's 1943 stage production, including the changed ending made by the author for her play.

And Then There Were None (1945) directed by René Clair. Shown from left: Louis Hayward, Roland Young, Walter Huston, June Duprez and Barry Fitzgerald (seated).

And Then There Were None is an archetypal example of classical detective fiction. Ten people—eight guests and two servants—are invited by a mysterious stranger, Mr. U. N. Owen, to an isolated house on a small island off the Devon coast. Although there is no sign of "Mr. Owen" and the house and the island appear deserted, the guests are murdered one by one until only two people remain—along with the murderer. Each inhabitant, including the servants, has a guilty secret, and their crimes are described after dinner on the first night when a recording provides a brief biographical sketch of each inhabitant. Each killing is marked by the destruction of a decorative Indian on a china ornament, a motif reinforced by a musical version of the nursery rhyme "Ten Little Indians," sung by Mischa Auer's character just before his death. The film stars Barry Fitzgerald as a vindictive judge, Walter Huston as a drunken doctor, Louis Hayward as a man with a mysterious past, C. Aubrey Smith as the grief-stricken general who has lost his wife, June Deprez, Roland Young, and Judith Anderson.

And Then There Were None was followed by four remakes: Ten Little Indians, starring Hugh O'Brien in 1965, which changed the setting to the Swiss Alps; And Then There Were None in 1974, moved to a hotel in Persia; Ten Little Indians in 1989, which altered the setting to Africa; and Desyat Negrityat (1987), filmed in Russia.

ANIMAL KINGDOM (2010). This harrowing Australian crime film won eight awards—including Best Film, Best Direction for David Michôd, Best Actor for Ben Mendelsohn, and Best Actress for Jackie Weaver—from the Australian Film Institute in 2011. Weaver, as Janine "Smurf" Cody, the matriarch of the Cody criminal family, also received an Academy Award nomination.

The film opens with a death and closes with a death. The first death is the mother of 17-year-old Joshua "J" Cody (James Frecheville), who dies from a self-inflicted heroin overdose. Joshua is shown sitting on a couch next to his dead mother while watching a game show on television. This scene establishes the tone of the film, where death, crime, and everyday domesticity are interrelated. When the paramedics arrive, he is more interested in the television program than the fate of his mother. With nowhere else to go, he moves in with his grandmother Janine and her three criminal sons—armed robber Andrew "Pope" Cody (Mendelsohn), drug dealer Craig Cody (Sullivan Stapleton), and younger brother Darren Cody (Luke Ford). These professional criminals are joined by Barry "Baz" Brown (Joel Edgerton), Pope's partner in the armed robberies and a regular visitor to the Cody household.

A tense standoff between the Cody family—notably Pope, who is in hiding—and the Armed Robbery Squad occupies the first part of the film. After meeting Pope in a shopping center, Baz is murdered by the police. Pope, Craig, and Darren retaliate by killing two young policemen late at night in a quiet suburban street. Both killings, Baz's and the cops', are slightly altered re-creations of infamous events in Melbourne's recent history. The latter is based on the callous murder of two policemen in an incident known as the Walsh Street Killings, an event that dominated headlines in Victoria for a long period and remains ever present in the public consciousness. Joshua, who did not participate in the killings (except to steal a car for the Cody family), tries hard not to get involved despite the efforts of Sgt. Nathan Leckie (Guy Pearce) to drive a wedge between him and the family. However, when the psychotic Pope murders Joshua's girlfriend Nicky (Laura Wheelwright), he is forced to seek refuge with Leckie and the police.

Michôd's direction is restrained, refusing to succumb to the standard clichés of the genre. Violence is committed in a moral or legal vacuum by both the police and the criminals. However, amid the banal surface of everyday life, real evil exists—not only in the obvious case of the Cody brothers but especially in their mother Janine. Her seemingly comforting presence only camouflages a monster, and her quasi-incestuous relationship with her sons personifies her sole reason for living: the protection of her family whatever the cost. When Janine orders a corrupt lawyer to kill her grandson, her delivery is without emotion or passion, as if she were ordering groceries from a supermarket.

Janine epitomizes the metaphor inherent in the film's title. In the "animal kingdom," she is the lioness. The animal kingdom does not function within ethical or moral parameters, as Leckie explains to Joshua when describing its food chain. Only the strongest and most ruthless survive. After Joshua learns that not even the police can protect you from fellow (corrupt) cops, he abandons the legal system. Late in the film, after Pope and Darren have been found not guilty of Nicky's murder, Leckie asks Joshua whether he has found his own place in the world (the animal kingdom). In the final moments in the film, Joshua establishes his place.

ARMSTRONG, CHARLOTTE (1905–1969). American poet, dramatist, and crime writer Charlotte Armstrong was born in Vulcan, an iron-mining town in Michigan. Her first mystery novel was published in 1942 (Lay On, MacDuff), but it was her 1946 psychological suspense novel The Unsuspected that interested Warner Bros. It was filmed in March 1947, starring Claude Rains as the narcissist Alexander Grandison who murders his young secretary. Both the novel and the film emphasize suspense, not crime solving, as the identity of the killer is known from the outset. Following the success of this novel, Armstrong moved to California, where she wrote more novels and, later, television scripts, including material for Alfred Hitchcock. In 1952, 20th Century-Fox adapted Armstrong's 1950 novel Mischief for the suspense thriller Don't Bother to Knock, starring Marilyn Monroe as a mentally disturbed babysitter and Richard Widmark as the man who tries to save both the babysitter and the young child in her care. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

ARSENAL STADIUM MYSTERY, THE (1939). Director Thorold Dickinson, who also worked on the adaptation of Leonard Reginald Gribble's novel, has fun with the conventions of the pre–World War II British mystery formula in The Arsenal Stadium Mystery. Soccer star John Doyce dies during a charity soccer game between the professional Arsenal soccer team and an amateur club, the Trojans, at Highbury Stadium. A number of suspects are exposed during the investigation by eccentric Scotland Yard inspector Anthony Slade (Leslie Banks) and his partner Sergeant Clinton (Ian McLean). The suspects include Kindilett (Wyndham Goldie), the manager of the Trojans, and some of the players, including Philip Moring (Brian Worth). Attractive model Gwen Lee (Greta Gynt) is also investigated, because she was involved with both Doyce and Moring. Slade, who knows the identity of the murderer quite early, leaves his hapless assistant Clinton to catch the criminal while he returns to producing the police revue. Ultimately, the murder-mystery plot functions as a showcase for the comedic skills of Banks.

ASPHALT JUNGLE, THE (1950). Directed by John Huston, this film established the key narrative conventions and characterizations that would define the caper film for many years. Based on W. R. Burnett's 1949 novel, Huston reworked Ben Maddow's script by shifting the emphasis toward the criminals and away from the activities of a reformist police commissioner determined to eradicate corruption in a midwestern town. In the first section of the film, Huston gives each criminal his own story. Career criminal Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) wishes to return to his childhood farm in Kentucky, mastermind "Doc" Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) longs to retire in Mexico, and safecracker Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso) needs money for his sick child. Funding for the robbery comes from crooked lawyer Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern), who wants money to supports his young mistress Angela Phinlay (Marilyn Monroe). The caper goes sour when Emmerich tries to swindle the men. He even articulates the film's central theme—that criminals are little different from the "respectable" members of society—when he explains to his wife that crime "is only the left-handed form of human endeavor."

The Asphalt Jungle introduced the three-part narrative structure that came to characterize the caper film: the recruitment of the criminals, the rehearsal and execution of the robbery, and the aftermath. The aftermath, at least until the 1960s, always resulted in the death or capture of the criminals, their downfall usually due to a combination of fate and human weakness. Importantly, Huston's film shifted the focus—and audience empathy—away from the police to the criminals. At the end of the film, the death of the central character, Handley, in a lush field amid his beloved horses in the Kentucky bluegrass country, is presented as a form of release from a cruel society. See also BLACKLIST; HIGH SIERRA.

ATTENBOROUGH, RICHARD (1923– ). The son of a school administrator, Richard Attenborough appeared in Ah, Wilderness in a small theater in London while studying acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He gained attention from his performance in Noël Coward's patriotic war film In Which We Serve (1942). After World War II, Attenborough was startling as the psychotic baby-face gangster Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock (1947). His other crime films included London Belongs to Me (1948), as the showy Percy Boon on a manslaughter charge, and as a Borstal boy in Boys in Brown (1949). In 1954, he starred as the married man accused of killing a young girl in Eight o'Clock Walk. However, by the end of the decade, Attenborough had become disillusioned with the roles offered to him and formed a partnership with actor-writer Bryan Forbes. They wrote and produced The Angry Silence (1960), with Attenborough starring as a factory worker who refuses to join in an unofficial strike. His first film as a director was Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), and he continued to work as an actor, as well, in films such as 10 Rillington Place (1971), where he played real-life multiple murderer John Reginald Christie. Attenborough was knighted in 1976 and made a baron in 1994.

AUSTRALIAN CRIME FILMS. The Story of the Kelly Gang, produced and released in 1906, was Australia's first feature film and arguably the first feature film in the world—it was four reels when one-reel films were the norm. The film concerned the career of Australia's most famous bushranger Ned Kelly and was a commercial success in both Australia and Great Britain. It was remade in 1910, 1934, and 1951; in 1970 starring Mick Jagger as Kelly; and in 2003 with Heath Ledger as Kelly. In each version, Kelly is presented in a sympathetic manner.

The Story of the Kelly Gang was the first in an intermittent cycle of "bushranger films" that included Thunderbolt in 1910, the story of bushranger Frederick Ward, popularly known as "Captain Thunderbolt." One of the few films to depict the bushranger in an unsympathetic manner was Dan Morgan in 1911, which presented the title character as a cold-blooded killer; the film was remade in 1975 as Mad Dog Morgan with Dennis Hopper as Morgan, a bushranger who roamed the Riverina and northern Victoria during the 1860s gold rush. The first cycle of bushranger films was halted in 1920 when the New South Wales police department banned such films.

There were few Australian crime films produced during the 1930s and 1940s. Raymond Longford's The Man They Could Not Hang (1934), the story of John Lee, a convicted murderer for whom the gallows failed to open, and Bush Christmas (1947), a family film involving three comic villains pursued into the bush by small children after they steal the family horse, were notable exceptions. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were few Australian films overall. In 1953, New Zealand–born Cecil Holmes directed Captain Thunderbolt, a politically charged version of Ward's life in which the bushranger was presented as the victim of class struggle. While the film was largely ignored in Australia, sales to Britain, Germany, Canada, and the United States earned twice the film's production costs. In 1958, the British Rank Organization produced the third version (the earlier versions were in 1907 and 1920) of Rolf Boldrewood's novel Robbery under Arms, starring Peter Finch as bushranger Captain Starlight. The next year, Lee Robinson directed Dust in the Sun, an Outback murder tale involving a Northern Territory policeman transporting an Aboriginal captive to Alice Springs. The last film to be released by the British Ealing Studio, The Siege in Pinchgut (1959), was filmed in Sydney. It involved an escaped convict, Matt Kirk (played by American actor Aldo Ray), and three accomplices taking over Fort Denison (commonly known as Pinchgut) in the middle of Sydney Harbour. The men then threaten to use a navy gun on a nearby munitions ship unless they are granted a retrial.

Except for low-budget crime films made for American television in the early 1970s—such as Color Me Dead (1970), a remake of the 1950 Hollywood film noir D.O.A.—there were no Australian crime films in the 1970s prior to the violent caper film Money Movers (1979), directed by Bruce Beresford. The film starred Terence Donovan and Bryan Brown as employees of an armored car company who perish when they attempt to rob their company. The film received an R censorship classification due to its violent climax and an earlier scene involving the removal of two of Donovan's toes by master criminal Bud Tingwell.

During the 1980s, the production of crime films increased. Examples include Grievous Bodily Harm (1988), a noir-based story involving a jealous husband who murders people while searching for his runaway wife, and The Surfer (1988), which depicts two innocent people chased by both a crooked policeman and local criminals.

The best Australian crime film since Money Movers, until 2010's Animal Kingdom, was Kiss or Kill (1997), a clever reworking of the couple-on-the-run thriller. Director Bill Bennett, who also wrote the story outline, revitalized the familiar storyline by keeping the audience guessing as to the identity of the killer. The film's central premise was "How well do you really know people close to you?" and it won the Best Film, Best Director (Bennett), and other awards from the Australian Film Institute in 1997. Two Hands in 1999 enjoyed a bigger budget and major stars, including Heath Ledger as an ambitious young man working as a courier for a local mobster, played by Bryan Brown.

In 2000, Eric Bana starred in Chopper as the real-life criminal and public celebrity Mark Brandon Read, who gained notoriety in Australia for his colorful life as a criminal, which included mutilating himself in prison by cutting off his own ears. Bryan Brown starred as the local king of the slot machines who confronts the Chicago Mafia, headed by John Goodman, in Dirty Deeds (2002). In the same year, the caper film The Hard Word starred Guy Pearce, Joel Edgerton, and Damien Richardson as armed robbers, the Twentyman brothers. The film costarred Rachel Griffiths as Pearce's wife and the film's femme fatale who vacillates between a crooked lawyer and her husband—until she is forced to make a fatal choice in the final minutes of the film.

The Square (2008), written by Joel Edgerton and Matthew Dabner, with direction by Joel's brother Nash, transforms the familiar film noir premise involving lust, marital infidelity, and murder into a naturalistic drama involving two rather ordinary people in an adulterous relationship. The two people, married man Raymond Yale (David Roberts) and married woman Carla Smith (Claire van der Boom), discover that once they decide to steal the robbery proceeds from Carla's husband, they cannot control the events that follow. This clever, downbeat film was rewarded with seven nominations, including Best Film and Best Direction, at the 2008 Australian Film Institute Awards.
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BACALL, LAUREN (1924– ). Betty Perske, born to Jewish immigrants in New York City, took her mother's name, Bacall, after her parents divorced when she was five years old. As Betty Bacall, she was working as a fashion model when she was noticed on the March 1943 cover of Harper's Bazaar, and Howard Hawks invited her to come to Hollywood for an audition. He signed her to a seven-year personal contract, changed her name, and gave her training (including teaching her to lower her voice to make it sound more masculine). He then cast her, at age 19, opposite Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944). This film established Bacall as a major screen presence, and off screen, she began a romantic relationship with the married Bogart that culminated in their marriage the following year.

Three more films with Bogart followed, beginning with The Big Sleep, also directed by Hawks. This film confirmed Bacall's popularity, and when Warner Bros. realized the appeal of the couple, they decided to recall the film, shot in 1944, and insert additional scenes between Bogart and Bacall. The heavily edited film was eventually released in the United States in August 1946 to good reviews and a strong box office. Both actors followed The Big Sleep with the film adaptation of David Goodis's novel The Dark Passage (1947) and John Huston's gangster film Key Largo (1948). These films were characterized by flirtatious wisecracks that flowed back and forth between the two actors, with Bacall presented as a strong, independent character.

Bacall's status as a major star diminished in the 1950s and 1960s. By 1964 and the Paul Newman detective film Harper, she was reduced to supporting roles, a position she occupied for the next 45 years. The exception was The Fan (1981), a crime film that offered Bacall the starring role as a Broadway actress stalked by a psychotic admirer. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

BAJO LA SAL (2008). Directed and cowritten by Mario Muñoz, this atmospheric Mexican police procedural is set in the remote (fictional) north Mexican town of Santa Rosa de la Sal. The town is situated on the edge of 100,000 acres of salt flats. During the salt harvest, the decomposed bodies of a number of young girls are discovered amid rows of salt. This unsettling imagery provides an appropriate context for the dark secrets that are exposed throughout the film. Comandante Trujillo (Humberto Zurita) comes back to the region after a long absence and agrees to assist the local sheriff, Jefe Salazar (Emilio Guerrero), with his investigation. Trujillo discovers that the girls once attended a local school with a troubled history. At the local mortuary, a teenager, Victor Zepeda (Ricardo Polanco), helps his father prepare the bodies. In his spare time, Zepeda makes violent stop-motion slasher films featuring a young male character ("Ken") who regularly decapitates a young female character ("Barbie"). Zepeda's psychological turmoil is attributed to the recent death of his mother who died, accidentally, while his father was driving.

Bajo la Sal, released overseas as Under the Salt, unfolds at a leisurely pace with two narrative strands. One features Zepeda, who becomes progressively obsessed with Isobel (Irene Azuela), a local waitress and former friend of one of the victims. When Zepeda discovers that Isobel works part time in a strip joint as dancer and "hostess," he reacts violently—especially when he finds her "entertaining" Professor Magaña (Julio Bracho), the school's math teacher, in a small cubicle at the strip club. The other narrative line concerns Trujillo's investigation into the killings. This gradually reveals the cop's own troubled past and the fact that his investigation has no official status, as he was recently dismissed from the police force following a botched attempt to save a kidnap victim. Zepeda, Trujillo, Isobel, and the killer come together in a deserted shack on the edge of town in the film's tense climax. This sequence resolves the mystery of the dead girls and provides a satisfying climax. Azuela won the 2009 Best Actress Ariel Award in Mexico. The bare salt marshes on the Baja California Peninsula provided the film's atmospheric location.

BAKER, ROY WARD (1916–2010). Roy Ward Baker began with Gainsborough Studios in 1934 and stayed with the company until the beginning of World War II. During this period, he gained valuable experience working as assistant director for Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed, and others. Baker was assigned to the British Army Kinematograph Service during the war, where he met author Eric Ambler. This association resulted in Baker's first film as director, the psychological thriller The October Man (1947). It starred John Mills as Jim Ackland, a young chemist who suffers a mental breakdown following the death of a child in a bus accident. After he is released from the hospital, Ackland is targeted by the police when a young woman, who lives in the same boardinghouse, is murdered. Baker followed with The Weaker Sex (1948) and the crime film Paper Orchid (1948). The latter, in which a major character, newspaper reporter Freddy Evans (Sid James), has to investigate a crime in which he has been deeply involved, has some of the resonance of the 1948 Hollywood film noir The Big Clock (1948). A similar plot was used in Scandal Sheet (1952). The success of Baker's next film, the submarine drama Morning Departure (1950), also starring Mills, resulted in a Hollywood contract with 20th Century-Fox. Baker had time to direct the espionage thriller Highly Dangerous (1950), starring Margaret Lockwood and American actor Dane Clark, before leaving for the United States.

After the Tyrone Power romantic fantasy The House on the Square (1951), Baker's next three films for 20th Century-Fox were crime films, beginning with Don't Bother to Knock (1952), starring Marilyn Monroe as a mentally disturbed babysitter who tries to murder a young girl in her care; Richard Widmark costarred as Jed Towers, a pilot on leave, and the film was based on Charlotte Armstrong's novel Mischief. An even better crime film was Night without Sleep (1952), which starred Gary Merrill as burned-out composer Richard Morton, who wanders the bars and apartments of Manhattan after emerging from an alcoholic stupor—not realizing that he had killed his wife the night before. Inferno (1953), Baker's best film at the Hollywood studio, followed. Filmed in Apple Valley, California, on the edge of the Mojave Desert in the 3-D process, it stars Robert Ryan as a millionaire who is abandoned in the desert without food or water by his wife (Rhonda Fleming) and her lover (William Lundigan) after he suffers a broken leg. The cinematographer on Baker's last three films for Fox—Don't Bother to Knock, Night without Sleep, and Inferno—was Lucien Ballard, and each film, especially Inferno, benefited from Ballard's skill as one of Hollywood's great cinematographers.

After Inferno, Baker returned to Great Britain for Passage Home (1954), a tense melodrama set on a cargo ship traveling from South America to England. Later, Baker directed an adaptation of Margery Allingham's novel Tiger in the Smoke (1956); this tense, atmospheric crime film involved a psychotic killer, Jack Havoc (Tony Wright), who murders a number of people while searching for clues to the location of a religious statue. Between October 1957 and March 1958, Baker directed his most prestigious film, A Night to Remember, based on Walter Lord's book about the sinking of the Titanic. After the traumatic experience of the bizarre melodrama The Singer Not the Song (1960), starring Dirk Bogarde as a Mexican bandit, Anacleto, who battles for the soul of a priest, Father Keogh (John Mills), Baker returned to more familiar material with Flame in the Streets (1961), a melodrama involving racial prejudice and violence directed at West Indian workers in a Notting Hill Gate furniture factory. However, the commercial and critical failure of The Singer Not the Song seriously affected Baker's career, and he worked in British television for much of the 1960s, directing numerous episodes of The Saint, The Avengers, and Minder.

Baker returned to feature films as a director in 1967 with a succession of horror and science-fiction films; the domestic melodrama The Anniversary (1967), starring Bette Davis, was the only exception during this period. In 1984, he directed an excellent Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Masks of Death, as a made-for-television feature starring Peter Cushing as Holmes and John Mills as Dr. Watson. The film reunited Holmes with Irene Adler (Anne Baxter), the woman who had rejected him a quarter of a century earlier. Although Baker continued to direct television series until 1993, when he was 76 years old, it was fitting that Mills costarred in Baker's last film, The Masks of Death. Altogether Mills had starred in six films directed by Baker: The October Man, Morning Departure, The Singer Not the Song, Flame in the Street, The Valiant (1962), and The Masks of Death.

BAKER, STANLEY (1927–1976). This intense, tough British actor who was closely associated with working-class roles in the 1950s was born William Stanley Baker in Ferndale, Rhondda Valley, Wales. His parents moved to London when he was a child. Baker was discovered by Russian-born British director Sergei Nolbandov, who cast him in the Yugoslav-set drama Undercover (1943). His first significant role was the sadistic Bennett in The Cruel Sea (1952), followed by the caper film The Good Die Young (1954), with Baker as the broken-down boxer Mike, who does not survive a bungled robbery. Baker continued in this vein as the ex-convict truck driver battling corruption in the transport industry in Cy Endfield's high-impact crime film Hell Drivers (1957). Throughout the 1950s, Baker gradually shifted this image to a man alienated from his society in films such as Violent Playground (1958), Blind Date (1959), Hell Is a City (1959), and The Criminal (1960).

Baker established his own production company, Oakhurst, in the 1960s, and it produced Robbery (1967), which was based on the real-life British Great Train Robbery, as well as the lighthearted caper film The Italian Job (1969). His last significant role, before his death of lung cancer in 1976, was also a caper film, Peter Hall's Perfect Friday (1970), with Baker cast against type as a repressed bank manager who robs his own bank because of his infatuation with a sensual aristocrat, played by Ursula Andress. Baker was knighted in 1976.

BANK JOB, THE (2008). Based on the real-life robbery of the Lloyd's Bank in Baker Street in 1971, screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais skillfully developed the background and significance of a robbery that quickly disappeared from the media after British authorities at MI-5 imposed a "D Notice" that effectively closed down all coverage of the heist. Clement and La Frenais, together with Australian-born director Roger Donaldson, cleverly used the narrative structure of the caper film employed 50 years earlier in Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955): the recruitment of the thieves, the lengthy robbery of the bank (which involved tunneling from a nearby shop), and the bitter aftermath. In The Bank Job, however, an extra layer involving political scandal and national politics is added to this familiar structure.

The film, which is recounted in a long flashback, begins with a member of the British royal family, Princess Margaret, being photographed in a sexually comprising position in the Caribbean. When the photographs are used by Black Power advocate Michael X (Peter De Jersey) to blackmail the British government, low-level drug courier Maxine Love (Saffron Burrows) is used by MI-5 agent Tim Everett (Richard Lintern) to recruit her former boyfriend Terry Leather (Jason Statham) and his pals to rob the bank. Leather and his associates are unaware that the real target of the robbery is safe-deposit box 118, which contains the photographs of Princess Margaret. However, he discovers that the bank vault contains the account books of Soho vice king Lew Vogel (David Suchet), which record the payments made by Vogel to corrupt policemen. The vault also contains incriminatory photographs of politicians lodged by a brothel owner who caters to the sexual fetishes of the British Establishment. After the robbery, Leather and his colleagues are pursued by national security forces, crooked (and legitimate) cops, and a vengeful Vogel. Donaldson imbues this clever film with a deep-seated cynicism concerning the personal and institutional corruption in Great Britain in 1971, while remaining faithful to the subversive edge of Dassin's 1955 film. Both films indicate that personal loyalty among thieves, and their families, is the only valid form of loyalty. Political institutions and outside forces, these films suggest, are not worthy of one's trust.

BENDIX, WILLIAM (1906–1964). With his strong Brooklyn accent, hulking build, and battered nose, William Bendix was mostly cast as a thug or a comedic figure. Despite his accent, he was born in Manhattan in a Midtown flat near the now defunct Third Avenue elevated railway. He initially worked as a grocer, but when the 1930s Depression killed his business, Bendix began taking his acting more seriously after working part-time in nightclubs and on stage. He appeared on Broadway in 1939 and made his film debut in 1940. His early career as a thug is evident in Paramount's second version of Dashiell Hammett's novel The Glass Key (1942), where his character, Jeff, gleefully bashes Alan Ladd for an extended period in a key scene in the film. A similar role, albeit more quietly menacing, was the anonymous "White Suit" in The Dark Corner (1946). The other side of Bendix's screen persona, the loveable everyman, was encapsulated by his most popular role as family man Chester A. Riley in Life of Riley (1949), a character that Bendix also played on radio from 1944 to 1951 and then on television from 1953 to 1958. The exception to this pattern was the British film noir The Rough and the Smooth (U.S. title Portrait of a Sinner, 1959), in which Bendix played an older man in love with a femme fatale, and when she rejects him, he commits suicide.

BENNETT, JOAN (1910–1990). Joan Bennett was the youngest of three acting sisters from a New Jersey theatrical family. Her first major role was opposite Ronald Colman in the screen's first sound adaptation of Bulldog Drummond in 1929. She is best remembered as the dangerous woman in two crime films in the mid-1940s: The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945), directed by Fritz Lang. The two women, however, are very different. In The Woman in the Window, Bennett's Alice Reed is a male fantasy figure who inadvertently implicates Edward G. Robinson in the killing of her wealthy benefactor. Bennett's Kitty "Lazy Legs" March in Scarlet Street, on the other hand, is a cheap, slovenly prostitute who, in conjunction with her lover, Dan Duryea, swindles Robinson. These roles defined her screen persona in crime films, as she was cast as a femme fatale and/or adulterous wife in The Macomber Affair (1947), The Woman on the Beach (1947), and Secret beyond the Door (1948). Her most sympathetic role during this period was as Lucia Harper, a mother forced to become involved with a criminal, played by James Mason, to protect her daughter in The Reckless Moment (1949).

Bennett's career was affected by scandal when her third husband, producer Walter Wanger, shot her press secretary in 1951 after discovering his wife's infidelity. Thereafter, she was reduced to supporting roles, including the mentally unstable murderess in Highway Dragnet (1954) opposite Richard Conte. Bennett's other crime films include Scotland Yard (1930), The House across the Bay (1940), and Hollow Triumph (1948). See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

BENTLEY, E. C. (1875–1956). British journalist and detective novelist Edmund Clerihew Bentley was famous for one novel: Trent's Last Case, which was published in 1913. Born in Shepherd's Bush, a suburb of London, Bentley worked as a journalist after training to be a lawyer. As a student at St. Paul's School, he began a lifelong friendship with G. K. Chesterton, who was an important influence on his career; Bentley dedicated Trent's Last Case to Chesterton. The novel was developed by Bentley over a number of years as he walked between his house in Hampstead and his office at the Daily Telegraph in Fleet Street. When London publisher Duckworth announced a competition offering £50 for a new novel, Bentley submitted his novel under the title Philip Gasket's Last Case. However, after learning that it would not win the competition, Bentley withdrew his manuscript. An American publisher, the Century Publishing Company, offered him a $500 advance for it, and it was also accepted, largely through Bentley's friendship with John Buchan, by the British publisher Thomas Nelson. However, the American editor wanted the name of the detective changed to Philip Trent, and the book was first published in the United States as The Woman in Black. In Britain, it was published as Trent's Last Case, and the novel was a great success in both countries.

Bentley's aim was to challenge the rigid conventions of classical detective fiction because he thought it lacked a sense of humanity. Thus, contrary to the traditions of the detective literature at that time, which favored eccentric, or at least superintelligent, detectives following the success of Sherlock Holmes, Bentley's detective was an ordinary, friendly, humorous artist who works for a newspaper as a crime journalist. The plot involves the mysterious death of an insane American millionaire, Sigsbee Manderson, and Trent's belief that the millionaire was murdered. In the process, Trent falls in love with Mabel Manderson, the widow of the millionaire. However, the most radical aspect of Bentley's book was the fact that his detective's solution to the crime, although plausible, is wrong, and the case is only solved by the unsolicited confession of a man inadvertently caught up in Manderson's death.

The first screen version of Trent's Last Case (1920) was a British film starring Gregory Scott as Trent. The second was filmed in Hollywood by the Fox Studio. Although the film's director, Howard Hawks, intended it to be a sound film, it was made as a silent with comedian Raymond Griffith as Trent. Hawks was disappointed with the resultant film. The third version, Trent's Last Case (1952), produced and directed by Herbert Wilcox, was a British film released by the British division of the Hollywood studio Republic. It starred Michael Wilding as newspaper reporter Trent, Orson Welles as Sigsbee Manderson, and Margaret Lockwood as his wife. Pamela Bower's screenplay follows Bentley's book very closely, and Welles, who only appears in a protracted flashback sequence, brings considerable authority to the film in much the same manner he did in The Third Man (1949).

Despite great success with Trent's Last Case, Bentley did not write another novel featuring Trent until Trent's Own Case in 1936, written in collaboration with Herbert Warner Allan. Bentley also published Trent Intervenes, a collection of short stories, two years later in 1938.

BENTLEY, JOHN (1916–2009). Born in Sparkhill, Birmingham, British actor John Bentley initially had no interest in an acting career. However, after attending an audition, he was accepted by the BBC, and his singing career evolved into an acting career. Stage appearances, beginning in 1936, were followed by his West End debut in 1940 and his film debut in the musical The Hills of Donegal (1946). He was cast in supporting roles in noncrime films, such as The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), and lead roles in crime and adventure films. With his handsome looks and pleasant manner, Bentley was a natural leading man in roles that required dedicated policemen, such as the police inspector in Confession (1955), directed by Ken Hughes, and debonair detectives like Paul Temple, in Calling Paul Temple (1948) and Paul Temple's Triumph (1950), and the Toff, the Honourable Richard Rollison, in Salute the Toff (1952) and Hammer the Toff (1952). Occasionally, he was cast against type as the villain, in such films as The Lost Hours (1952), costarring American actor Mark Stevens, and the racing-car driver plotting to kill his wife in The Flaw (1955). After appearing as the police captain in Roy Ward Baker's bizarre melodrama The Singer Not the Song (1960), Bentley's film career virtually dried up as the British supporting feature disappeared from the screen. Thereafter, he starred in the British television series Crossroads from 1965 to 1977.

BERNHARDT, CURTIS (1899–1981). German-born Jewish director Curtis Bernhardt directed crime films in Germany before fleeing to France in 1933 and then the United States in 1939. At Warner Bros. in the 1940s, Bernhardt directed a number of intense crime films, including Conflict (1945) with Humphrey Bogart as a troubled man who murders his wife after falling in love with her younger sister. His best film, Possessed (1946), stars Joan Crawford as a mentally disturbed woman, Louise Howell, who gradually becomes psychotically obsessed with engineer David Sutton (Van Heflin). This leads to hallucinations and David's murder at the hands of Louise. This powerful film noir begins with one of the visually strongest opening sequences, showing Louise wandering in a catatonic state through the empty streets of downtown Los Angeles early in the morning. Her story is then told via a flashback.

Bernhardt followed with the High Wall (1947), a film with a similar theme involving Robert Taylor as an amnesiac veteran caught up in murder. Bernhardt subsequently directed a compromised film version of Somerset Maugham's novel Rain, with Rita Hayworth starring in Miss Sadie Thompson (1953). Bernhardt continued to work for various studios until his last film Kisses for My President in 1964, starring Fred MacMurray.

BEZZERIDES, A. I. (1908–2007). Albert Isaac Bezzerides was born in Samsun, Turkey, to a Greek-Armenian family that emigrated to the United States when he was two years old. He began writing stories as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was studying electrical engineering. He dropped out of college to continue his writing and was working as an engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power when his novel The Long Haul (1938) was turned into the film They Drive by Night (1940), with George Raft and Humphrey Bogart as struggling truckers hauling produce in California. Warner Bros. paid him $2,000 for the rights and offered him a screenwriting contract at $300 a week. His first credit as a screenwriter was Juke Girl (1942), a social melodrama that advocated rights for migrant workers. In 1949, 20th Century-Fox employed Bezzerides to adapt his novel Thieves' Market for a film starring Richard Conte as the veteran out for revenge against a crooked racketeer who controls San Francisco's wholesale fruit market. Bezzerides also wrote the screenplay for the bizarre crime melodrama Desert Fury (1947), Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground (1952), Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and Bullet for Joey (1955) starring George Raft. In the 1950s, he was not blacklisted, but was placed on a graylist that limited his opportunities and allowed producers to exploit him. He turned to television and in the 1960s created the long-running television series The Big Valley, starring Barbara Stanwyck.

BIG CLOCK, THE (1948). Directed by Australian-born filmmaker John Farrow, The Big Clock is based on poet Kenneth Fearing's 1946 novel. In the novel, George Stroud, an editor and reporter at Crimeways magazine, meets an attractive blonde woman, Pauline Delos, and spends the night with her. Two months later, when his wife and daughter are away, he takes Delos out again. However, Earl Janoth, Delos's boyfriend and Stroud's boss at Crimeways, sees Delos with Stroud, although he does not recognize her companion. During a fit of jealous rage, Janoth kills Delos and then assigns Stroud to find her mysterious lover. In other words, Stroud is assigned to locate himself—an investigation that places him in extreme peril.

Although the film follows the basic premise of Fearing's plot, it begins with an iconic film noir situation of a man, Stroud (Ray Milland), hiding in the darkness of a huge building (Janoth's) while a hired killer and the police search for him. Stroud's voice-over then recounts the events of the past 24 hours leading to this predicament, and this occupies the body of the film. Both film and novel, however, assimilate this story of murder and infidelity within a thematic concern for the growth of corporate power in the United States, especially the destructive power of media conglomerates such as Janoth's (Charles Laughton) media empire. This fear is encapsulated in the film's décor, notably Janoth's obsession with a huge clock in his art deco building that synchronizes and controls all of the clocks throughout his company. Both the narrative and thematic expression of this fear merge during the film's climax, when Stroud hides in the room housing the clock's mechanism. After he accidentally disturbs its operation, every clock in Janoth's publishing empire is affected. This moment, followed by Janoth's rage and sense of impotence, effectively dramatizes the film's central theme concerning the centralization of financial power in the United States.

The Big Clock was remade in 1987 as No Way Out, directed by Roger Donaldson. Roger Garland's script transfers the setting of the 1948 film to the U.S. Defense Department and focuses on a political conspiracy involving CIA liaison Kevin Costner and the secretary of defense, Gene Hackman.

BIGGERS, EARL DERR (1884–1933). A Harvard-educated American author, Biggers is best remembered for his six Charlie Chan novels, beginning with The House without a Key. The novel was first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1925. He began his writing career as a humor columnist. After a short stint as a drama critic, he published his first novel, the mystery story Seven Keys to Baldpate, in 1913. It was popular with readers, especially after George M. Cohan adapted it for a Broadway play. It was not the intention of Biggers in The House without a Key to create a continuing character in Chan. That was determined by the public reception to the character. His six Charlie Chan novels represented a significant departure from the stereotypical presentation of Chinese characters in Western fiction, which at that time resembled the diabolical villain Fu Manchu as created by Sax Rohmer. Biggers, on the other hand, created a Chinese detective who was human, intelligent, friendly, and well mannered. The other novels featuring Chan are The Chinese Parrot (1926), Behind the Curtain (1928), The Black Camel (1929), Charlie Chan Carries On (1930), and Keeper of the Keys (1932).

BIG SLEEP, THE (1946). The filming for RKO's adaptation of Raymond Chandler's second novel Farewell, My Lovely, which was released as Murder, My Sweet, was completed on 1 July 1944. At the same time, an adaptation of Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep, was in preproduction at Warner Bros. The studio decided to cast Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall for it, following their pairing in To Have and Have Not (1944). Production began with Howard Hawks directing in December 1944, and filming was completed in spring 1945 just before the release of To Have and Have Not. However, following praise for the on-screen chemistry between Bogart and Bacall in that film and the subsequent publicity emanating from their off-screen romance, the studio decided to recut The Big Sleep, delete certain scenes, and film additional scenes between Bogart and Bacall to strengthen their on-screen relationship. The film was finally released in August 1946.

The plot of the film is convoluted and begins when Bogart, as private eye Philip Marlowe, is hired by General Sternwood to prevent Eddie Mars from blackmailing his younger daughter, Carmen. However, Sternwood's older daughter, Vivien (Bacall), is more concerned that Marlowe may investigate the disappearance of Sean Regan, Sternwood's confidant. This premise leads Chandler into a decadent world of gambling, pornography, nymphomania, murder, and drugs. Hawks's film, however, is less concerned with narrative coherence than atmosphere and the romance between Bogart and Bacall—including the notorious scene detailing their favorite sexual practice which bypassed censorship concerns by presenting it as part of a discussion about horse racing.

BIRT, DANIEL (1907–1955). Oxford-educated Daniel Birt worked as an editor and director of British documentaries before his first feature film, the gothic drama The Three Weird Sisters, in 1948. He followed with the excellent crime thriller, The Interrupted Journey (1949), starring Richard Todd as the unfaithful husband caught up in a desperate situation after attempting to flee from his wife with his mistress. For the rest of his film career, until his early death in 1955, Birt's career was mainly concerned with low-budget crime films and thrillers such as Circumstantial Evidence (1952) and Three Steps in the Dark (1953). The latter, which starred Greta Gynt and Hugh Sinclair, was a traditional country house murder mystery. Other crime films directed by Birt included She Shall Have Murder (1950) and The Night Won't Talk (1952).

BIYEOLHAN GEORI (2006). This critically celebrated South Korean gangster film owes much to such Hollywood films as Scarface (1932) and The Godfather (1971), as Min-Ho (Nam-gung Min), one of the characters in the film, acknowledges. Essentially, it traces the rise and fall of a small-time gangster, Kim Byeong-du (Jo In-seong), who leads a small group of young thugs under the control of Sang-cheol (Yun je-min). Byeong's gang is a small cog within a large jopok (gangster) Triad in Seoul, controlled by the seemingly respectable Hwang Heui-Jang (Cheon Ho-Jin). Byeong's primary function within the Triad is to collect debts by violent means, and in this regard, he is extremely successful.

The film, like The Godfather, is more interested with Byeong's place and responsibilities within a system of "families." This includes his duties to his blood family, which is facing eviction, as well as his obligations to the hierarchical criminal Triad and his relationship with former school friend, Min-Ho, and ex-girlfriend Hyeon-ju (Lee Bo-yeong). When his immediate superior in the Triad, Sang-cheol, ignores Byeong's plea for money to assist his family, he bypasses him and accepts an offer from the head of the Triad, Hwang Heui-jang, to kill a public prosecutor. After successfully completing the murder, Byeong is forced to murder Sang-cheol during a wedding celebration because his superior believes that his authority has been undermined. In a moment of weakness, Byeong confides in aspiring filmmaker Min-Ho, who proceeds to insert details of these killings into his first film as a director. This betrayal has fatal consequences for Byeong, and the film conforms to the classical gangster pattern with the gangster's demise at the hands of an ambitious lieutenant. Just as Byeong kills his superior to gain power, another kills him to advance his position within the Triad.

Biyeolhan geori, directed by poet and writer Ha Ya, was nominated for four Grand Bell Awards in South Korea: Best Actor (Jo), Best Film, Best Screenplay (Ha), and Best Supporting Actor (Cheon). The film ridicules the highly choreographed movements of Asian martial arts films by replacing such sequences with a series of graphic set pieces, including a prolonged battle between two gangs in mud under a freeway with baseball bats, wooden planks, and knives. When Min-Ho replicates this incident in his film-within-a-film, Byeong explains to the actors that the extravagant kick and spin moves of conventional martial arts films have no place in the reality of Korean gang battles.

BLACKLIST. Although the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was formed in 1938, its initial investigation into Hollywood was postponed during World War II. However, in 1947, with the resurgence of the Republican Party, a subcommittee of HUAC began hearings into allegations of left-wing and Communist influence in Hollywood. In October 1947, HUAC convened public hearings in Washington where "friendly" witnesses reiterated assertions that Communist infiltration in the Hollywood film industry was widespread. Eleven "unfriendly" witnesses refused to cooperate with the investigation and when one of them, Bertolt Brecht, left the United States for Europe, the remaining unfriendly filmmakers—the "Hollywood Ten," which included Edward Dmytryk, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo—were charged by Congress for contempt and imprisoned for one year. On 25 November 1947, the day after the approval of the contempt citations, a special meeting of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association was convened at the Waldorf Hotel in New York. The meeting comprised the major studio executives, and it agreed to dismiss and deny employment to anyone refusing to cooperate with the investigation by HUAC. This decision lead to the infamous blacklist.

The blacklist was accompanied by an even more insidious "graylist" of people not named in the HUAC hearings but who were subjects of allegations from the FBI, right-wing organizations, rumor, and innuendo. These people were subsequently refused employment, and their careers were destroyed without evidence tested in a public forum.

Investigations by HUAC continued between 1951 and 1954, resulting in the blacklisting of more than 200 filmmakers, including Lee J. Cobb, Howard Da Silva, Jules Dassin, Howard Duff, Cy Endfield, John Garfield, Dashiell Hammett, Sterling Hayden, John Ireland, Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, Abraham Polonsky, Edward G. Robinson, Robert Rossen, Paul Stewart, Orson Welles, Michael Wilson, and Nedrick Young. Some blacklisted filmmakers, such as Trumbo, Wilson, and Young, continued to work in Hollywood through "fronts" (fellow filmmakers who would take the screen credit for their work). Others, including Dassin, Losey, and Endfield, left the United States for Europe. Some of the people blacklisted, such as Dmytryk, Rossen, Kazan, and Hayden, were eventually reinstated by the studios after they supplied HUAC with the names of left-wing filmmakers.

The blacklist began to break down in the early 1960s following the decision to reemploy Trumbo in 1960. This period, especially the early 1950s, is often described as "McCarthyism" due to the crusade by Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy to expose "subversives" within American society.

BLACKMAIL (1929). This is often credited as Alfred Hitchcock's first sound film, although it is only partially a sound film. It was initially planned as a silent, and when it was decided to produce a version with some sound, the plan was jeopardized by lead actress Anny Ondra's heavy Czechoslovakian accent. To overcome this, British actress Joan Barry delivered the dialogue off-camera while Ondra mimed her words. Blackmail was a landmark film for Hitchcock, as he pushed his use of optical and aural subjectivity further than previous films while retaining many of his familiar themes—especially the role of guilt. The film also encourages the audience to adopt a morally ambivalent attitude to its central character, Alice White (Ondra).

White betrays her dull policeman boyfriend Frank Webber (John Longden) by accepting an invitation to a more potentially exciting evening with an artist (Cyril Ritchard). However, guilty pleasure is always followed by punishment in a Hitchcock film, and the artist's sexual ardor is too much for White, and after trying to fight him off, she kills him with a bread knife. After the murder, Hitchcock intensifies White's sense of guilt as she wanders through the city before rejoining her family. This is compounded when Webber joins in the investigation and finds her gloves at the scene of the crime. Consequently, Webber is implicated when he covers up this evidence. The introduction of a blackmailer, Tracy (Donald Calthorpe), temporarily pushes the film's narrative toward a traditional crime thriller, but after Tracy's death at the British Museum, the film returns to its central aspect—the moral dilemma concerning the two lovers. This is not fully resolved by the morally problematic ending when White secretly confesses her guilt to Webber as the two lovers leave the police building—legally free but emotionally scarred.

In Blackmail, Hitchcock extends the formal and thematic possibilities of the crime film. On one occasion, he emphasizes the word "knife" at the expense of other words at the family dinner table to highlight White's fragile mental state after the killing. He also disrupts the film's "happy ending" by drawing attention to the dead artist's painting of a jester in the final image as an ironic comment on justice as the two legally free, but morally guilty, lovers walk from the police station.

BLOOD MONEY (1933). This notoriously perverse film assimilates a bizarre romance between a female masochist and a morally dubious bail bondsman within the conventions of the 1930s gangster film. It was produced and coscripted by Darryl F. Zanuck for his newly formed film company, Twentieth Century. The central character, Bill Bailey (George Bancroft), is a successful bail bondsman with substantial criminal and political connections. He boasts to others that he makes "money off losers." Bailey is a former policeman who was rescued by nightclub (and bordello) owner Ruby Darling (Judith Anderson) after he was fired for accepting graft. At the beginning of the film, their romance has been ongoing for some time. However, he falls in love with young wealthy socialite Helen Talbart (Frances Dee), who is seeking excitement. Specifically, she wants someone who will give her "a good thrashing." If, she tells Bailey, she could find someone like that, "I'd follow him around like a dog on a leash." The middle-aged ex-cop initially satisfies her desire for excitement by associating with the criminal element in society, but eventually she desires even more risk and gravitates to bank robber Drury Darling (Chick Chandler). Her interest in Drury is cemented when, during a kiss, he bites her lip.

Talbart, trying to protect Drury, double-crosses Bailey, and he seeks revenge by informing the police of Drury's whereabouts. Ruby, Drury's older sister, then undermines Bailey's business through her contacts in the underworld. This culminates in an attempt on Bailey's life in a billiard parlor where the eight ball has been replaced by one filled with nitroglycerine. Ruby, learning that Talbart was responsible for Drury's plight, speeds in a taxi to save him.

However, it is not the plot that makes the film so distinctive but the determination of Zanuck, and director Rowland Brown (who also coscripted the film), to undermine the moral basis of the 1930 Production Code. This is evident in the film's refusal to show any form of redemption, as the characters remain unchanged at the end. The film depicts an utterly corrupt society where judges readily conform to Bailey's wishes. Zanuck and Brown also include a number of minor characters who would not be permitted in Hollywood films for many years after the Code was tightened in 1934—including two five-dollar-a-night call girls (one played by Lucille Ball) and a lesbian wearing a tuxedo and a monocle who, after being offered a cigar by Bailey, tells him he is "a sissy." However, Brown (who directed only four films due to his violent off-screen behavior) and Zanuck save their most perverse scene for the end, when Talbart, having being rejected by Drury, eagerly seeks a meeting with a man after she learns that he tried to bash and sexually molest a young woman. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

BLUE LAMP, THE (1950). The most popular British film released in 1950 was The Blue Lamp. In 1955, the success of the film resulted in the resurrection of one of the film's characters, Police Constable (P.C.) George Dixon (Jack Warner), in a long-running BBC television series, Dixon of Dock Green, which continued until 1976. The Blue Lamp introduced a new type of British criminal: the antisocial juvenile delinquent, a recurring character in British crime films in the 1950s. This new breed is represented in the film by Tom Riley (Dirk Bogarde), the leader of a gang of young thugs who turn to crime when the British underworld refuses to help them. The film, however, is eager to establish a clear association between the rise of this new type of criminal and the escalation of crime in postwar Great Britain. To this end, the film utilizes an anonymous narrator who, over a montage of newspaper headlines, depicts the deterioration of communal and family values leading to a new type of British criminal who, the narrator suggests, lacks the "code, experience, and self-discipline of the professional thief." This new breed of criminal, the film implies, is inferior, a "class apart."

The film's schematic structure presents the police force as a kind of family, and the youngest member of the Paddington Green police station, P.C. Andy Mitchell (Jimmy Hanley), is depicted as the surrogate son of P.C. Dixon, a 25-year veteran. Mitchell's absorption into the "family" of policemen is contrasted with the path followed by Riley, who graduates from petty theft to murder. This dual structure is emphasized by crosscutting between the friendly communal activities at the Paddington Green station (which includes choir practice and dart matches) and the criminal activities taking place in Riley's apartment, including a plan to rob the Coliseum Cinema. After Riley kills Dixon outside the cinema, the police, led by Mitchell, receive strong assistance from the British underworld, the "legitimate" criminals, who trap Riley at a greyhound race at White City Stadium. However Bogarde's unsettling mixture of disturbed sexuality and repressed violence disrupts the film's simple premise concerning its condemnation of this new breed of criminal. While the film celebrates the cooperation between the police and "legitimate," or old-style, criminals, it is Bogarde's Riley who is remembered after the film ends.

BODY HEAT (1981). The critical and commercial success enjoyed by Body Heat resurrected interest in the James M. Cain strand of film noir found in his novels and subsequent films, especially Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). Director and scriptwriter Lawrence Kasdan knowingly reworks Cain's formula involving a seductive but greedy woman who convinces a pliable man to kill her husband. In Body Heat, Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) seduces inept Florida lawyer Ned Racine (William Hurt), and he murders her husband Edmund (Richard Crenna). Consistent with the Cain formula, the relationship between Matty and Ned unravels immediately after Edmund's death. While the film constantly reworks many of the formal and narrative conventions associated with the earlier adaptations of Cain's novels, the most striking change involves the sexual explicitness between Matty and Ned compared to the mid-1940s, when the Production Code imposed severe restrictions on Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. The other significant change involved the film's ending, as the absence of the Production Code, which always required the punishment of criminal transgression, meant that Kasdan could show Matty escaping unpunished, whereas her 1940s counterparts, Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Phyllis in Double Indemnity, both died for their transgressions.

Kasdan's film, with its pseudo-1940s score dominated by the use of the saxophone and its bold use of color in the costumes and décor (most notably Matty's striking black bathroom), combined with Kathleen Turner and William Hurt's ability to project a convincing degree of passion in their steamy love scenes, ensured the significance of Body Heat. The film was a commercial success and was followed by many inferior variations. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

BOEHM, SYDNEY (1908–1990). Sydney Boehm was born in Philadelphia and began his writing career as a journalist before moving to screenwriting in the 1940s. In a long career, he specialized in genre films, especially crime films. His first screen credit was for High Wall (1947), starring Robert Taylor as the military veteran suffering from amnesia. Boehm followed with one of his best films, Joseph H. Lewis's The Undercover Man (1949), starring Glenn Ford as a U.S. Treasury agent trying to bring down a mobster modeled on Al Capone. A long list of crime films followed for Boehm, including Anthony Mann's Side Street (1950); Mystery Street (1950); Union Station (1950); Second Chance (1953); Black Tuesday (1954), starring Edward G. Robinson; Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953), starring Ford; Rogue Cop (1954); and Hell on Frisco Bay (1955), costarring Alan Ladd and Robinson. The last three films were based on novels by William P. McGivern.

BOGARDE, DIRK (1921–1999). Born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde, Bogarde was the son of a Dutch-born art editor for the London Times. Bogart studied as scenic designer and worked briefly as a commercial artist before making his stage debut in 1939. He appeared on stage in J. B. Priestley's When We Are Married, followed by a brief appearance in the George Formby film Come On George (1939). During World War II, he served with the Air Photographic Intelligence Unit. After the experience of driving through the Belsen concentration camp in 1945, Bogarde said that nothing would frighten or disturb him as much again.

After the war, Bogarde's performance as the neurotic killer in the play Power with Glory attracted the attention of Rank Studio. Although Bogarde was dismissive of his early screen roles—which included his first starring role as the irresponsible husband William Latch in Esther Waters (1948), the speedway motorcycle racer in Once a Jolly Swagman (1948), and Jean Simmons's savior in the thriller So Long at the Fair (1950)—he quickly gained a strong fan base. His major film break was as the young thug Tom Riley in The Blue Lamp (1950). In this film, Bogarde was able to project a feeling of sexual ambiguity and psychological intensity—qualities that characterize his best films, such as Victim (1961). For most of the 1950s, however, he was cast as a conventional hero in films such as Simba (1955) and Campbell's Kingdom (1957), with an occasional shift for films such as Hunted (1952), where Bogarde played a murderer who befriends a young boy. His most successful films in the 1950s were romantic comedies, especially the highly successful "doctor" series that began with Doctor in the House (1954). Bogarde reprised his role as Simon Sparrow in three sequels.

By the end of the 1950s, Bogarde was tired of "matinee idol" roles and sought more challenging material. This desire was realized when he was cast as the nonpracticing homosexual Melville Farr involved with blackmailers in Victim. He consolidated this shift throughout the 1960s, especially after he resumed his film relationship with expatriate American director Joseph Losey. This relationship began in 1954 when Losey cast Bogarde as a disturbed young man who willfully destroys the marital relationship between a psychoanalyst (Alexander Knox) and his wife (Alexis Smith) in The Sleeping Tiger (1954). In 1963, Bogarde appeared in another Losey film, The Servant, as the manipulative servant Hugo Barrett who assumes absolute control over his master (James Fox). Bogarde starred in three more films for Losey, including the critically celebrated Accident (1967).

Bogarde, ever restless, sought greater variety, and he left England for the Continent, first to Italy to work with Luchino Visconti, and then to France, where he lived on a farm in Provence for nearly 20 years. In 1974, he starred in Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter as an ex-Nazi officer in a sadomasochistic relationship with a woman (Charlotte Rampling) he had abused years earlier in a concentration camp. Although this film provoked some discontent from his admirers, this was of little concern for Bogarde, who felt that audience adulation was rather silly. After appearing in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Despair (1978), he semiretired from the screen to concentrate on his writing. Bogarde was knighted in 1992 and died of a heart attack in 1999. His last film was Bernard Tavernier's Nostalgia (1990).

BOGART, HUMPHREY (1890–1957). Humphrey Bogart was Warner Bros.' biggest star throughout the 1940s and was listed on the exhibitors' top-10 poll every year from 1943 to 1949. Bogart was born into a middle-class New York family, the son of a doctor. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War I before embarking on a stage career in the late 1920s. He made little impact in his first visit to Hollywood in 1930–31 and returned to the New York stage. His career was at its lowest ebb with few stage roles when, unexpectedly, he won the part of gangster Duke Mantee for the Broadway production of The Petrified Forest. When Leslie Howard, the star of the stage production, insisted that Bogart repeat the role in the Warner Bros. film version, Bogart's Hollywood career was finally under way. Warner, however, already had Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and, from 1938, George Raft under contract, so there was little opportunity for Bogart to star in the studio's major crime films. Hence, from 1936 to 1941, he played supporting roles to Robinson, Cagney, and Raft with a few lead roles in B movies. During this period, he made 29 films, often as a vicious gangster.

His first starring role in a major film came as the aging gangster Roy Earle in John Huston's 1941 film High Sierra. Bogart won the role only after Raft declined the film. High Sierra gave Bogart his first opportunity to move beyond criminal stereotypes by adding a sense of vulnerability and inner turmoil to his tough-guy persona. As "Mad Dog" Earle, he finds redemption and love before his death on the slopes of Mount Whitney. High Sierra was the first presentation of the distinctive Bogart persona—a morally ambiguous figure at odds with society's values.

Bogart followed with his portrayal of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade in Warner's third version of The Maltese Falcon (1941). In the early 1940s, Warner Bros. encouraged Bogart to shift away from gangster roles and present a more romantic persona in films such as Casablanca (1942), To Have and Have Not (1944), and Passage to Marseille (1944). The adaptation of Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel The Big Sleep (1946) combined both sides of his screen image, and the studio exploited his off-screen romance with his costar, Lauren Bacall by delaying the film's release after production had finished to allow additional filming between Bogart and Bacall.

From the mid-1940s, Bogart was increasingly cast in roles that presented him as psychologically disturbed. In Conflict (1945), he played a wife killer. This was followed by his mentally deranged artist in The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947) who paints his wives as angels of death before killing them. Dark Passage (1947), based on the 1946 novel by David Goodis, stars Bogart as an escaped convict wrongly convicted of killing his wife; Bacall costarred as a woman who believes in his innocence. In 1946, Jack Warner replaced Bogart's 1942 contract with a 15-year offer of $200,000 per film plus his right to exercise control over both the choice of director and story. However, after the release of Key Largo in 1948, he appeared in only one more crime film for the studio, The Enforcer (1951).

Bogart established his own production company, Santana Productions, and distributed his films, such as In a Lonely Place (1950), through Columbia. This film, one of his best, gave him a showcase for many facets of his screen persona as a psychologically damaged screenwriter. Cancer curtailed Bogart's career, and his last role was, fittingly, a crime film, The Harder They Fall (1956), with Bogart as an ex–sports columnist turned boxing promoter caught up in a fraudulent boxing event.

Bogart's other crime films include Three on a Match (1933), Bullets or Ballots (1936), Black Legion (1937), San Quentin (1937), Marked Woman (1937), Kid Galahad (1937), Dead End (1937), Racket Busters (1938), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), King of the Underworld (1939), The Roaring Twenties (1939), Invisible Stripes (1939), Brother Orchid (1940), The Wagons Roll at Night (1941), The Big Shot (1942), Dead Reckoning (1947), Knock on Any Door (1949), Deadline U.S.A. (1952), Beat the Devil (1954), and The Desperate Hours (1955).

BOSTON BLACKIE. The genesis of the ex-convict and master safecracker known as Boston Blackie was the July 1914 edition of the American Magazine. Creator Jack Boyle followed with more magazine stories, which were collected and published as a book in 1919 as Boston Blackie. Blackie's first screen appearances were in 1918 in Blackie's Little Pal and, the next year, in Blackie's Redemption. Bert Lyell, who also played the Lone Wolf, portrayed Blackie in both films. In Paramount's production The Face in the Fog (1922), Blackie, played by Lionel Barrymore, rescues a Russian princess from the Bolsheviks. Thereafter, a number of other actors were cast as Blackie: David Powell in Missing Millions (1922), William Russell in Boston Blackie (1923), Forrest Stanley in Through the Dark (1924), and Raymond Glenn in The Return of Boston Blackie (1927).

The actor most associated with Blackie, however, was Chester Morris, who starred in 14 films for Columbia between 1941 and 1949, beginning with Meet Boston Blackie (1941). In these low-budget films, often shot in 12 days, Blackie was presented as a former jewel thief and con artist. The films emphasized comedy as much as crime, with the standard plot requiring Blackie to clear his name and capture the culprits after being sought by Inspector Farraday for a crime he did not commit. Morris, a more-than-capable actor, imbued the role with the requisite amount of charm and violence. He was supported in 11 films by George E. Stone as a former convict, "the Runt," while Richard Lane was Blackie's adversary, Farraday, in every film. Lloyd Corrigan was cast as Arthur Manleder, an eccentric middle-aged playboy, in a number of the films. Columbia also cast up-and-coming actresses, such as Ann Savage (After Midnight with Boston Blackie, 1943), Dorothy Malone (One Mysterious Night, 1944), and Nina Foch (Boston Blackie's Rendezvous, 1945). Expert directors were also utilized, including Robert Florey (Meet Boston Blackie); Edward Dmytryk, who directed the best film in the series, Confessions of Boston Blackie (1941); William Castle (The Chance of a Lifetime, 1943); and Oscar (Budd) Boetticher (One Mysterious Night). The last film in the series, Boston Blackie's Chinese Venture (1949), presented a typical plot for this series when Blackie and the Runt are reported leaving a Chinese laundry after its owner is found dead, forcing Blackie to expose the real murderer. Morris also played Boston Blackie on the radio in the 1940s.

BRACKETT, LEIGH (1915–1978). A devotee of swashbuckling and science-fiction stories published in pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, Leigh Brackett sold her first science-fiction story to Astounding Science Fiction when she was 25. Although she became a regular contributor to Planet Stories, Brackett is remembered as one of the few female writers of hard-boiled detective fiction working in Hollywood in the 1940s. In 1944, she published No Good for a Corpse, a crime novel with a tough private eye and a Hollywood setting. Producer-director Howard Hawks read the novel and invited Brackett to work on the screenplay for The Big Sleep (1946) with William Faulkner, although Hawks was reportedly surprised when he discovered that Brackett was a woman. Brackett and Faulkner worked on the script separately, and Hawks turned to Brackett to toughen up Faulkner's contributions.

Brackett preferred novels and short stories, especially science fiction, to screenwriting. However, Hawks also employed Brackett to work on Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), and El Dorado (1967), all starring John Wayne. She also scripted an adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel The Long Goodbye for Robert Altman's 1973 film starring Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe. Brackett's 1957 novel The Tiger among Us, concerning a juvenile gang terrorizing a middle-aged man, was filmed as 13 West Street (1962) starring Alan Ladd. Brackett's last script was for the George Lucas film The Empire Strikes Back (1980). She died of cancer soon after delivering the first draft of the script to Lucas.

Brackett's only other contribution to the crime genre was her script for the sixth entry in the Crime Doctor series, Crime Doctor's Man Hunt (1946), starring Warner Baxter as Dr. Robert Ordway. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

BRADY, SCOTT (1924–1985). Scott Brady was born Gerard Kenneth Tierney in Brooklyn, the younger brother of actor Lawrence Tierney. He was a regular leading man in B movies in the late 1940s and 1950s. Brady played an escaped convict in Canon City (1948), followed by the lead role of a troubled military veteran involved in murder in Undertow (1949). In Port of New York (1949), he was a government agent combating gangsters involved in the narcotics industry. His best role in a crime film was the policeman who pursues Richard Basehart in He Walked by Night (1949). Brady, however, was better known for his westerns for Republic, especially Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), starring Joan Crawford.

BRAHM, JOHN (1893–1982). Born Hans Brahm in Hamburg, Germany, John Brahm worked as a stage director in Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. He then moved to Great Britain, where he was an editor, screenwriter, and production supervisor before directing his first film, a remake of Broken Blossoms (1936). After shifting to Hollywood in 1937, his early crime films included Let Us Live (1939) and Rio (1939). Brahm's characteristic style, involving low-key lighting and dramatic camera compositions, was heavily influenced by expressionism. This was particularly evident in many of his 1940s films, including three gothic-inflected crime films: The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945), both starring Laird Cregar, and Guest in the House (1944), starring Anne Baxter as a mentally disturbed young woman. Brahm also directed the second screen adaptation of Raymond Chandler's 1942 novel The High Window. The film, produced by 20th Century-Fox in 1947, was retitled The Brasher Doubloon and starred George Montgomery as a lackluster Philip Marlowe. In 1947, Brahm directed the film noir The Locket, with flashbacks within flashbacks, a convoluted tale of a psychotic kleptomaniac (Lorraine Day) who is a destructive force in the lives of the men (including Robert Mitchum) who fall in love with her. Brahm worked mainly in television in the 1950s and 1960s.

BRAZILIAN GANGSTERS. In 2002, the release of the Cidade de Deus (City of God) provoked debate in Brazil and elsewhere, even eliciting a response from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva about the depiction of life in the favelas, the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The film's impact was enhanced by the fact that the young actors were recruited from the slums. Its story follows, in a fashion, the conventional rise of young gangsters, beginning with small-time robberies in the 1960s, to drug trafficking in the 1970s. Directed by Fernando Meirelles, City of God attracted worldwide attention with Oscar nominations and an internationally strong box office. However, City of God was not the first film to show crime in the favelas. Favela Five Times in 1961 and The Big City in 1966 emerged from the 1950s Cinema Novo movement. Pixote: A lei do mais fraco, directed by Hector Babenco in 1981, attracted worldwide attention for its tale of a young boy who sells drugs in São Paulo.

The production of other Brazilian gangster films was more sporadic. The 1973 film A rainha diaba (Devil Queen) focuses on a gay gangster who controls the rackets in Rio. O amuleto de Ogum (The Amulet of Ogum, 1974) mixed fantasy and realism in its story of a boy who is made immortal by his mother before despatching him to gangsters; when the boy joins a rival gang, his former colleagues attempt to murder his mother. O dia das profissionais (The Day of the Professionals) in 1976 was a more traditional crime story concerning a criminal who employs a man to kill the thief who stole his jewels, while Os matadores (Belly Up) in 1997 concerned two hit men waiting for their intended victim in a small border town.

Brazil also produced a number of film noirs, including Maior que o ódio (Greater than Hatred, 1951), which focuses on two boyhood friends ending up on different sides of the law, the caper film Mulheres e milhões (Woman and Millions, 1961), and a thriller, Assassinato em Copacabana (Assassination in Copacabana, 1962). The police thriller Os depravados (The Depraved Ones, 1979) was followed by a film influenced by the characters and situations found in the novels of James M. Cain, Boca do Lixo (1990). Terra estrangeira (Foreign Land, 1996), a Brazilian-Portuguese coproduction directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, traces the plight of a university student who becomes involved in a smuggling operation, while O que é isso, companheira? (Four Days in September, 1997) is a political thriller based on the true story of the abduction of the U.S. ambassador in 1969.

BRIGHTON ROCK (1947). Brighton Rock, along with Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), Mine Own Executioner (1947), and The Third Man (1949), signaled a profound change in the British crime film. These films and others emphasized the disturbed psychology of their protagonists as much as the actual details of the crime itself. This shift is evident in the film's first image of young gangster Pinkie Brown, played by Richard Attenborough, who first played Brown on stage at the Garrick Theatre in 1943. This low-key image of baby-faced Brown emphasizes his brooding sadism as he is presented not as a youth seduced into the world of crime but as a disturbed young man. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie assumes control of a gang of small-time thugs in Brighton in the 1930s when its leader is killed by a rival gang. Brown blames the killing on Fred Hale (Alan Wheatley), a newspaper journalist who is visiting Brighton as part of a promotional stunt to increase his paper's circulation. After Brown murders Hale on the Ghost Train in the local amusement park, the narrative focuses on his instability. Brown, who does not like women, has to court and marry 17-year-old waitress Rose (Carol Marsh) to prevent her from testifying against him for the murder of Hale. His plan to convince his young bride to commit suicide is disrupted by blowsy entertainer Ida Arnold (Hermione Baddeley), who becomes involved after the police declare that Hale committed suicide when Arnold knows that he was murdered.

The U.S. release title for Brighton Rock was Young Scarface, and Pinkie Brown shares the same twisted sexuality that characterized Howard Hawks's gangster in Scarface (1932). After killing elderly gang member Spicer (Wylie Watson), Brown shows his true feelings for Rose. On their wedding night, he speaks his contempt for her on a gramophone record that he presents to her as a wedding present. Instead of the expected declaration of his love for his bride, he records, "I hate you, you little slut. You make me sick. Why don't you go back to Nelson Place and leave me alone." The perverse basis of this scene is emphasized by the composition, with Brown in the foreground while Rose, unable to hear his words, looks adoringly at her husband. Rose does not hear this recording until the end of the film, after Pinkie's death, but the record has become warped and all she hears is his prologue: "You asked me to make a record of my voice. Well here it is. What you want me to say is I love you." At this point the record sticks on the repetition of "I love you." Although Graham Greene criticized this ending, which departed from his novel, it is deeply ironic, utterly bleak, and totally in keeping with the mood of the film. The film was remade, with a number of changes, in 2010, directed by Rowan Joffe with Sam Riley as Pinkie.

BRODIE, STEVE (1919–1992). Steve Brodie was born John Stephens in El Dorado, Kansas. In his youth, he raced cars, boxed, and made bootleg whisky. His initial career choice was that of criminal lawyer, but when he left school he settled on acting. However, after auditioning in New York without success for more than a year, Stephens changed his name to Steve Brodie, after the New York saloon owner who supposedly jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River in 1886 and survived. Some casting agents assumed he was related to the saloon owner, and he did not correct them.

An MGM talent scout brought Brodie to Hollywood, and the studio loaned him to Universal for his film debut in Ladies Courageous (1944). When MGM did not renew his contract, he freelanced before signing with RKO, where he appeared as the cowardly bigot Floyd Bowers who watches Robert Ryan beat a Jewish man to death in Crossfire (1947). At RKO, he was also the shady private detective who destroys Robert Mitchum's plan for a tranquil life with Jane Greer in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947). Brodie followed this with a series of crime films, including playing the tough hoodlum Al Mapes in Richard Fleischer's Armored Car Robbery (1950) and prison escapee Jinx Raynor in the film version of Horace McCoy's novel Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950). In more than 140 films and television appearances from 1944 to 1988, he rarely played the hero. The main exception, apart from a couple of very low-budget crime films (Spy in the Sky, 1958; Arson for Hire, 1959), was the newlywed truck driver threatened by Raymond Burr in Anthony Mann's Desperate (1947).

Brodie's other crime films include Criminal Court (1946), The Falcon's Adventure (1946), Bodyguard (1948), I Cheated the Law (1949), Tough Assignment (1949), The Great Plane Robbery (1950), Joe Palooka in Triple Cross (1951), M (1951), The Crooked Circle (1957), and Three Came to Kill (1960).

BROWN, FATHER. Conservative Catholic philosopher, journalist, historian, and author G. K. Chesterton created his popular clerical detective, the Roman Catholic priest Father Brown, in 1910 with his short story "The Blue Cross," which was published in the September issue of Storyteller. Father Brown, who was described by Ellery Queen as one of the three great detectives of all time, appeared in five books and a number of films. The first book, The Innocence of Father Brown, was published in 1911. This was followed by The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914), The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), The Secret of Father Brown (1927), and, finally, The Scandal of Father Brown (1935). Chesterton died the following year.

Brown was loosely based on Chesterton's friend Father John O'Connor. Chesterton presented his detective as a plump, shortsighted man who often caught his adversaries off-guard with his stumbling, disorganized habits. The priest, however, possessed a keen intelligence that was able to solve crimes due to his ability to get inside the mind of the criminal. His methods were less based on deduction and logic and more on his understanding of human nature. Once the criminals were apprehended, Brown was not interested in their punishment, but in their redemption.

The films that feature Father Brown include the Hollywood production Father Brown, Detective, released by Paramount in 1934 starring Walter Connolly as the clerical detective and Paul Lukas as a master jewel thief. However, the best-known film featuring Brown was the 1954 Columbia British production Father Brown, starring Alec Guinness as Brown and Peter Finch as the notorious art thief Gustave Flambeau. This film, directed by Robert Hamer, is a gentle story of redemption in which Brown, after failing to dissuade the police from sending a valuable religious artifact from London to Rome without a police guard, travels with the article to Paris, where Flambeau, disguised as a priest, steals it. Brown tracks the master thief down to his estate in provincial France, retrieves the stolen article, and celebrates Flambeau's redemption. Although his career is placed under jeopardy by the theft, Father Brown is motivated by his desire for Flambeau's salvation, not revenge.

After Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism in 1922, his novels often functioned as a platform for his religious philosophy. Similarly, the 1954 film was not only a mystery film but also a low-key religious parable celebrating the virtues of the nonmaterialistic world. Heinz Rühmann appeared as Father Brown in two German films in the 1960s, while Kenneth More played him in a 1973 British television series. See also CLASSICAL DETECTIVE FILMS.

BURNETT, W. R. (1899–1982). Three novels written by William Riley Burnett, almost 10 years apart, changed the gangster film. They were Little Caesar in 1929, High Sierra in 1940, and The Asphalt Jungle in 1949. Overall, he wrote 36 novels, 18 of which were crime novels, and 27 screenplays, and he received 60 screen credits. Born in Springfield, Ohio, Burnett initially worked as a statistician until 1927 when he left for Chicago. Working at the Northmere Hotel, Burnett listened to the gangsters that he encountered in the hotel, and this provided material while also allowing him to recall their distinctive slang in his stories. In Little Caesar, he drew upon Machiavelli's story of power, betrayal, and corruption in The Prince for his tale of gangster Caesar Enrico ("Rico") Bandello. Warner Bros. bought the rights and adapted it into a highly successful film starring Edward G. Robinson. After the success of Little Caesar, Burnett was employed as a screenwriter and worked, sometimes uncredited, on numerous crime films in the next three decades—including Beast of the City (1932), Scarface (1932), High Sierra (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), Nobody Lives Forever (1946), The Racket (1951), and I Died a Thousand Times (1955), a remake of High Sierra.

BURR, RAYMOND (1917–1993). Raymond William Stacey Burr was born in New Westminster, British Columbia. After his parents divorced, he moved to Vallejo, California, with his mother. He began his acting career at the Pasadena Playhouse and made his film debut in 1940 and his Broadway debut in 1941. Prior to achieving fame on television as the quintessential version of Erle Stanley Gardner's lawyer-sleuth Perry Mason, Burr was one of the cinema's best villains, as his hulking body suggested menace, but his manner and persona exuded a sinister charm. These qualities were most evident in Anthony Mann's Desperate (1947) and Raw Deal (1948). He was equally despicable as the married police inspector Tony Pope who has an affair with Barbara Stanwyck in Crime of Passion (1957) and, infamously, as the wife killer who hunts down wheelchair-bound James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). In Pitfall (1948), Burr was a disreputable private detective who harasses a young model (Lizabeth Scott). Burr's other crime films include I Love Trouble (1948), Ruthless (1948), Sleep, My Love (1948), Walk a Crooked Mile (1948), Abandoned (1949), Borderline (1950), Red Light (1950), Unmasked (1950), His Kind of Woman (1951), M (1951), Please Murder Me (1956), and Affair in Havana (1957).
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CAGNEY, JAMES (1899–1986). Born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, James Cagney was a tough street kid who wanted to be a dancer. These two attributes, fighting and dancing, defined his film career. His first break was as a dancer in the vaudeville production Every Sailor, where he was required to dress in women's clothes, including high heels. His breakthrough role in film came as the gangster who takes over Lew Ayres's gang in The Doorway to Hell, which was released one month before Little Caesar in 1930. The Public Enemy, which was released the following year, made him a star as the violent, ego-driven, strutting gangster Tom Powers. Cagney was initially cast as Matt, Tom's best friend, with Donald Woods as Powers. However, director William Wellman reversed the casting after watching the daily rushes. Following The Public Enemy, Warner Bros. starred Cagney in a succession of crime-related films, including Smart Money (1931), costarring Edward G. Robinson; Taxi (1932); and Lady Killer (1933), where, instead of pushing a grapefruit into the face of Mae Clarke as he did in The Public Enemy, Cagney pulls the actress across the floor by her hair. In G-Men (1935), he switched to the other side of the law without changing his aggressive character traits.

Later in the decade, the studio cast Cagney in a range of genres, including westerns such as Oklahoma Kid (1939), but audiences preferred him in urban settings, especially gangster films such as The Roaring Twenties (1939). In the early 1940s, United Artists assisted Cagney in establishing his own production company, and Cagney starred in Johnny Come Lately (1943) and Blood on the Sun (1945). At the end of the decade, he returned to Warner Bros. for his greatest gangster role in White Heat (1949) as Cody Jarrett who, in the words of studio publicity, was a "homicidal paranoiac with a mother fixation." Cagney followed in a similar role as escapee Ralph Cotter, who exploits, and destroys, everybody associated with him in Warner's 1950 adaptation of Horace McCoy's novel Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. His last significant gangster role was as Martin "the Gimp" Synder, who exerted considerable control over the career of real-life singer Ruth Etting (Doris Day) in Love Me or Leave Me (1955).

CAIN, JAMES M. (1892–1977). James M. Cain is often associated with other writers of hard-boiled fiction such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Cain, however, always rejected this association, arguing that such a school of writing never existed. Cain, unlike Hammett and Chandler, did not use recurring characters like Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. Nor did he utilize detectives or investigators—except for the sheriff in Sinful Woman (1948) and the insurance investigator in Jealous Woman (1950). His narrators are not tough, resourceful detectives but marginal characters seeking fame, fortune, and excitement. Generally, they find death and misfortune. While he employed first-person narration, Cain's storytelling differed from Chandler's and others' because it often took the form of a confession.

The son of a college professor and an opera singer, he was born in Annapolis, Maryland, and studied at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. After military service in World War I, he drifted into journalism, including seven years with the New York World. After failing to establish himself as a playwright, he moved to Hollywood in 1931 and secured a position at Paramount as a screenwriter. He would return to screenwriting over the next decade, as he liked the money but disliked the work and received very few film credits.

Cain relished California, and it rejuvenated his imagination and provided the setting for his most famous novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice. This highly influential story of a murderous triangle involving two men and a sensual woman became the basis of an important strand in film noir involving infidelity, domesticity, and murder. The real-life inspiration for the tale was the 1927–28 murder trial and execution of Ruth Snyder and her lover Judd Gray for the murder of Snyder's husband. Cain employed what he called the "love rack," a technique borrowed from screenwriter Vincent Lawrence. Its basic premise was that once the pair had committed the murder, their relationship would lose its passion and they would turn on each other. Lawrence also provided the title for The Postman Always Rings Twice after the publisher rejected Cain's initial title, Bar-B-Que. When Lawrence told Cain that he always knew when his postman was at the door because he rang twice, Cain immediately realized that he had his title as it conveyed the notion that punishment, even if delayed, was inevitable. The Postman Always Ring Twice was an immediate best-seller even though it created considerable controversy and an obscenity trial. The novel was banned in Boston and Canada.

In 1936, Double Indemnity appeared as an eight-part serial for Liberty magazine and was published, with other stories, as Three of a Kind in 1943. The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity were both filmed, in 1946 by MGM and in 1944 by Paramount, respectively.

Serenade in 1937 was Cain's most bizarre novel, featuring a bisexual opera singer and a Mexican prostitute. Warner Bros. stripped the story of its controversial aspects and released a screen version in 1956. A more satisfactory adaptation of a Cain story was Warner's 1946 adaptation of his 1941 novel Mildred Pierce, starring Joan Crawford as Mildred and Zachary Scott as Monty Beragon. The studio changed the story by adding a murder, although a television miniseries, produced by HBO and broadcast in five episodes in 2011 starring British actor Kate Winslet in the title role and Australian actor Guy Pearce as Beragon, closely follows Cain's story. In 1956, screenwriter Robert Blees adapted Cain's 1942 novel Love's Lovely Counterfeit for the gangster film Slightly Scarlet with John Payne. Cain's 1947 novel The Butterfly was filmed in 1981. After the end of his third marriage in 1947, Cain remarried and left Los Angeles for Hyattsville, Maryland, where he continued to write until his death.

CAINE, MICHAEL (1933– ). Born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite in the charity wing of St. Olave's hospital in South London, Michael Caine changed his name after the release of the 1954 film The Caine Mutiny. He left school at 16 and worked at a number of different jobs until military service in Korea. Caine was employed as assistant stage manager at the Horsham Repertory Company in Sussex and, from 1956 to 1962, alternated between small roles on television and repertory theater. His major break came when he replaced Peter O'Toole in the play The Long and the Short and the Tall. Director Cy Endfield elevated him to film stardom when he cast him as Lt. Gonville Bromhead in Zulu (1964). Next came secret agent Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File (1965), a role he repeated four times in films from 1966 to 1997. He also starred in the caper film The Italian Job (1969), costarred with Laurence Olivier in Sleuth (1972) (and played the Olivier role in Kenneth Branagh's 2007 remake), and was the amoral hit man Jack Carter in Get Carter (1971), with a brief cameo in the 2000 Hollywood remake starring Sylvester Stallone.

Caine, who grew up among gangsters and con men, played a vicious criminal in Mona Lisa (1986) and a businessman who kills his way to the top of the corporate ladder in A Shock to the System (1990). He was a deliberately incompetent Sherlock Holmes in Without a Clue (1988). In the caper film Flawless (2008), Caine enlists the help of Demi Moore to help him rob his former employer, the London Diamond Corp. In 2009, Caine had one of his best roles in years in Harry Brown as the 77-year-old retired pensioner living on an impoverished London housing estate who turns vigilante and seeks vengeance for the murder of a close friend after he is attacked by local youths; this combination of action and meditation on the difficulties of aging on a low income in contemporary society gave Caine ample opportunity to display the full range of his remarkable acting talent. Caine was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1992 and knighted in 2000.

CAPER FILMS. Robbery provides the basis for the earliest films, including the trick film Sherlock Holmes Baffled that was produced by Biograph Studio between 1900 and 1903. This was followed by The Great Train Robbery (1903), often cited as the first western; The Bold Bank Robbery (1904); and The Great Jewel Robbery (1905). In literary fiction, the caper story—which involves a thief, or thieves, who execute a daring robbery—emerged from the stories based on the activities of gentleman thieves such as A. J. Raffles. Raffles was an expert safecracker who robbed the wealthy by night while moving in high society during the day. Robberies are also common in early sound gangster films such as Little Caesar (1931), where Rico (Edward G. Robinson) appears robbing a gas station, and Bugs Raymond (Spencer Tracy) masterminding a protection racket in Quick Millions (1931). This continued into the 1940s in films such as High Sierra (1940), The Killers (1946), Criss Cross (1949), White Heat (1949), and Gun Crazy (1950). A key difference between these films and the 1950s caper film was that the focus was not on the robbery but on other aspects of the genre.

John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) was the first fully developed caper film, as it concentrates on the planning, execution, and aftermath of the robbery. Huston's film established many of the key narrative conventions and characterizations that would shape the caper film for many years. Based on W. R. Burnett's 1949 novel, the film presented a three-part narrative structure: the recruitment of the criminals, each with specialist abilities; the rehearsal and execution of the robbery; and the bitter aftermath where, at least until the 1960s, the criminals would either die or be captured by the police. Importantly, the film focuses on the criminals, not the police. Huston's film was remade as The Badlanders (1958), Cairo (1963), and Cool Breeze (1972).

Following the success of The Asphalt Jungle, a cycle of caper films followed, including The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955), The Killing (1956), Odds against Tomorrow (1959), The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (1960), The League of Gentlemen (1960), and A Prize of Arms (1961). Some, such as Violent Saturday (1955) and The Big Caper (1956), reversed the moral emphasis in Huston's film by presenting the criminals as a threat to society.

Beginning with Ocean's Eleven in 1960, the tone of the caper film changed. Comedy and romance were emphasized at the expense of suspense and danger. In films like The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), they even get away with the money. Similar films include Topkapi (1964), with director Dassin returning to the caper film; How to Steal a Million (1966); Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966); Gambit (1966); Grand Slam (1967); They Came to Rob Las Vegas (1968); The Italian Job (1969); The Sicilian Clan (1969); Perfect Friday (1970); The Hot Rock (1972) and its sequel, The Bank Shot (1974), which was based on the same novel by Donald Westlake; The Heist (1971), also known as $ (Dollars); The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973); Lady Ice (1973); Cops and Robbers (1974); 11 Harrowhouse (1974); Diamonds (1975); and Rough Cut (1980). The Great Train Robbery, released in 1979, was based on a real-life British robbery in the mid-1880s when gold was stolen from a moving train. Similarly, The Brink's Job (1978) presents the robbery of the Brink's headquarters in Boston in 1950 in a lighthearted manner.

This trend continued from the 1960s to remakes of The Thomas Crown Affair in 1999 and The Italian Job in 2003. Occasionally, a darker caper film was produced, such as The Score (2001) and The Bank Job (2008). This latter film was based on a real-life robbery in 1971 where British Intelligence took an active role in removing a safe-deposit box from a British bank because of its controversial contents. See also POLICE PROCEDURALS.

CAPONE, AL (1899–1947). Alphonse Capone was born in Brooklyn and acquired distinctive parallel scars on his left cheek in a bar fight when he was a teenager. Howard Hawks titled his 1932 gangster film Scarface, although he called his gangster Tony Camonte. In 1919, Capone left New York for Chicago and became a member of Johnny Torrio's gang, which, in turn, was part of a larger organization controlled by Jim Colosimo. However, when Colosimo was not interested in the sale of illegal alcohol (bootlegging) during the early years of Prohibition, he was murdered in May 1920. Torrio and Capone established a flourishing criminal organization in the early 1920s. In 1925, Torrio retired following an unsuccessful attempt on his life, and Capone assumed control of a large criminal empire with a board of directors and annual revenue from bootlegging, prostitution, and protection (plus some legitimate activities—Capone posed as an antique dealer) of more than $60 million.

Although Capone was protected in Chicago by its mayor, "Big Bill" Thompson, other politicians, and corrupt treasury agents, he was pursued by various civic groups, including the vigilante commission known as the Secret Six that was set up by businessman Robert Isham Randolph. Eventually, adverse publicity forced the federal government to intervene, and Eliot Ness, from the Treasury Department, formed a nine-man squad of Prohibition agents known as the "Untouchables." In 1929, Capone was convicted of carrying a concealed weapon, and while serving a short prison sentence, his tax records were scrutinized. In 1931, he was found guilty of income tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years. He was released in 1939 on psychiatric grounds, associated with the venereal disease he had contracted years earlier and which by this time had developed into neuro-syphilis. Capone spent his final years in a Florida mansion and died from a brain hemorrhage on 9 January 1947.

In 1929, The Racket was released with Louis Wolheim as an expensively dressed bootlegger protected by local politicians. This thinly disguised representation of Capone's relationship with Mayor Thompson was based on a 1927 play that was banned in Chicago because it was perceived as an attack on Thompson and other local politicians. The Racket was the first film to re-create aspects of Capone's life.

Similar films followed in the 1930s—including Edward Arnold's gangster in Okay America (1932) who tries to gain public sympathy by offering to locate the kidnapped Lindbergh baby. This had its basis in fact: When Capone was in Leavenworth Prison, he offered to track down the man responsible for kidnapping the baby of aviator Charles Lindbergh. Another rendition, The Secret Six (1931), was set in Centro, a thinly veiled substitute for the town of Cicero, where Capone and Torrio had set up their operations in 1923. The film also presented a fictional dramatization of the activities of the Secret Six. In the film, they confront a brutish bootlegger called Scorpio. In a similar film, Beast of the City (1932), based on a story by W. R. Burnett, Jean Hersholt plays a brutal gangster whose control over the city is so complete that an honest cop is forced to form a small vigilante group. The film concludes with a suicidal raid on the gangster's nightclub.

There were many other Capone-like characters in the 1930s. Nicholas Ray's 1958 film Party Girl includes a scene where gangster Lee J. Cobb beats an associate to death with a miniature billiard cue at the gang's Citizen's Club dinner. This action had its roots in a real-life incident when Capone murdered three members of his gang by beating them to death with a baseball bat at a dinner at the Hawthorne Inn. This incident was also depicted in the 1987 film The Untouchables. In 1959, Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot re-created the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the real-life incident in which two men employed by Capone, dressed as policemen, murdered seven members of Bugs Moran's gang with machine guns in the SMC Cartage Co. warehouse on 14 February 1929 in a vain attempt to kill Moran.

Joseph H. Lewis's 1949 film Undercover Man shows treasury officials, headed by Glenn Ford, going after Capone for tax evasion—although Capone's name is never mentioned and he is referred to only as the "big fellow" throughout the film. The first screen biography of Capone was Richard Wilson's Al Capone in 1959 with Rod Steiger as the gangster. Jason Robards starred as Capone in Roger Corman's The St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1967, and Ben Gazzara was the gangster in Capone (1975). Twelve years later, Robert De Niro was Capone opposite Kevin Costner as Ness in The Untouchables. This film, directed by Brian De Palma, was loosely based on the late 1950s–early 1960s television series starring Robert Stack as the dour treasury agent. The television series pilot was a two-part episode directed by Phil Karlson that costarred Neville Brand as Capone; it was released in theaters outside the United States as The Scarface Mob (1959).

CARLYLE, ROBERT (1961– ). Robert Carlyle was born in Glasgow and had a difficult childhood after his mother left the family when he was still a baby. He dropped out of school at 16, but did not consider acting until a friend gave him a copy of Arthur Miller's The Crucible for his 21st birthday. Although he spent three years at the Royal Academy of Music and Drama, he nearly left the academy midway in his first term, and it took the intervention of two tutors to persuade him to return. His first film role was in Silent Scream (1990), followed by the lead role as an ex-convict construction worker in Ken Loach's Riff-Raff (1991). He sought the role of Albie, a psychotic killer, and survivor of the Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield that killed many Liverpool soccer fans; Carlyle considered this role socially relevant and from the moment he was cast in this three-part episode of the Cracker television series, he spoke only with a Scouse (Liverpool) accent for three months. His critically celebrated performance was awarded with the 1995 BAFTA Scotland Best Actor Award.

At the same time that Carlyle was attracting attention as the crazed Begbie in Trainspotting (1996), he was reaching another audience as the troubled but humane Glasgow policeman sent to the small Highlands town of Lochdubh in the popular television series Hamish Macbeth (1995–97). Carlyle also starred in four very different films for director Antonia Bird in the 1990s. Her debut film Safe (1993) was a bleak tale of London's homeless youth, and she followed with Carlyle as the lover of a gay priest in Priest (1994). Face, in 1997, was a caper film. His fourth film for Bird, Ravenous (1999), was a bizarre mixture of horror, comedy, and melodrama. Set in California in 1847, it begins with Carlyle stumbling into a remote fort followed by a disturbing tale involving cannibalism. More mainstream, and more popular, was his performance as Gaz, the unemployed laborer who encourages a small group of unemployed workers to pay their bills as strippers in The Full Monty (1997). This role transformed Carlyle into an international star, and he was next cast as the villain opposing James Bond in The World Is Not Enough (1999) and as the demented Daffy who points Leonardo DiCaprio toward a troubled paradise in The Beach (2000). He was also a highwayman in Plunkett and Macleane (1999), the irresponsible Irish father in Angela's Ashes (1999), and a soccer coach in There's Only One Jimmy Gribble (2001).

CARR, JOHN DICKSON (1906–1977). The doyen of the locked-room mystery, John Dickson Carr also wrote under the pseudonyms Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, and Roger Fairbairn. He was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a lawyer who served a term in Congress. Carr began writing detective stories before graduating from Haverford College and readily acknowledged the influence of G. K. Chesterton, although, as a staunch conservative, he questioned some of Chesterton's more liberal values. After marrying an Englishwoman, Carr settled in Great Britain for many years, where he produced some of his best crime fiction, including a series of books based on Dr. Gideon Fell, an overweight, beer-drinking consultant to Scotland Yard who first appeared in Hag's Nook (1933). Fell's adventures include the classic locked-room mystery The Hollow Man (1935), which was also published as The Three Coffins. In this book, Carr interrupts the narrative so that Fell can deliver a lecture about the nature and characteristics of the locked-room crime.

During World War II, Carr moved back to the United States, but he was soon recalled to Britain to work on propaganda programs as well as a weekly mystery radio series called Appointment with Fear. Prior to this program, Carr had contributed many radio scripts to the American radio anthology series Suspense, broadcast by CBS. His radio scripts included the celebrated impossible mystery "Cabin B-13," which was filmed by 20th Century-Fox as Dangerous Crossing in 1953 starring Jeanne Crain and Michael Rennie. Carr's "Cabin B-13" was first broadcast on CBS in March 1943 and was so popular that CBS produced it again, with a different cast, on 9 November 1943. Carr published the story in the May 1944 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In 1949, one of the characters in "Cabin B-13," the ship's doctor, received his own program in a 25-week series scripted by Carr titled Cabin B-13. It was also adapted a number of times for television, including the anthology series Climax!, which was broadcast in 1958. In 1992, "Cabin B-13" became the basis for a made-for-television film, Treacherous Crossing, starring Lindsay Wagner and Angie Dickinson.

Carr's award-winning short story "The Gentleman from Paris" formed the basis for the 1951 feature film The Man with a Cloak, a period mystery featuring Barbara Stanwyck as the villain and Joseph Cotten as the mysterious stranger who comes to the aid of a young French girl (Leslie Caron). In 1957, a British production of Carr's 1942 crime novel The Emperor's Snuff-Box was released as The Woman Opposite in Britain and (in 1959) as City after Midnight in the United States. A French production of Carr's 1937 novel The Burning Court was released in 1962 as La chambre ardente.

Under his Carter Dickson nom de plume, Carr also developed another series character, Colonel March, chief of the Department of Queer Complaints. These short stories were collected in 1940. Carr modeled March on his close friend John Rhode, another mystery writer who in private life was Maj. C. J. C. Street, formerly of the British army. In 1956, Boris Karloff starred in 26 episodes of the British television series Colonel March of Scotland Yard.

After World War II, Carr wrote the official biography of Arthur Conan Doyle from the archives collected by Doyle's youngest son, Adrian. The book was published in 1949 as The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and it won a special Edgar award. After completing the book, Carr left Britain permanently to, in his words, "escape socialism." He moved eventually to Greenville, South Carolina. See also CLASSICAL DETECTIVE FILMS.

CARTER, NICK. This detective was, at least in terms of quantity, America's preeminent literary detective; only Great Britain's Sexton Blake appeared in more stories. He was created by publisher Ormond G. Smith, who supplied his cousin, journalist, and author John Russell Coryell with his ideas for The Old Detective's Pupil; or, The Mysterious Crime of Madison Square, which appeared in the September 1886 issue of the New York Weekly. The story introduced the sleuth Seth Carter and his protégé Nick Carter. After two more stories, the series was continued for the next 17 years by Frederic Marmaduke Van Rensselaer Dey, who wrote nearly 500 novellas. Thereafter a succession of writers, including Frederick W. Davis, continued Carter's exploits in weekly periodicals and later pulp magazines. Most were signed "Nicholas Carter." Carter also featured in a radio series between 1943 and 1955 and in paperbacks from 1964. During this period, his character changed from a clean-living young detective in the 1880s to a sophisticated secret agent in the 1960s.

The French were the first to adapt Carter's adventures to the screen; he was featured in four serials starring André Liabel between 1909 and 1912. Tom Corrigan played Carter in 1920 and Edmund Lowe in 1922. In 1939, MGM resurrected the character for three films starring Walter Pidgeon as Carter: Nick Carter, Master Detective (1939), Phantom Raiders (1940), and Sky Murder (1940). With the advent of World War II in Europe, these films were concerned with espionage and sabotage, and in the last film Carter is asked to expose fifth columnists working in the United States. A 1943–45 radio series, Chick Carter, Boy Detective, featured Nick's son Chick, and in 1946 Columbia Studios cast character actor Lyle Talbot in a 15-episode serial titled Chick Carter, Detective. Eddie Constantine starred as Nick Carter in two French films in the 1960s: Nick Carter va tout casser (1963) and Nick Carter et le tréfle rouge (1965). Robert Conrad played Carter in a made-for-television film, The Adventures of Nick Carter, in 1972; this was a pilot for a television series that did not eventuate. Played by Michel Docolomansky, Carter also featured in the Czech-produced comedy Adéla jeste nevercerela (1977).

CASPARY, VERA (1899–1987). American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Vera Caspary was born in Chicago and left for New York to edit a dance magazine. There she published her first novel, The White Girl, in 1929 and her first play in 1931. In the early 1930s, she began working on film scripts. In 1943, she published her most famous novel, Laura, concerning the strange infatuation of a police detective for a woman he has never met and who appears to have been murdered. The reputation of this novel was enhanced by Otto Preminger's 1944 critically acclaimed film version, starring Dana Andrews as the detective and Gene Tierney as the "dead" woman. It later became a stage play.

Caspary followed Laura with Bedelia, and although the novel was set in Connecticut, the British film studio Ealing transposed the setting to Yorkshire and produced a screen version in 1946 with Lance Comfort as director. Caspary and her husband, producer I. G. Goldsmith, traveled to London to work on the screenplay. The film starred Margaret Lockwood as the mentally disturbed wife (Bedelia) who plans to kill her fourth husband (after murdering her first three spouses). Her intended victim is Charlie Carrington (Ian Hunter). However, an insurance investigator alerts Carrington, and the film ends with Bedelia's suicide. This ending was altered for the U.S. release, as censorship requirements at that time prohibited suicide, so Bedelia instead confesses her guilt to the police.

Caspary also worked on the following crime films: The Night of June 13 (1932), Such Women Are Dangerous (1934), Private Scandal (1934), and Scandal Sheet (1938). In 1953, director Fritz Lang adapted Caspary's short story "Gardenia" for his film The Blue Gardenia. See also WOMEN AND CRIME FILMS.

CELDA 211 (2009). This harrowing Spanish prison film won eight Goya Awards at Spain's national film event, including Best Picture, Best Director (Daniel Monzón), Best Actor (Luis Tosar), and Best Adapted Screenplay. Scripted by director Monzón and Jorge Guerricaechevarría from the novel by Francisco Pérez Gandul, the film opens with an unnamed prisoner slowly slitting his wrists in a darkened cell. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the film. Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann) accepts a position as a prison officer, and desperate to make a good impression as his wife Elena (Marta Etura) is expecting their first child, he arrives at the prison the day before he is due to start work. During a tour of the prison, he is rendered unconscious by a piece of the ceiling that falls on his head. Awaiting medical assistance, the guards place him in cell 211, a cell with a sad history. While Juan is unconscious, the leader of the convicts, Malamadre (Tosar), captures some of the guards and takes over the prison. He uses the guards, as well as Basques associated with the terrorist group ETA, to bargain for better conditions. When Juan wakes up, he discovers that the other guards have left him and, to save himself from certain death, pretends that he is a newly arrived prisoner. After humiliating Juan in front of the other prisoners by forcing him to strip naked, Malamadre befriends and protects him from his rival, Apache (Carlos Bardem).

The first half of the film is suspenseful, violent, and predictable as Juan tries to stay one step ahead of the prisoners while prison authorities attempt to extricate him and end the takeover. This changes when Elena is brutally beaten by a sadistic guard, Utrilla (Antonio Resines), during a protest outside the prison. She subsequently dies in the hospital. When Juan learns that his wife and unborn baby have been killed, he changes sides and joins Malamadre's protest. When Utrilla enters the compound, Juan slits his throat. The government, which initially agrees to Malamadre's demands, betrays the prisoners and sends in a SWAT team. Apache kills Juan, wounds Malamadre, and assumes control of the prisoners. The government inquiry into the prison riot insists that it did nothing wrong, and the film ends with a prison official simply asking, "Any more questions?" Juan's demise is noted on the walls of cell 211, along with the other inhabitants of this cell who have also suffered and died.

Celda 211 was released overseas, including in the United States, as Cell 211. After the film's release, director Monzón pointed out that he did not want to make a homage to American prison films. While recording the appalling prison conditions, the film refuses to present the prisoners in a sentimental fashion or preach about their situation. Instead, they are shown to be violent, untrustworthy, sexually depraved, and self-interested. The only positive relationship, aside from flashbacks showing Juan and Elena, is between Juan and Malamadre. This is a complex, dynamic relationship based on a mixture of power, survival, and respect. It forms the emotional center of this powerful film that refuses to be constrained by generic conventions or formulaic characters.

CENSORSHIP. In 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that moving pictures were merchandise and thereby not protected by the First Amendment. Mutual Films v. Ohio upheld the rights of prior censorship, and as a consequence local censor boards were established in some states, with 37 states contemplating setting up such boards. In January 1922, Massachusetts voted to create the eighth state censorship board, and a referendum was scheduled to approve federally mandated censorship. Fearing federal censorship, the film industry on 10 March 1922 responded by establishing a trade protection organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), and appointed Will H. Hays, a Presbyterian elder and former postmaster general, as director. The MPPDA's aims were to prevent federal censorship, stop the proliferation of state boards, and appease civic and church groups concerned about the effect of films on American youths.

Eight censorship boards remained—in Florida, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. They created severe difficulties for producers, causing increased costs because each board imposed different criteria as to what should be cut and what could be screened. For example, Kansas was a "dry" state, and the local board censored scenes showing alcohol consumption. Other states were more concerned with the depiction of sex and profanity.

Throughout the 1920s, Hays and his Studio Relations Committee (SRC) had little real effect on the studios. When protests from Catholic and Protestant church groups, educators, and other lobbyists continued, Irving Thalberg, with other producers, drafted the "General Principles to Govern the Preparation of the Revised Code of Ethics for Talking Pictures." Father Daniel Lord followed with "The Reasons Supporting the Code." In 1930, these documents were reworked, and on 17 February 1930, the MPPDA board adopted the Code to Govern the Making of Talking, Synchronized, and Silent Motion Pictures, which became known as the Production Code or simply the Code.

While films containing sex and partial nudity continued to challenge the SRC and state censorship boards, the other major concern in 1930 and 1931 was the gangster film. This genre attracted intense scrutiny from local censorship boards following the success of Little Caesar (1930). Dr. James Wingate, the head of the Motion Picture Division of the New York State Education Department, demanded numerous cuts to the film, and the Pennsylvania State Board followed his lead. After Little Caesar was a major commercial success, with 3,000 people attending the opening in New York, these concerns intensified, especially when The Public Enemy (1931) proved to be an even more popular film.

In the cash-strapped years of the 1930s Depression, the Hollywood film studios were keen to exploit public interest in the genre, and they increased the production of gangster films. This provoked a strong reaction from the Catholic Church and civic groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the United Presbyterian Church, the Catholic Knights of Columbus, and the National Federation of Men's Bible Classes. These groups pressured the studios into limiting, and eventually stopping, production of gangster films—with one exception, Howard Hughes, who hired Howard Hawks in 1932 to direct the Ben Hecht–scripted gangster film Scarface. When Jason Joy from the SRC warned Hughes to abandon the film, Hughes told Hawks: "Screw the Hays office. Start the picture and make it as realistic, as exciting, as grisly, as possible." Eventually, in 1932, Hughes reluctantly agreed to reshoot the ending. Joy requested further changes, including a scene showing gangster Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) on the gallows. However, as Muni was not available for filming, the final minutes show only Camonte's hands and shadow, creating an expressionistic effect. After Hughes released the film in New Orleans on 31 March 1932, New York, Pennsylvania, and Chicago banned the film, while Ohio passed it. A third version was prepared by United Artists, without Hughes's approval, and New York finally passed it. Thus, throughout 1933 and 1934, three versions of the film circulated in different parts of the United States.

In 1934, Joseph Breen was appointed to the SRC, and following increased pressure from groups such as the Catholic Church through its lobby arm the Legion of Decency, Breen dissolved the SRC and formed the Production Code Administration (PCA). At a meeting of the MPDDA on 13 June 1934, Breen submitted a pamphlet titled "A Code to Govern the Making of Motion and Talking Pictures, the Reasons for Supporting It, and the Resolution for Uniform Interpretation." This represented a systematic and more thorough reworking of the Code. It also contained a crucial addendum, written by Breen, entitled "Compensating Moral Values." This document guided the censorship of films in the United States for the next 25 years. Essentially, the principle of compensating moral values required that evil be clearly identified by a major character in the film and "that in the end the audience feels that evil is wrong and good is right." Hence, "stories must contain at least sufficient good to compensate for any evil they relate. The compensating moral values are: good characters, the voice of morality, a lesson, regeneration of the transgressor, suffering and punishment." "Communistic propaganda" was also banned. Breen was appointed the Production Code administrator, and he strengthened the power of the PCA by insisting that a $25,000 fine be levied against any producer who produced a film without PCA approval or released a film without the PCA seal.

Breen's principle of compensating moral values had a profound effect on the crime film, especially the gangster film, because the PCA prohibited any script that presented gangsters in a positive way. The studios, however, responded by casting actors associated with the gangster genre, such as Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, as police officers working undercover as gangsters, as in G-Men (1935) and Bullets and Ballots (1936). Another narrative device was to contrast the gangster with a virtuous character, such as a priest (as in Angels with Dirty Faces, 1938) or a lawyer (Manhattan Melodrama, 1934; The Roaring Twenties, 1939). Or the studios sometimes transformed the gangster into a comedic figure, a process that began before Breen's intervention, with Jimmy the Gent (1934), and later included films such as A Slight Case of Murder (1938), Brother Orchid (1940), and Larceny Inc. (1942).

More problematic for the PCA after 1934 was the cycle of outlaw-couple-on-the-run films, beginning with Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937). Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1949) and Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1950) were two other examples. While in the 1930s this cycle blamed society for antisocial behavior (as in Angels with Dirty Faces and The Roaring Twenties), later films such as Gun Crazy rejected social causes and favored psychological and/or sexual desire as motivating factors. This trend, consistent with film noir, often presented the gangster as a socially alienated figure of pathos, like Roy Earle in High Sierra (1940).

The development of film noir throughout the 1940s, with its emphasis on aberrant desires as the basis for criminal behavior, was a constant headache for Breen and the PCA. In 1935, MGM bought the rights to James M. Cain's best-selling and controversial novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. The novel, however, was a direct assault on the basic principle underpinning the Code: that "sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin." While the book did not contain profanity or explicit sex, it was infused with a sense of immorality. For example, after Frank and Cora murder Cora's husband and roll his car down an embankment, Frank tears Cora's blouse in preparation for the arrival of the police. Frank's action arouses Cora, and she tells Frank, "Rip me! Rip me!" Breen, aware of the novel's power and popularity, refused to sanction a film version—until October 1944 when MGM, sensing a change in the culture, submitted a new story outline that changed the emphasis in the novel from lust and desire to include a sense of remorse and regeneration. The film went into production in 1945.

This followed the release of Double Indemnity in 1944. The production of Double Indemnity was also prohibited in 1935 after Paramount had purchased the rights to Cain's novella. Breen's objections at that time concerned the adulterous relationship between the two central characters, a wife and insurance man, as well as the explicit details involving the death of her husband. In September 1943, though, he approved a treatment prepared by Billy Wilder that changed the ending from the suicide of the protagonists to that of a double murder. The adultery and the details of the murder were retained. This represented a clear change in PCA policy, as Walter Neff was allowed a more sympathetic treatment. Double Indemnity paved the way for a more "adult" treatment of sex and criminal activity in the 1940s. This included Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). In both films, Joan Bennett was cast as a woman who earned her living by prostitution. An earlier attempt by Ernest Lubitsch in the 1930s to film Jean Renoir's The Bitch (1931), the French version of Scarlet Street, had been prevented by the PCA.

The other major change in the censorship of the crime film in the 1930s was the ability of filmmakers to bypass the literal prohibitions of the Code with a subtle use of costume, body language, editing, and suggestive mise-en-scène that was not evident in the written treatments submitted to the PCA. Thus, subtle systems of symbology were established that could bypass the literal prohibitions of the PCA. For example, sexual intercourse could be implied in films, as in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947) when Robert Mitchum, after drying Jane Greer's wet hair with a towel, throws the towel away as he begins kissing her. The camera follows the towel as it hits a lamp, knocking out the light just as her bungalow door swings open. More explicit was The Big Combo (1955), directed by Joseph H. Lewis, which aroused the concerns of the PCA when Richard Conte performs oral sex on his mistress Jean Wallace. But Lewis avoided censorship by showing Conte kissing Wallace's neck and then, as he moves down her body, the camera remains on the face of Wallace and her rapturous reaction. This film followed Gun Crazy (1950), also directed by Lewis, with its audacious "sexual foreplay" at a carnival sideshow where composition, editing, and body language communicates the raw animal attraction between John Dall and Peggy Cummins without the need for explicit dialogue. Anthony Mann and other directors also utilized the gun as a sexual metaphor. Mann, for instance, had Mary Beth Hughes stroke the barrel of Erich von Stroheim's pistol in The Great Flamarion (1945) while trying to encourage him to murder her husband.

The PCA prohibited any suggestion of suicide, while also keeping a close watch on the depiction of foreign governments. This changed during World War II, when Germany and Japan were subjected to constant ridicule and negativity. The Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China suffered the same fate during the Cold War. The PCA was vigilant in preventing negative depictions of the clergy, the police, and the judicial system, as well. The same applied to the military during World War II. Hence, in 1945 Paramount was forced to change the ending of the Raymond Chandler–scripted film The Blue Dahlia to appease the Navy, which objected to the film's ending where the killer is revealed to be a naval officer. Chandler was forced to hastily resurrect a minor character, a house detective, as the murderer.

After World War II, there was a gradual liberalization of censorship policy, and in May 1952 the Supreme Court declared that the film industry was protected by the same safeguards as the press. In 1968, the Code was replaced by a ratings system. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

CHABROL, CLAUDE (1930–2010). Claude Chabrol was born in Paris. He spent World War II in the village of Sardent and returned to Paris to study pharmacology at the University of Paris. In the 1950s, he became involved with Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, François Truffaut, and other filmmakers associated with the French New Wave. Chabrol cowrote, with Rohmer, a study of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and Chabrol's debut film, Le beau Serge (1958), was clearly influenced by Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Over the next few years, Chabrol created his own distinctive world that often exposed the dark secrets contained within the respectable, highly mannered world of the French bourgeoisie. Chabrol's fascination with his tightly enclosed world emerged in 1963 with L'oeil du matin (The Third Lover) and manifested itself in the "Hélène" cycle, which starred his then wife Stéphane Audran: La femme infidèle (The Unfaithful Wife, 1968), Que la bête meure (This Man Must Die, 1969), Le boucher (The Butcher, 1969), La rupture (The Break, 1970), and Juste avant la nuit (Just before Nightfall, 1971).

Chabrol's career faltered in the 1970s until Violette Nozière (1978), with Isabelle Huppert as a young woman who kills her parents. A succession of superior crime films followed, including Poulet au vinaigre (1985) and its sequel Inspecteur Lavardin (1986); Le cri du hibou (The Cry of the Owl, 1987), an adaptation of a novel by Patricia Highsmith; and especially La cérémonie (Judgement in Stone, 1995), an adaptation of the novel by Ruth Rendell, with Isabelle Hupert and Sandrine Bonnaire.

Chabrol's last feature film, Inspector Bellamy (2009), was a fitting end to a fine career. It stars Gérard Depardieu as Bellamy, a detective vacationing with his wife Françoise (Marie Bunel) in the family holiday home in the south of France at Nîmes. Here he becomes involved with a murder investigation while sorting out the domestic entanglements caused by the sudden appearance of his charismatic but irresponsible half-brother Jacques Lebas (Clovis Cornillac). This deceptively leisurely mystery was Chabrol's homage to prolific French writer Georges Simenon, who published a similar story, Les vacances de Maigret, in 1948.

CHAN, CHARLIE. Created by author Earl Derr Biggers, Chinese-American police detective Charlie Chan first appeared in the novel The House without a Key, which was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post beginning on 24 September 1925. Biggers, having visited Hawaii some years earlier, was keen to use Hawaii as the setting for a mystery story after he learned of the activities of two Honolulu policemen, Chang Apana and Lee Fook. Biggers abandoned the traditional racist stereotype of the sinister Asian by creating a Chinese-American detective, based in Honolulu, who is amiable, courteous, and intelligent. He also gave Chan his trademark aphorisms delivered in stilted English. Although not the central character in The House without a Key, his character was well received by the public, and Biggers followed with Chan playing a more central role in The Chinese Parrot. This story was also serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1926. Four more novels featuring Chan appeared before Biggers's death in 1933.

Pathé purchased the film rights to The House without a Key as the basis for a silent serial in 10 episodes in 1926 starring the popular serial team of Allene Ray and Walter Miller. It was not a vehicle for Charlie Chan, and Japanese actor George K. Kuwa was cast as Chan, a minor character in the film. Universal bought the rights to The Chinese Parrot, and the film was released in 1927 with another Japanese actor, Kamiyama Sojin, as Chan. The first sound film to feature Chan was Biggers's third Chan novel, Behind the Curtain, which was released by Fox in 1929 with E. L. Park as Chan, again a relatively minor character.

Thereafter, with the casting of Swedish-born actor Warner Oland as Charlie Chan, the Chinese-American detective emerged as a popular figure on the screen throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Oland's first film as Chan was Charlie Chan Carries On (1931), based on Biggers's fifth Chan novel. Although no known print of the film has survived, Oland's performance was praised, and reviewers began to make special mention of Chan's aphorisms, slyly delivered by Oland, such as "Hasty deductions like ancient egg—look good from outside" and "Bad alibi like dead fish—cannot stand the test of time," which endeared him to the public. The film was a commercial success, and Fox bought the rights to The Black Camel, which was released as a film in 1931 with Chan firmly established as the central character and Bela Lugosi as a sinister psychic.

Charlie Chan's Greatest Case (1933) represented a reworking of The House without a Key. This time, however, Chan's role in the story was magnified, as the trade journals urged exhibitors to emphasize Chan's presence in these films. His name was inserted into the title for the next 20 films. Beginning with Charlie Chan's Courage (1934), Sol Wurtzel, the head of B movies at 20th Century-Fox, appointed producer John Stone to supervise the Chan films, and Stone, determined to exploit the popularity of the character, increased the number of Chan films to three a year. The studio soon exhausted Biggers's novels, but Stone hired talented writers such as Seton I. Miller (Charlie Chan's Courage), Philip MacDonald (Charlie Chan in London, 1934), Robert Ellis and Helen Logan (Charlie Chan in Egypt, 1935; Charlie Chan in Shanghai, 1935; Charlie Chan's Secret, 1936; Charlie Chan at the Circus, 1936; Charlie Chan at the Race Track, 1936; Charlie Chan at the Olympics, 1937; Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo, 1938; Charlie Chan in the City of Darkness, 1939), Philip Wylie (Charlie Chan in Reno, 1939), and John Larkin (Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, 1939; Charlie Chan in Panama, 1940; Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum, 1940; Dead Men Tell, 1941; and Castle in the Desert, 1942). Stone also employed talented supporting actors, including Boris Karloff as a demented opera singer in Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936), with a mock opera score by Oscar Levant; Ray Milland in Charlie Chan in London; George Zucco in Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938); Cesar Romero in Charlie Chan at Treasure Island; and Victor Jory in Charlie Chan in Rio (1941).

Gradually, the films evolved into a predictable formula, with Chan gathering the various suspects together at the climax of the film so that he could reconstruct the crime and expose the guilty party with his trademark accusation: "You are murderer." Chan's family also played their part, beginning with Charlie Chan in Paris (1935), in which Keye Luke was introduced into the series as Lee Chan—better known as "Number One Son." From Charlie Chan in Shanghai on, Luke featured in all of the Oland/Chan films, with Lee Chan giving his father exuberant, if sometimes unhelpful, assistance. In Charlie Chan in Honolulu, Victor Sen Yung was cast as Lee Chan following Luke's decision not to renew his association with the series after Oland's death on 6 August 1938. Luke was also upset by the studio's decision to cut his pay. In the next film, Charlie Chan in Reno, Yung took the name Jimmy Chan. Periodically, other members of the Chan family also appeared. Layne Tom Jr. appeared as Willie Chan in Charlie Chan's Murder Cruise (1940), while Benson Fong was Tommy Chan in Charlie Chan in the Secret Service (1944), with Marianne Quon as Iris Chan.

While the primary focus in each film was Charlie's ability to expose the murderer, the series often assimilated topical events. Charlie Chan in Egypt exploited public interest in the excavation of the Egyptian tombs, specifically in the Valley of the Kings where in 1928 Howard Carter had opened the gold-filled tomb of Tutankhamun. The film's plot involves the mysterious deaths of those who initially entered the tomb. Similarly, Charlie Chan in the City of Darkness was set in Paris the night before the Germans entered the city, and the victim in the film is exposed as a quisling supplying arms to the Nazis. Charlie Chan in Panama likewise uses the canal setting and associated fears of foreign espionage. Earlier, in 1937, Charlie Chan at the Olympics showed Chan traveling to the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin in a dirigible to watch his son Lee compete as part of the U.S. swimming team. In Berlin, Charlie becomes involved in espionage following the death of an American inventor.

Warner Oland, the best actor to portray the detective, appeared in 16 Chan films before his death in 1938. His last, unfinished film, Charlie Chan at the Ringside, began production on 10 January 1938. Oland, who had a problem with alcohol, was unable to work, and the film was scrapped. However, the series was too lucrative to abandon, so veteran character actor Sidney Toler was cast as Chan and Victor Sen Yung replaced Keye Luke in Charlie Chan in Honolulu. The studio, realizing that Toler, while adequate in the role, lacked Oland's on-screen charisma, decided to strengthen the scripts and production values. Consequently, the best Chan films appeared during Toler's period as Chan, and he made 11 films for 20th Century-Fox between 1938 and 1942.

One of Toler's earlier films was Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939), scripted by John Larkin and expertly directed by Norman Foster. Cesar Romero was cast as the magician Rhadini, who joins with Chan to expose a mysterious psychic known only as Dr. Zodiac. Foster and cinematographer Vigil Miller combined to set up a number of elaborate sequences, including the film's thrilling climax in a large theater where Charlie exposes the murderer. Another notable Chan film during Toler's period, directed by Harry Lachman, was Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum. In this 1940 film, Charlie declares, "Only very foolish mouse makes nest in cat's ear." The plot has Chan exposing the identity of a man determined to kill him during a radio broadcast in a wax museum. This was followed in 1941 by Dead Men Tell, also directed by Lachman, with Charlie situated aboard a ship hunting for treasure, on which a "pirate ghost" kills those in possession of a map showing where the bullion is buried.

With the loss of many European and Asian markets due to World War II, the series was becoming too expensive for the studio. In an attempt to salvage it, executive producer Wurtzel toured South America and put Charlie Chan in Rio (1941) into production in an attempt to boost sales there. After one more film, Castle in the Desert (1942), a fascinating murder mystery located in an Italian castle in the Mojave Desert, 20th Century-Fox terminated the series.

When Toler discovered that the studio was canceling the series, he negotiated with Eleanor Biggers Cole, the widow of the creator, for the rights to the character of Charlie Chan. In May 1943, he convinced Monogram, a poverty row studio, to begin production of Charlie Chan in the Secret Service, which was released in 1944. While Fox often spent more than $200,000 on each film, the budgets at Monogram were reduced to $75,000. Also, because Monogram had strong distribution outlets in the southern states, black actor Mantan Moreland was cast as Birmingham, Chan's chauffeur in many films in an attempt to inject more comedy into the series. Toler starred in 11 films for Monogram before his death on 12 February 1947.

Monogram, however, believed that the character was still commercially viable and so cast Roland Winters as Chan for a further six films. The series ended in 1949 with Sky Dragon. In the second-to-last film, The Feathered Serpent (1948), both Keye Luke as Lee Chan, and Victor Sen Yung, as Tommy Chan, appear. In this film, scriptwriter Oliver Drake, who scripted the last two Chan films, recycled his script for The Riders of the Whistling Skull, a Republic western filmed in 1937.

A radio series featuring Charlie Chan began in 1932 with Chan being voiced by Walter Connolly, followed by Ed Begley (1944–45) and Santos Ortega (1947–48). There was also a television series in 1956–57, The New Adventures of Charlie Chan, shot in Great Britain with American character actor J. Carroll Naish as Chan; Naish had played the murderer in the 1936 film Charlie Chan at the Circus.

Three Spanish-language films also featured Charlie Chan. The first, Eran trece (1931), was filmed in Hollywood simultaneously with Charlie Chan Carries On, with each scene filmed twice—once with an English-speaking cast and Warner Oland as Chan, then again with a Spanish-speaking cast and Manuel Arbó as Chan. A Chinese detective resembling Chan was featured in the Cuban production La serpiente roja (1937) and a Mexican film, El monstruo en la sombra (1955). During the 1930s and 1940s, a number of Chan films were produced in Shanghai and Hong Kong, as well. Gu Meijun played Chan in the Shanghai films, and Bai Yan in Hong Kong.

A television pilot, The Return of Charlie Chan, with Ross Martin as Chan, was filmed in 1971 but was not sold; it was finally released as a television film in 1979. Peter Ustinov starred as Chan in the lame comedy Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen in 1981. See also CLASSICAL DETECTIVE FILMS.

CHANDLER, RAYMOND (1888–1959). Born in Chicago, Raymond Chandler's father was a hard-drinking railroad engineer of British descent who deserted his Irish wife when Chandler was seven. Chandler traveled with his mother to live with relatives in London, where he was a first-class scholar with a vocation for Latin and the classics. After studying in France and Germany, he worked in the Admiralty and began writing poetry, criticism, and book reviews. When this failed to provide sufficient income, he left for California. In 1917, he went to Canada, joined the Gordon Highlanders, and served with the first division of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces in France. Discharged in 1919, he returned to California, eventually entering the oil business.

In 1932, at the age of 44, Chandler was unemployed. A few years earlier, he had been the director of several oil companies, but the Depression, combined with personal problems, notably his heavy drinking, destroyed his employment prospects in the oil industry. Aware of the hard-boiled fiction being published in pulp magazines by writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner, he began studying their style. "Blackmailers Don't Shoot," his first short detective story, was published in Black Mask magazine in December 1933. Chandler was paid $180. Six months later, he followed with another short story, "Smart Aleck Kill."

Although he admired Hammett and was often linked with him because his detective stories were also told in first-person narration, Chandler's style and worldview were different from Hammett's. Chandler's detective—whether he was called Dalmas, Mallory, Carmady, Evans, or Marlowe—was a traditional hero who, even if disillusioned by society, would strive to restore some sense of justice and morality. Hammett's fiction, on the other hand, presented a nihilist view of the world.

Because Chandler was not a prolific writer of pulp fiction, his income in the 1930s was small. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. Chandler, however, was attracted to the lucrative possibilities of writing for the screen after Billy Wilder asked him to assist on the film adaptation of James M. Cain's novella Double Indemnity. Chandler, who disliked Cain's novels, convinced Wilder that it was impossible to use Cain's original dialogue, as it was written for the eye, and that they should try to convey only the spirit of the dialogue, not the dialogue itself. Wilder acknowledged that while he had to teach Chandler film technique, he had a flair for description. The resultant script by Chandler and Wilder was nominated for an Academy Award. This film enhanced Chandler's reputation in Hollywood, and Paramount assigned him to work on the scripts for And Now Tomorrow (1944) and The Unseen (1945).

Chandler's contract with Paramount expired in September 1944. However, when the studio realized that their number one film star, Alan Ladd, was due to return to the army in three months, they needed a script. Producer John Houseman suggested to Chandler that he convert his current novel into a screenplay. Chandler submitted the first half of the script, and production of the film, The Blue Dahlia, began. It proceeded smoothly until Chandler announced that he had writer's block and could not deliver the final 30 pages, including the ending. Chandler suggested that he would finish the script if he could drink heavily while writing. With two Cadillac limousines constantly on call for various duties, including a doctor who would monitor him, he completed the script on time. Chandler received his second Academy Award nomination, and the film grossed more than $2.75 million. Chandler, however, was upset that he had to alter his original ending when the U.S. Navy persuaded Paramount that the killer could not be a navy man.

By 1947, and MGM's adaptation of Lady in the Lake, Chandler had left Hollywood. His disillusionment and hostility toward the film industry was expressed in his 1948 novel Little Sister, which was filmed as Marlowe (1969) with James Garner as the private detective. In 1951, Chandler briefly returned to Hollywood when Alfred Hitchcock asked him to work on the script for Strangers on a Train. However, the two men did not get along, and Hitchcock eliminated large sections of Chandler's work. After the publication of his most ambitious novel, The Long Goodbye, in 1953—which was filmed in 1973—Chandler's career and health declined, especially after the death of his wife, Cissy, in 1954.

CHIKO (2008). This German gangster film was set in Hamburg's tough Dulsberg district. Director Özgür Yildirim claimed that the film was conceived as a Turkish-German version of Scarface, the 1983 film directed by Brian De Palma. However, De Palma's gangster film, which starred Al Pacino as a Cuban refugee who emerges from the lower levels to control of the cocaine trade in Miami, is considerably different from Chiko. While De Palma's film is excessively violent and operatic in tone, Yildirim's film is restrained and devoid of the large-action set pieces that characterized the 1983 Hollywood film. This is especially notable in the climax of the German film, which is abrupt and unexpected.

Yildirim's protagonist is a young Turkish immigrant, Isa Çikar (Denis Moschitto), who, with his aggressive friend Tibet (Volcan Özcan), inveigles his way into a crime gang controlled by the charismatic Brownie (Moritz Bleibtreu). They achieve this by bashing two low-level drug peddlers. However, when Tibet tries to swindle Brownie, he is tortured and expelled from the gang. Fueled by drugs and hatred, Tibet's desire for revenge ultimately destroys Isa, Brownie, and himself. In keeping with the traditional rise-and-fall narrative pattern of the gangster film, the ending takes place just as Chiko achieves some measure of material security and personal happiness.

At the 2009 German Film Awards, Chiko won the Best Screenplay and Best Editing awards as well as attracting a nomination for Best Feature Film and Best Actor (Moschitto). Although the film's basic premise is similar to Scarface, Yildirim's film focuses more on the daily operations of the drug trade at its source. Also, it focuses not on Chiko's rise but on the conflicting allegiances involving his adopted family (Tibet and his mother), his young daughter, his newly acquired love Meryem (Reyhan Sahin), and Brownie, his criminal mentor. These allegiances are, ultimately, irreconcilable. His inner conflict is epitomized by the fact that, although he is Muslim, his forename is Arabic for Jesus.

CHOW YUN-FAT (1955– ). Hong Kong actor whom the Los Angeles Times called "the coolest man in the world." Born in 1955 on Lamma, a small island off Hong Kong's Victoria Harbor, Chow Yun-Fat starred in a number of successful television programs before director John Woo cast him in his influential gangster film A Better Tomorrow (1986). The film made Chow a star, although Woo had to work hard to convince people that Chow could transfer his popularity on television to feature films.

A Better Tomorrow, along with City of Fire (1987), created a subgenre known as "heroic bloodshed," and Chow was an integral part of that subgenre. The film also established Woo, after 13 years, as a major director. In the film, Chow played the laconic brother of a Triad gangster. However, it was his choice of weapons—Beretta 45s—and distinctive clothing—a long duster coat and dark glasses—that had the most impact on audiences.

Shuang Diang (The Killer, 1989) extends the central motif of A Better Tomorrow with a cop bonding with a hit man. Chow plays the hit man and Danny Lee the cop. It includes the usual plot elements involving Triad killings, betrayal, and corrupt cops. The seemingly endless gun battles culminate in a final battle in a church where the cop and the hit man join forces against superior odds.

Chow also worked with director Ringo Lam in the "On Fire" series, beginning with City on Fire (Longhu fengyun, 1987). In this film, he is an undercover cop assigned to expose a gang of jewel thieves. The same motif of a cop (Chow this time) bonding with a criminal (Lee) is used. Four films, starring Chow and directed by Lam, followed: Prison on Fire (1987), Wild Search (1989), Prison on Fire II (1991), and Full Contact (1992).

Chow went to Hollywood for the role of an assassin in The Replacement Killer (1998) and a New York police officer in The Corruptor (1999). His American films, however, failed to match the success of his Hong Kong ones.

CHRISTIE, AGATHA (1890–1976). The most influential practitioner of classical detective fiction, with two of the world's most popular fictional detectives—Miss Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot—Agatha Christie was one of the most important detective writers in any mode. Born Agatha Clarissa Miller in Torquay, on the south coast of Devon, Christie was the third child of an American father and English mother. She was initially educated at home before attending schools in Paris. In her youth, she wrote sentimental short stories and poetry. A planned career in opera did not eventuate due to her shyness and the fact that her voice was not considered strong enough. In 1914, she married the dashing aviator Col. Archibald Christie. In World War I, she worked as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment Hospital, spending time in the hospital pharmacy that gave her knowledge of various drugs and poisons—information that would become useful in her crime fiction. During this period, Christie was exposed to European refugees, including victims from Belgium, the nationality of her first detective, Poirot.

In 1916, she began her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, while still working as a nurse, and she finished the novel during a two-week vacation at Dartmoor. The novel featured the investigation by Poirot into the murder of an elderly lady in a country house. After rejections from various publishers, she was finally offered £125 and an option on her next four novels. The book was published in the United States in October 1920 by John Lane and in Great Britain in January 1921 by Bodley Head. In the 1920s, Christie perfected her characteristic puzzle-centered detective fiction, which was marked by the ingenuity and complexity of the plots. Her practice of deliberate misdirection often involved setting out clues for the reader while subtly guiding them in the wrong direction. Her fiction often pointed the reader toward a specific suspect only to seemingly clear him or her of guilt—and then expose that same person as the guilty party.

The year 1926 was a crucial one for Christie. Her Poirot novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd challenged a key convention of detective fiction by using an unreliable narrator. The novel, however, became one of Christie's best sellers. Late in 1926, her husband informed her that he was going to spend the weekend with his mistress. After leaving a note for her secretary, Agatha Christie attracted worldwide attention when she disappeared for 11 days. In a largely unexplained incident, she spent the time at the Swan Hydropatic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, where she registered as Mrs. Teresa Neele, the surname of her husband's mistress. While others speculated that she may have had a nervous breakdown, or at least suffered from temporary amnesia, Christie never addressed this incident in her autobiography, which was published after her death. In 1930, she married archaeologist Max Mallowan, and she accompanied him on many excavations in Iraq and Syria, areas which she also used as settings for her novels.

Christie published 85 books of mystery fiction, including collections of short stories. Aside from Marple and Poirot, she developed series characters such as Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Superintendent Battle, Mr. Parker Pine, and Harley Quin. Beginning with Black Coffee in 1930, she was also a prolific playwright. Her play The Mousetrap, based on the 1948 story "Three Blind Mice," opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London on 25 November 1952 and became the longest running play in the history of the British stage. She also wrote a series of romantic stories under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, a children's book, and a psychological thriller, Endless Night (1967). She became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1956 and a Dame Commander of the order (DBE) in 1971. In the 1940s, Christie wrote Curtain, a mystery in which Poirot dies, and Sleeping Murder, intended as the final appearance of Miss Marple. These novels were lodged in a bank vault for 30 years. Curtain was published in 1975 when Christie could no longer write because of ill health, and Sleeping Murder was published after her death in 1976.

The first film based on one of Christie's novels was a Tommy and Tuppence story filmed in Germany, Die Abenteuer G.m.b.H (1928), an adaptation of The Secret Adversary. During the same year, her short story "The Coming of Mr. Quin" was filmed in Great Britain as The Passing of Mr. Quin. The first actor to portray Poirot on screen was Austin Trevor, in three British films in the early 1930s: Alibi (1931), based on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; Black Coffee (1931), based on Christie's 1931 stage play; and Lord Edgware Dies (1934), based on her 1933 novel. In the 1960s, MGM filmed The Alphabet Murders (1965) in Britain, starring Tony Randall as Poirot. This was an adaptation of The A.B.C. Murders, and Margaret Rutherford appeared as Miss Marple in a cameo role. In 1974, EMI produced a lavish adaptation of Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, starring Albert Finney as Poirot. EMI followed with three more large-budget adaptations. Finney was replaced by Peter Ustinov in Death on the Nile (1978), Evil under the Sun (1982), and Appointment with Death (1988).

Marple's first screen appearance was much later than Poirot's. She was featured in four films produced by MGM in Great Britain with Rutherford as Marple. The first film, Murder, She Said (1962), was based on Christie's 1957 novel 4:50 from Paddington and was followed by Murder at the Gallop (1963), based on her 1953 novel After the Funeral that featured not Marple but Poirot. Then came Murder Most Foul (1964), based on another Poirot novel, Mrs. McGinty's Dead (1952). The final film in the series, Murder Ahoy (1964), was an original story and screenplay. Ita Evers, an Estonian actress, played Marple in Tayna chyornykh drozdov (1983), a Russian adaptation of Christie's A Pocketful of Rye. In 1980, Angela Lansbury was Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd, a large-budget British adaptation of Christie's 1962 novel. In addition, Bengali actress Rakhee Gulzar played Ranga Pishima, a Miss Marple–type character, in Shubho Mahurat (2003), an Indian adaptation of Christie's The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side.

Aside from the Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple films, adaptations of Christie's novels and plays include Love from a Stranger (1937), which was a United Artists film made in Britain from Christie's short story "Philomel Cottage" and remade in Hollywood in 1947. The most celebrated adaptation of a Christie novel was 20th Century-Fox's And Then There Were None (1945), based on her 1939 novel Ten Little Niggers. This film was directed by French director René Clair and scripted by Dudley Nichols, influenced by Christie's 1943 stage production. It was followed by four remakes: Ten Little Indians in 1965 changed the setting to the Swiss Alps; And Then There Were None in 1974, moved to a hotel in Persia; Ten Little Indians in 1989, set on a safari in Africa; and Desyat negrityat, a Russian adaptation, released in 1987. Witness for the Prosecution, directed by Billy Wilder in 1957, was based on Christie's play, which, in turn, was based on a short story. The Spider's Web (1960), Endless Night (1972), and Ordeal by Innocence (1985) were all based on Christie's fiction, while the French-British adaptation of Christie's Towards Zero met with resistance from Christie's daughter, Rosalind Hicks. She ordered that the title be changed as well as the names of the characters after she reviewed the screenplay and discovered that it included incest. The film was released as Innocence Lies in 1995. A more faithful adaptation of Christie' s Towards Zero was made in France in 2007 as L'heure zero. Christie's 4:50 from Paddington was remade in France as Le crime est notre affaire in 2008.

CHUGYEOGJA (2008). This violent South Korean crime film shares some of the characteristics of the police procedural. However, there is a major difference in that the central character, ex-cop turned pimp Joong-ho Eom (Yun-seok Kim), spends most of the film trying to locate one of his prostitutes, Mi-jin Kim (Yeong-hie Seo), who is badly wounded and left to die in the bathroom used by a serial killer, Young-min Jee (Jung-woo Ha). The identity of the killer is revealed early in the film. Loosely based on actual events, director Na Hong-Jin cleverly reworks familiar material and keeps one step ahead of the audience.

Chugyeogja is, in essence, a redemption story involving pimp Joong-ho who, initially, is motivated by his financial interest to locate Mi-jin. At the start of the film, he forces Mi-jin, who is unwell, to accept a client whom Joong-ho believes is responsible for the disappearance of two prostitutes working for him. He callously places Mi-jin in extreme jeopardy, and this situation deteriorates further when the signal from Mi-jin's cell phone is blocked and Joong-ho cannot locate her. The film then becomes a race against time as Joong-ho searches for Mi-jin while the killer tries to pierce her head with an ice pick. This suspenseful device, the race against the possibility of a dire situation, is used a number of times throughout the film.

Chugyeogja, released as The Chaser overseas, was a major box-office hit, especially in South Korea. It was awarded the Grand Prize at the 44th Baeksang Art Awards and won five awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor at the 45th Daejong Awards. Director Na followed this film with the equally impressive but ultraviolent thriller Hwanghae (The Yellow Sea, 2010), featuring a disempowered cab driver in Yanji City who, to extricate himself from his financial problems as well as find his wife, makes the mistake of accepting a contract from a hit man.

CITIES. The gangster and the hard-boiled detective are closely associated with the city. Cities provide the appropriate setting for the crime film, with nightclubs and speakeasies, low-class hotels, and dark streets. Its materialistic trappings and forbidden attractions attract the gangster, while its gutters and alleys provide the setting for his fall. Its importance is evident in the title of many films: Dark City, The Naked City, City of Shadows, City for Conquest, Cry of the City, Night and the City, The Sleeping City, While the City Sleeps, The City That Never Sleeps, Edge of the City, Captive City. Sometimes actual cities are named in the title: New York City Confidential, Port of New York, The Killer That Stalked New York, Chicago Deadline, Chicago Confidential, Kansas City Confidential. The city may be referred to as "the street" or an actual address may substitute: The Naked Street, Scarlet Street, Mystery Street, Street of Chance, The Street with No Name, One Way Street, Panic in the Street, Side Street, Pickup on South Street, 99 River Street, The House on 92nd Street, 711 Ocean Drive, Sunset Blvd. Sometimes the nature of the city is indicated by the title metaphor: The Human Jungle, The Steel Jungle, The Asphalt Jungle, Hell Is a City.

There is a demarcation between the presentation of the pre-1940 and post-1940 city. Until 1940, the city was often depicted as a place of excitement, money, and forbidden thrills. After that, film noirs such as Phantom Lady (1944), Deadline at Dawn (1945), and Night and the City (1950) established the city as a place of entrapment and alienation. When the gangster, cop, or private detective leaves the city, as in High Sierra (1941), On Dangerous Ground (1952), and Out of the Past (1947), he loses his bearings and is rendered vulnerable. Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) in High Sierra is overwhelmed by the Sierra mountains and dies on the slopes of Mount Whitney. The same disaster befalls John Dall and Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy (1950). As soon as Bogart, Dall, and Cummins abandon their car—the physical manifestation of their urban world—they are lost and soon die in the wilderness. Former private detective Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) discovers that even in the remote rural location of Bridgeport he cannot escape his past in Out of the Past. A rare exception to this pattern in the post-1940 period was troubled New York policeman Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) in On Dangerous Ground, who finds love and redemption in rural Westham. As Alfred Hitchcock demonstrates in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), by the 1940s evil could no longer be contained within the filmic city and had spread to provincial centers and the countryside.

Just as the skyscraper represented power, success, and virility in the 1920s and 1930s, John Farrow's The Big Clock (1948) epitomized the postwar shift from one of optimism to a pervasive fear of corporate life (represented by huge buildings) controlled by people such as Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton). This fear is encapsulated in the imagery that opens the film as the camera pans across a dark city to a large building and a corridor in shadows where a frightened man, George Stroud (Ray Milland), tries to avoid both the police and Janoth. The building, with its mammoth clock, seems to engulf the human protagonist. More recently, Man on a Ledge (2011) continued this negative image of the skyscraper; the hero (Sam Worthington) is trapped 20 floors up on a ledge in Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel as a consequence of the machinations of the film's corporate villain (Ed Harris).

CLARK, DANE (1912–1998). Born Bernard Zanville in Brooklyn, Dane Clark got his break when Warner Bros. signed him to a contract and developed his career in the early and mid-1940s as a second-string John Garfield—a tough, working-class kid. A more mature persona emerged in Moonrise (1948), Frank Borzage's haunting tale of a young man crippled by the knowledge that his father was hanged, which renders him a social outcast. More in keeping with his working-class image was Whiplash (1948), with Clark as a tough boxer. In the early 1950s, Clark regularly traveled to Great Britain, where he starred opposite Margaret Lockwood in Roy Ward Baker's espionage thriller Highly Dangerous (1950). This was followed by three crime films coproduced by independent American producer Robert L. Lippert and Hammer Films: The Gambler and the Lady (1952), with Clark as an ambitious gangster brought down by his need for respectability; Murder by Proxy (U.S. title Blackout, 1954); and Five Days (U.S. title Paid to Kill, 1954). As his film roles dwindled, Clark moved into television in the mid-1950s.

CLASSICAL DETECTIVE FILMS. Classical detective fiction, characterized by the process of "ratiocination" as developed by such authors as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, dominated the cinema until the 1940s. The classic crime formula remained basically unchanged after the publication of Christie's first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921). It is based on a murder, or series of killings, in a closed setting, such as an isolated manor house, a country house during a snowstorm, or a barren island. The number of suspects is limited, and after repeated interrogations by a police officer or, more likely, an amateur sleuth, the story ends with the detective assembling the suspects together, cleverly reassembling the events leading up to the murder, and exposing the killer. A reviewer in the Observer in May 1958 described this form of detective fiction as "cosy." Crime is presented as an aberration, something to be eliminated by a superior detective. Its appeal is the puzzle.

A crucial figure in the development of this form of crime fiction was a troubled alcoholic writer, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe published three seminal short stories in the 1840s featuring Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, an eccentric, superintelligent sleuth. The first, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," was published in Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine in April 1841. The second, "The Mystery of Marie Roget," appeared in Snowden's Lady's Companion in November 1842, and the third, "The Purloined Letter," in the Gift in October 1844. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was an early example of the locked-room mystery that became a staple of crime fiction during its golden age between the two World Wars. Poe's tale introduced the term ratiocination, an essential characteristic of the classical form, which Dupin outlines while walking the streets of Paris. Essentially, it emphasizes a cerebral process where the detective logically and systematically sorts through the facts of the case to reach the correct solution—a solution not reached by others.

The emphasis on ratiocination and puzzle-centered stories formed one strand of the American and European classical detective film. Hollywood has, however, except for a period in the 1930s, been more influenced by a variant in this tradition: the adventurer that emerged out of the dime novel and pulp literature. The dime novels began as a series of paper-covered books called Beadle's Dime Novels, published between 1860 and 1874 by Irwin Pedro Beadle. Later the term was used to describe sensational fiction published in paper covers. The first dime novel series devoted exclusively to detective stories was Old Cap. Collier Library, which began in 1883. In 1891, the first weekly detective hero, Nick Carter, emerged. The French were the first to produce a series of films based on Carter.

Sherlock Holmes, a crucial figure in the development of the classical form, appeared at the beginning of the cinema (Sherlock Holmes Baffled, 1900). S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance first appeared on the screen in The Canary Murder Case in 1929, which was followed by a long series of popular films featuring Vance. Nero Wolfe's first appearance was in Meet Nero Wolfe (1936). Before this film, Hollywood had already started borrowing British adventurers, such as Herman Cyril McNeile's Bulldog Drummond, for its screen heroes. There was also an American version of Christie's Miss Jane Marple: Stuart Palmer's schoolteacher-turned-detective Hildegarde Withers appeared in a series of films in the 1930s beginning with The Penguin Pool Murder in 1932. Warner Bros. developed its own series based on the Nancy Drew books featuring a teenage amateur detective created by Edward L. Stratemeyer in 1930. Erle Stanley Gardner's lawyer Perry Mason was adapted to the screen by the same studio for a series of film in the 1930s. Meanwhile, the Honolulu detective Charlie Chan, created by Earl Derr Biggers, enjoyed a huge following throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, and John Marquand's Japanese adventurer Mr. Moto flourished until anti-Japanese sentiment—and Peter Lorre's refusal to continue in the series—brought it to an end in 1939.

RKO embarked on a series of films based on Leslie Charteris's adventurer the Saint in 1938 and continued the series in both Hollywood and London until they replaced him with virtually the same figure, the Falcon, without having to pay royalties to Charteris. Louis Joseph Vance's Lone Wolf, a character similar to E. W. Hornung's gentleman thief Raffles, first appeared on screen in 1917 courtesy of Lewis J. Selznick, with Bert Lytell, as The Lone Wolf. Films based on this character continued after Columbia Pictures purchased the rights for The Lone Wolf Returns in 1926 with Lytell retaining the role. Although the character posed a problem for the censors, since he was a thief, the studio bypassed these problems by focusing on his redemption. With the release of The Lone Wolf Returns in 1936, featuring Melvyn Douglas as the safecracker, the emphasis had shifted to comedy and romance rather than crime. The Lone Wolf remained on screen until 1949.

France's "Prince of Thieves," Arséne Lupin, the creation of Maurice Leblanc, first appeared in 1907 in the novel Arséne Lupin: Gentleman-cambrioleur. Film adaptations in Europe and Hollywood began in 1917 and continued through MGM's 1932 production Arséne Lupin, with John Barrymore as the gentleman thief and Lionel Barrymore as the prefect of police who allows Lupin to go free after stealing the Mona Lisa. Following the success of The Lone Wolf Returns, MGM cast Melvyn Douglas as Lupin for Arséne Lupin Returns in 1938.

This mixture of classical detectives (Philo Vance, Charlie Chan, Nancy Drew, Hildegarde Withers, Nero Wolfe) and adventurers (the Saint, the Lone Wolf, Arséne Lupin) dominated the screen until 1938's Arséne Lupin Returns and The Lone Wolf in Paris. These were the last of the big-budget screen presentations of the classical detective and gentleman adventurers. Thereafter, these characters would be consigned to low-budget films in the early 1940s, while hard-boiled detectives like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe assumed control of the screen. In the period after World War II, the major studios were no longer interested in classical detective characters even for low-budget films consigned to the bottom half of a double bill. The Falcon, Chan, Drummond, and Vance continued in films produced by the poverty row studios, such as Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), until these studios went out of business in the late 1940s.

The success of the lavish 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, with Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot, revived interest in the classical detective in Hollywood, Great Britain, and France, but it did not last long. Fitful attempts to revive characters from the 1914–38 golden age, including an updated presentation of Bulldog Drummond (in Deadlier than the Male, 1967) and the Saint (in The Saint, 1997), failed to attract large audiences. The same occurred with the locked-room mystery Le mystère de la chambre jaune (2003), based on the 1907 novel by French journalist Gaston Leroux. Miss Marple enjoyed a brief revival in Britain in the 1960s due to the expertise of Margaret Rutherford, but attempts to revive Chan, Carter, and Poirot on the big screen have not been successful. Instead, these characters, especially Marple, Poirot, and Holmes, have found a secure place on television.

The exception to this pattern was Feng sheng, the 2009 Chinese film shown overseas as The Message. The film is an expertly crafted mixture of Chinese propaganda and historical thriller that assimilates many of the conventions of such Agatha Christie mysteries as And Then There Were None (1945). Based on a novel by Jia Mia and directed by Kuo-fu Chen and Qunsha Gao, five suspects working in the Japanese-controlled counterinsurgency center are taken to an isolated mansion hidden in the mountains where a cat-and-mouse game takes place as the suspects are gradually eliminated.

COBB, LEE J. (1911–1976). Intense, sometimes overpowering character actor, born Leo Jacoby in New York. In the 1930s, Lee J. Cobb joined the left-wing Group Theater—an action that resulted in severe problems for the actor in the late 1940s and early 1950s during the investigation of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) into Hollywood. Although he was attracted to leftist groups and principles in the 1930s, following the economic consequences of the Depression in the United States and the rise in fascism in Europe, Cobb was not intrinsically a political person. However, to protect his wife, who suffered a nervous breakdown during this period, he gave HUAC the names it requested. This action prolonged his career.

Cobb's first substantial film role was in the Hopalong Cassidy western North of the Rio Grande (1937), but it was on Broadway in 1949 that he made his name, in the lead role in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, a role that Miller wrote specifically for Cobb. Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Cobb went back and forth between supporting roles in films and major theater productions in New York. His crime film roles include the tough detective in Johnny O'Clock (1947); a police psychiatrist who helps William Holden in The Dark Past (1948); a newspaper editor who supports James Stewart's attempt to rectify a miscarriage of justice in Call Northside 777 (1948); a crooked wholesaler in Thieves' Highway (1949); a cop who covers up a murder committed by his mistress in The Man Who Cheated Himself (1951); and a clothing factory owner who exploits his workers in The Garment Jungle (1957). Cobb received an Academy Award nomination for his performance as the waterfront gangster Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront (1954).

COCHRAN, STEVE (1917–1965). This charismatic supporting actor who specialized in tough characters with a violent edge never quite made it to leading man status. Steve Cochran was born Robert Alexander Cochran in Eureka, California. He performed on stage in the early 1940s, and his first major role was the psychotic gangster who terrorizes his wife in The Chase (1946), based on Cornell Woolrich's novel The Black Path of Fear. His career received a major break with a supporting role in William Wyler's critically acclaimed film The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946. In this film, he made the first of six screen appearances with actress Virginia Mayo. The most notable of these roles with Mayo was the gangster who steals her from James Cagney in White Heat (1949). This film consolidated Cochran's image as a tough, lusty, duplicitous gangster—a persona repeated, with some variations, in the next few years in films such as The Damned Don't Cry (1950), opposite Joan Crawford, and Highway 301 (1950). A variation on this persona was the cop who is tempted to steal the proceeds of a bank robbery after the thief dies in a car accident in Private Hell 36 (1954), opposite Ida Lupino. He appeared as another gangster, albeit a more vulnerable one, in Roger Corman's I, Mobster (1958).

Cochran's best role, however, was not as a gangster but as a man jailed for a crime he did not commit. In this film, Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951), he is forced on the run with a dance hall girl after they are involved in an accidental death. Another atypical role for Cochran was as the redemptive husband in the rural melodrama Come Next Spring (1956), opposite Ann Sheridan. One of his better films in the 1950s was the British thriller The Weapon (1956), which costarred Lizabeth Scott as the mother of a young boy who runs away after accidentally shooting a playmate with a German gun found in the industrial ruins of Aldergate; the film was directed by Val Guest.

Cochran's screen career faltered in the 1960s, and he moved into television. He died in bizarre circumstances in 1965 of an acute lung infection on his yacht near Guatemala with three young female companions on board.

COEN BROTHERS (JOEL, 1954– ; ETHAN, 1957– ). Joel and Ethan Coen grew up in the Jewish community in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. They were interested in filmmaking from a young age. Joel attended New York University, where he made a 30-minute film. He developed his expertise in editing and initially worked on industrial films and music videos. Ethan studied at Princeton University, where he majored in philosophy.

The Coen brothers' debut film, Blood Simple (1984), was symptomatic of their distinctive approach to filmmaking. While their films are often rooted in recognizable sources from the past, the final result is always unique and sometimes disturbing. For example, Blood Simple was clearly influenced by the fiction of James M. Cain. Miller's Crossing (1990), a gangster film reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett, set in the Prohibition period, presents two gangs, one Irish and one Italian, battling for control of a town and thereby allowing a man (Gabriel Byrne) to play both sides against each other. In 1996, the Coens won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Fargo, a kidnapping-gone-wrong tale set in rural Minnesota, starring Frances McDormand as a pregnant police officer; McDormand also won an Academy Award.

The Big Lebowski (1998), a comic-crime film starring Jeff Bridges, was followed by The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), a serious homage to Fritz Lang's 1940s film noir Scarlet Street (1945), starring Billy Bob Thornton as a passive barber who kills his wife's lover. No Country for Old Men (2007) represented a return to the rural setting of Blood Simple. This was their most critically acclaimed film, winning Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. However, unlike most Oscar-winning films, No Country for Old Men defied many of the basic Hollywood narrative conventions in its tale of a vicious hit man (Javier Bardem) who pursues a common man (Josh Brolin) after he inadvertently steals money from the psychotic criminal. The film's ambiguous ending, which refuses to endorse a simplistic view of the universe, is typical of their cinema. See also SAN QIANG PAI'AN JINGQI.

COMFORT, LANCE (1908–1966). Lance Comfort was born in Harrow in northwest London. He began working in the British film industry when he was 18 years of age and served a long apprenticeship as animator, sound recordist, and director of short films and documentaries before his first feature, Penn of Pennsylvania, in 1941. It was his second film, Hatter's Castle (1941), with Robert Newton as a greedy, manipulative businessman who destroys his family in 19th-century Scotland, that established his reputation. In 1946, Comfort directed the crime thriller Bedelia, starring Margaret Lockwood as a murderess with a deep hatred of men. Temptation Harbour (1947), Daughter of Darkness (1948), and Silent Dust (1949), with widely different stories and settings, were linked by Comfort's fascination with troubled, sometimes psychologically disturbed protagonists who commit murder.

Most of Comfort's films were ignored by British critics, and his status within the film industry declined and rarely was he offered major stars. However, he obtained Richard Attenborough for Eight o'Clock Walk (1954) as the man falsely accused of killing a young girl. Also, Jack Warner was cast in Bang! You're Dead (1954), a crime film concerning a young boy who accidentally shoots a man with a gun that he finds in a derelict U.S. Army hut in southern England. In this underrated film, Comfort effectively emphasizes the boy's sense of terror during the police hunt.

Comfort ended his career with a spate of efficient crime films, such as The Breaking Point (1961), Touch of Death (1962), The Break (1962), Tomorrow at Ten (1962), and Blind Corner (1963). The primary setting for The Break was a farmhouse operating as a hotel, and the film involved a married couple, a fugitive, and a smuggling racket. Following a gas station robbery in Touch of Death, two thieves (David Sumner and William Lucas) take a female hostage on a houseboat as the police search for proceeds of the robbery that have been contaminated by potassium cyanide.

The finest crime film directed by Comfort in the latter part of his career was Tomorrow at Ten (1962), starring John Gregson as the police inspector determined to recover a young boy who has been kidnapped. Comfort's superb direction of the original story and screenplay by Peter Millar and James Kelly elevates this film above the routine crime films that dominated British supporting features in the 1950s and 1960s.

CONNERY, SEAN (1930– ). Thomas Sean Connery, born in Edinburgh, left school at 15 and joined the Royal Navy. After three years, Connery left the navy to work in a variety of jobs over the next few years before his interest in bodybuilding led to modeling (he represented Scotland in the Mr. Universe contest) and the chorus in the London stage production of South Pacific in 1951. Small roles in films and repertory appearances accompanied a good deal of television in the 1950s, including the lead role in a live performance of Requiem for a Heavyweight in 1957.

Connery, after 1957, concentrated on films. He was a hot-headed truck driver in Cy Endfield's tough crime film Hell Drivers (1957), the vicious O'Bannion in Tarzan's Greatest Adventure (1959), and an Irish crook in The Frightened City (1961). The first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962), elevated Connery to stardom, although the author of the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming, had opposed the casting. However, the film's director, Terence Young, emphasized Connery's masculinity, to which he added a layer of sophistication and cruelty to make him the definitive Bond. Connery used the success of the Bond films to broaden his acting opportunities, playing such roles as the enigmatic protagonist in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964), the stubborn army prisoner who refuses to submit to a sadistic prison officer in The Hill (1965), and an Irish mine worker fighting exploitation in Pennsylvania in the 1870s in The Molly Maguires (1970). He was also an obsessive cop in the offbeat crime film The Offence (1972) and one of a trio of criminals who rob a moving train in the greatest robbery of all time in The First Great Train Robbery (1979).

Connery won the 1988 BAFTA Award for Best Actor for his role as a monk who functions as a detective at an Italian abbey during the Inquisition of the 13th century in the Italian-German-French coproduction The Name of the Rose (1986). He was also awarded the 1988 Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor as the Irish cop who assists Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) in his struggle against Al Capone in The Untouchables (1987).

Before his retirement in 2003, Connery starred in a succession of mostly Hollywood-produced adventure and crime films, including as the archaeologist father of Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989); a career criminal who joins his son (Dustin Hoffman) and grandson (Matthew Broderick) in a difficult robbery in the caper film Family Business (1989); a Japanese expert who assists the investigation by a Los Angeles detective (Wesley Snipes) into a murder that involves a Japanese corporation and a U.S. senator in Rising Sun (1993); a Harvard law professor who comes to the assistance of a black man about to be executed in Florida in Just Cause (1995); an imprisoned British agent who helps an FBI agent (Nicholas Cage) successfully attack Alcatraz, which is held by a disturbed military man threatening San Francisco, in The Rock (1996); a villain who opposes secret agents (Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman) in The Avengers, the 1998 film version of the popular 1960s British television series; an art thief who battles an insurance investigator (Catherine Zeta-Jones) in Entrapment (1999); and Allan Quatermain, one of many legendary, and notorious, 19th-century figures who come together to seek justice in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003). Connery was knighted in 2000.

CONTE, RICHARD (1910–1975). The son of an Italian-American barber, Richard Conte was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. In 1935, with the assistance of Elia Kazan and John Garfield, he obtained an acting scholarship, and after a short stage career, his film debut came in Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (1940). In 1942, 20th Century-Fox offered him a contract and promoted him as the "new John Garfield." The studio cast him in a succession of big-budget films, where he alternated between sympathetic and villainous roles. His heroic characters included the man wrongfully sentenced to life imprisonment for killing a policeman in Calling Northside 777 (1948), the son fighting his vindictive brothers in House of Strangers (1949), and the working-class trucker avenging his father's ruin by a vicious fruit wholesaler in Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway (1949). He was also effective as villains such as nightclub boss Mel Phillips in Somewhere in the Night (1946) and the amoral killer on the run in Robert Siodmak's Cry of the City (1948).

Conte's career faltered after he left 20th Century-Fox in the late 1940s. His roles in the 1950s included the conniving convict Bert Galvin in Under the Gun (1951), the sadistic crime boss in Joseph H. Lewis's The Big Combo (1955), and the remorseful brother in Phil Karlson's The Brothers Rico (1957) who inadvertently leads mobsters to his younger brother Johnny. The latter film provided Conte with one of his best roles as a former criminal racked by guilt and a sense of personal impotence. Conte's status declined in the 1960s although his career received a brief boost when Frank Sinatra cast him as Detective Santini in the two Tony Rome detective films, Tony Rome (1967) and Lady in Cement (1968). His last major crime role was as Emilio Barzini, Don Corleone's rival in The Godfather (1972).

Conte's other crime films include The Spider (1945), 13 rue Madeleine (1947), Whirlpool (1949), The Sleeping City (1950), Hollywood Story (1951), The Blue Gardenia (1953), Highway Dragnet (1954), New York Confidential (1955), The Big Tip-Off (1955), and Little Red Monkey (1955).

CONWAY, TOM (1904–1967). Tom Conway was born Thomas Charles Sanders on 15 September 1904 in St. Petersburg, Russia. His family, with its British birthright, returned to Great Britain prior to the Bolshevik revolution. After working as a rancher in South Africa for six years, he adopted the stage name Tom Conway and followed younger brother George Sanders into the acting profession. After stage appearances in Manchester and roles on radio, he left for Hollywood, where his brother was already established as an actor. Conway's first Hollywood film was in a supporting role in Sky Murder (1940), the third and last film in MGM's short-lived Nick Carter series starring Walter Pidgeon. Conway continued to be cast in supporting roles, mainly at MGM, until RKO cast him in The Falcon's Brother (1942).

After his third film as the Falcon, George Sanders informed RKO of his intention to leave the series. The studio, however, was desperate for another film in this popular crime series and convinced Sanders to remain for one more film by offering to cast his real-life brother as the Falcon's brother in The Falcon's Brother. Although Sanders was led to believe that Conway would continue in the role after this film, the studio planned to end the series with The Falcon's Brother by killing Sanders's character. The film, however, was successful, and Conway went on to make nine more films as Tom Lawrence, the Falcon, between 1942 and 1946. Conway blossomed as the debonair sleuth, and the public readily accepted him as a more-than-suitable replacement for Sanders.

After the Falcon series ended and his contract was not renewed, Conway's career declined. He was cast as Bulldog Drummond in two low-budget films, The Challenge (1948) and Thirteen Lead Soldiers (1948), produced by independent producer Edward Small and released by 20th Century-Fox. He also continued in supporting roles in a number of big-budget films, such as Prince Valiant (1954), while starring in low-budget ones such as I Cheated the Law (1949). Conway's best role in this post-Falcon period was as private detective Tom Conway in Blood Orange (U.S. title Three Stops to Murder, 1953), filmed in Great Britain for Hammer Films. He also appeared on radio as the Saint and Sherlock Holmes and, from 1951 to 1954, starred as Insp. Mark Saber in the television series Mark Saber.

Conway's last screen appearance was in the Perry Mason television series in 1963. In September 1965, reporter Gene Youngblood discovered Conway living in a cheap hotel room in Venice, California, suffering from alcoholism and virtually bankrupt. The resultant publicity attracted attention, but his health was so poor that he was unable to work. He died on 22 April 1967.

COOGAN'S BLUFF (1968). Clint Eastwood's screen persona—a tight-lipped loner with a penchant for violence—was fashioned in the 1960s in westerns directed by Sergio Leone such as Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). Coogan's Bluff transferred this characterization from the West to New York, with Eastwood as Deputy Sheriff Walt Coogan, who arrives in New York dressed in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. The film's familiar narrative structure involves a rural sheriff from Arizona—referred to as "Tex" by an overworked police chief, Lieutenant McElroy (Lee J. Cobb), and a sympathetic social worker, Julie (Susan Clark)—who is assigned to bring a prisoner, Ringerman (Don Stroud), back from New York. However, impatient at the obstacles imposed by the system, Coogan manipulates Ringerman's early release and, in the process, loses his prisoner in an ambush orchestrated by Ringerman's girlfriend Linny Raven (Tisha Sterling). Ordered back to Arizona, Coogan defies his superiors and tracks down Ringerman in New York.

This predicable narrative structure provides an opportunity for director Don Siegel and screenwriters Herman Miller, Dean Reisner, and Howard Rodman to contrast the decadence and corruption associated with New York with the rural values projected by Coogan. Often this point is made solely through Coogan's facial reactions, which range from bewilderment to disgust, at the sights he encounters in New York, like the hippie-oriented Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel Club. However, the film's final moment, when he offers Ringerman a cigarette on the journey back to Arizona, suggests a softening or relaxation of his disgust with the city.

Coogan's Bluff was a pivotal police film, and Eastwood reprised Coogan's mannerisms and values four years later as the maverick cop Lt. Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry (1972). Also, the film's basic formula, involving an out-of-town cop with a cowboy background sorting out the criminals in New York, provided the basis for the long-running television series McCloud, (1970–77), starring Dennis Weaver as the cowboy policeman.

COOK, ELISHA, JR. (1903–1995). Elisha Cook Jr. was a familiar face in 1930s crime films, relentlessly typecast as a "fall guy" or loser. He was born in San Francisco and after a short period on stage signed with Paramount in 1935. Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) established his fall-guy image as the innocent taxi driver condemned to death. This screen image was reinforced by his performances as Wilmer, the small-time fall guy in The Maltese Falcon (1941); the jittery killer in I Wake Up Screaming (1941); the drummer who lusts after Ella Raines in Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady (1944); the doomed private detective in The Big Sleep (1946); and the trusting friend killed by Lawrence Tierney in Born to Kill (1947). In the 1950s, Cook was cuckolded by Marie Windsor in Stanley Kubrick's caper film The Killing (1956) and was an elevator operator unable to protect his psychologically disturbed niece (Marilyn Monroe) in Roy Ward Baker's Don't Bother to Knock (1952).

Cook's other crime films include Dark Waters (1944), Blonde Alibi (1946), Two Smart People (1946), Fall Guy (1947), The Long Night (1947), The Gangster (1947), I, the Jury (1953), Accused of Murder (1956), The Wrong Man (1957), Chicago Confidential (1957), Plunder Road (1957), Baby Face Nelson (1957), The Wrong Man (1956), and The Outfit (1973).

COPPOLA, FRANCIS FORD (1939– ). Francis Ford Coppola resurrected, and changed, the gangster film with The Godfather (1972), the most commercially successful film up to that time. The son of composer Carmine Coppola, he graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, film school before directing a low-budget film, Dementia (1963), for Roger Corman. After directing studio films, he formed his own production company, American Zoetrope, in 1969. However, the company was soon in financial difficulties, and Coppola was forced back to the studios—and The Godfather. Many directors had rejected the project after Robert Evans, head of production at Paramount, bought the rights to Mario Puzo's novel.

After considerable haggling with the studio, Coppola directed a sequel, The Godfather: Part II, two years later. A third film, The Godfather: Part III, in 1990 was less successful. Between the first two Godfather films, Coppola directed The Conversation, a paranoid thriller that jettisoned action in favor of a low-key character study that documents the disastrous effect technological surveillance has on Gene Hackman. The film's release coincided with the beginning of the Watergate scandal, and The Conversation was subsequently associated with the political and social anxieties of this period. In 1984, Coppola directed The Cotton Club, an expensive ($50 million), troubled film that was loosely based on aspects of the career of George Raft, who befriended real-life gangster Dutch Schultz. The film stars Richard Gere as cornet player Dixie Dwyer who works at Schultz's New York nightclub, the Cotton Club, which presented black music to a white audience.

COSH BOY (1952). Cosh Boy, the first British film to receive an X Certificate, dramatized the growing fear of juvenile delinquency as an emerging social problem in Great Britain. The film's release coincided with the murder trial of teenager Christopher Craig and his older companion Derek Bentley. The solution to this problem, as suggested in the film, was the restoration of strict family discipline.

In Cosh Boy, young delinquent Roy Walsh (James Kenney) lacks control from his mother, Elsie Walsh (Ann Davies), and the film implies that the absence of a strong father (Roy's father died in World War II) is a major reason for the boy's descent into crime. Walsh controls a gang of teenage thugs who rob women at night by hitting them with a cosh while stealing their handbags. After he is arrested and ordered to undertake community service, Walsh uses the local youth center as the base for his criminal activities. At the youth center, he meets, terrorizes, and seduces Rene Collins (Joan Collins). After impregnating her, he callously dismisses her plea for marriage. This results in an unsuccessful suicide attempt and the death of her baby. During the robbery of a local sports stadium, planned and carried out by Walsh, he shoots one of the workers. When Bob Stevens (Robert Ayres), the manager of the stadium and Elsie Walsh's boyfriend, corners him and promises to give him a thrashing, Walsh hopes that the police will save him. The police, however, walk away, allowing Stevens to discipline the boy. The film ends with the sound of Walsh's screams. James Kenney, who had appeared previously on stage as Walsh, is excellent as the young criminal.

COTTEN, JOSEPH (1905–1994). Born in Petersburg, Virginia, Joseph Cotten struggled as an actor following his Broadway debut in 1930. To supplement his income, he worked as a radio actor in New York, where he met Orson Welles and joined Welles's Mercury Theatre Company in 1937. Welles gave Cotten his acting break in Hollywood with lead roles in Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). He also costarred opposite Welles in the 1943 film adaptation of Eric Ambler's espionage thriller Journey into Fear.

Cotten was often cast as the romantic lead in the 1940s, including in Since You Went Away (1944), I'll Be Seeing You (1944), Love Letters (1945), The Farmer's Daughter (1947), and especially William Dieterle's touching love story Portrait of Jennie (1948). His most notable roles exploited his southern charm, which sometimes functioned as a mask for a more sinister figure. This persona was perfectly rendered in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of Doubt (1943), with Cotten as the serial killer Uncle Charlie who targets wealthy widows. Cotten's most famous role, however, was the naïve American who betrays his former friend Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, in The Third Man (1949). He was also the troubled Korean War hero George Loomis who is locked into a loveless marriage with a younger woman (Marilyn Monroe) in Henry Hathaway's film noir Niagara (1953). Loomis ultimately strangles his wife before perishing in Niagara Falls.

Throughout the rest of the 1950s through the early 1980s, Cotten was a journeyman actor who drifted between supporting roles in crime films such as The Money Trap (1966), westerns such as The Last Sunset (1961), and low-budget horror films, including La figlia di Frankenstein (1971), in which he played Baron Frankenstein. He also appeared in many television series.

CRAWFORD, BRODERICK (1911–1986). William Broderick Crawford was born in Philadelphia, the son of vaudeville performers. He joined his parents on stage until vaudeville virtually disappeared. His acting career received a boost following his role as the slow-witted Lennie in the 1937 Broadway production Of Mice and Men. Crawford made his film debut in 1937 (Woman Chases Man), and for the next decade, due largely to his burly build and gravelly voice, he was typecast as villains, thugs, or comic figures. His major break came in 1949 when Columbia cast him in the lead role as Gov. Willie Stark in Robert Rossen's All the King's Men. This film, which demonstrated how power corrupts, traces the transformation of a much-loved southern populist politician into a demagogue. The film had its basis in the political career of Huey Long of Louisiana, who was governor from 1928 to 1932. Crawford won an Academy Award for his performance as Stark.

He followed with another major success, the Garson Kanin comedy Born Yesterday (1950) opposite Judy Holliday and William Holden. Crawford was promoted to starring roles in crime films throughout the early and mid-1950s, cast as both villains, such as the leader of the "syndicate" in New York Confidential (1955), and heroes like the undercover cop fighting corruption on the waterfront in The Mob (1951). More challenging roles included the working-class husband betrayed by his wife (Gloria Grahame) in Fritz Lang's Human Desire (1954) and Mark Chapman, the energetic, ambitious newspaper editor who accidentally kills his wife in Phil Karlson's Scandal Sheet (1952). In the latter, an engrossing film noir, Chapman watches his protégé, a young reporter (John Derek), gradually trace the killing back to him.

In the mid-1950s, Crawford moved into television, especially the long-running cop series Highway Patrol, while occasionally returning to crime films such as Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover with Crawford as Hoover. Other crime films starring Broderick Crawford include The Black Angel (1946), The Flame (1947), Convicted (1950), Down Three Dark Streets (1954), Big House, U.S.A. (1955), Convicts 4 (1962), and Ransom Money (1970).

CRAWFORD, JOAN (1905–1977). Joan Crawford was born into poverty as Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas. She had at least three distinct periods in her Hollywood career that began in 1925 and ended with a role in the television series The Sixth Sense in 1972. The first phase was as a young ingénue who matured into a major star in romantic and dramatic roles at MGM, a phase that ended when she left MGM for Warner Bros. in the early 1940s. Her career was reinvigorated in 1945 with the lead role as the ambitious housewife turned restaurateur in the film adaptation of the James M. Cain novel Mildred Pierce. Crawford won an Academy Award for her performance as the overly indulgent mother in this film noir. Determined to capitalize on Crawford's success in this film, Warner Bros. cast her in a number of crime films in the next five years, and these roles gave Crawford the opportunity to reprise various aspects of the persona she displayed in Mildred Pierce—strength, resilience, pathos, and, when required, the destructive traits associated with the femme fatale. These films include Flamingo Road (1949), The Damned Don't Cry (1950), and This Man Is Dangerous (1952). More challenging was Curtis Bernhardt's Possessed (1947), with Crawford as a possessive woman who suffers from a mental illness that leads to murder. Similarly, Humoresque (1946) gave Crawford the opportunity to portray a tragic, willful woman who lusts after violinist John Garfield, culminating in her suicide.

After an Oscar nomination for her performance as the playwright whose life is threatened by her new husband (Jack Palance) and his girlfriend (Gloria Grahame) in Sudden Fear (1952), Crawford's career stalled. Her last great film was Robert Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Thereafter, she appeared in a succession of low-budget horror films such as Berserk! (1967). See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

CREGAR, LAIRD (1916–1944). Samuel Laird Cregar was born in Philadelphia, trained at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, and after a short stage career, made his film debut in 1940. Talented, versatile Cregar was typecast as suave, psychologically disturbed villains after his performance as the morally corrupt police detective Ed Cornell obsessed with a murdered woman in I Wake Up Screaming (1941). A variation on this role was Cregar's effete villain who hires hit man Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire (1942). Cregar played a similar character in Joan of Paris (1942) as the duplicitous, sadistic Nazi Herr Funk who torments Allied prisoners captured in occupied France.

Prior to his death in 1944, 20th Century-Fox offered Cregar two of his best roles in the gothic crime films The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945). In the first film, he was Jack the Ripper in turn-of-the-century London. In the second, based on Patrick Hamilton's novel, Cregar was a schizophrenic composer who murders during periodic blackouts. His victims include his unfaithful girlfriend (Linda Darnell). The film's dramatic climax gave Cregar ample opportunity to showcase his acting skills as the composer commits suicide in an inferno while playing his own concerto. In an attempt to change his physical appearance so that he would be offered more heroic roles, Cregar went on a severe diet to lose weight; he developed stomach complications and died, aged 28.

CRICHTON, CHARLES (1910–1999). Charles Crichton was born in South Kensington, London, and educated at Oxford University. He entered films in the mid-1930s as an editor with London Films, where he worked on many prestigious films, including Sanders of the River (1935). He began directing at Ealing Studio in 1944 with For Those in Peril (1944), a film celebrating the work of the Air-Sea Rescue that was filmed in the English Channel. Crichton directed the "The Golfing Story," an episode in the portmanteau film Dead of Night (1945), detailing the tense relationship between golfing partners Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford. In 1946, he directed the first Ealing film that epitomized the "Ealing comedy," Hue and Cry, about a group of children who outwit a gang of crooks.

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) was Crichton's biggest hit in the 1950s. The film was initially conceived as a conventional caper film involving a plan to rob the Bank of England. However, producer Michael Truman, working with scriptwriter Tibby Clarke and Crichton, reworked the script to focus on the two men who conceive and execute the robbery, and with the casting of Stanley Holloway and Alec Guinness, the film was successfully transformed into a comedy involving the passage of gold-laden miniature Eiffel Tower souvenirs. Crichton was nominated for the Golden Lion award for The Lavender Hill Mob at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.

Crichton worked in a variety of genres for Ealing. The crime story Hunted (1952) involved a murderer, played by Dirk Bogarde, who forms an attachment with a young boy. After leaving Ealing, Crichton directed Floods of Fear (1958), starring Howard Keel as a convict on the run who is caught up in a major flood. Following a disagreement with Burt Lancaster, Crichton withdrew from The Birdman of Alcatraz in 1963, and his career as a feature film director stalled. He turned to television, directing series such as The Avengers, Danger Man, and The Return of the Saint throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1983, he was approached by John Cleese with an idea for a comedy, and the two men worked on the script for A Fish Called Wanda. The film went into production in 1987 with Crichton directing and Cleese starring (Cleese was credited as codirector for insurance purposes, as Crichton was 77 years of age at the time of production) in this highly successful film.

CRIME DOCTOR. Crime Doctor began as a radio series on the CBS network. It concerned an ex-gangster turned psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Ordway, who employed psychiatry to solve crimes involving mental disturbance. Columbia Pictures, eager to exploit this popular radio series for low-budget films, cast veteran actor Warner Baxter as Ordway. Crime Doctor (1943), directed by Michael Gordon, was the first, and best, entry in this series of 10 films. It begins with gangster Phil Moran (Baxter) knocked unconscious by a member of his gang. When he wakes up in a hospital, he cannot remember the past, and a physician, Dr. Carey (Ray Collins), persuades Moran, who takes the name Robert Ordway, to study medicine, specializing in psychiatry. After successfully completing his studies, Ordway establishes his reputation by rehabilitating criminals until a blow to his head brings back his criminal past, leading to a trial that exonerates him.

That first film in the series includes love interest Grace Fielding (Margaret Lindsay) for Ordway. This concept was dropped for the second film, and Ordway remains a bachelor for the rest of the series, displaying only a platonic interest in females. The remaining entries were mainly formulaic, although Shadows in the Night (1944) was nearly as good as the first film. Shadows in the Night, directed by Eugene Forde, begins with Lois Garland (Nina Foch) calling on Ordway during a stormy night to ask the doctor to help her overcome a recurring impulse to commit suicide.

Baxter's real-life problem with arthritis plagued the last entries, and production was postponed in 1948. In Baxter's final appearance in the series, Crime Doctor's Diary (1949), most of the action was carried by other performers. He died in 1951 following an operation to relieve his advanced arthritis.

CUMMINS, PEGGY (1925–). Peggy Cummins was born Augusta Margaret Diane Fuller to Irish parents in Prestatyn, Wales. Despite a long career in Britain and the United States, she is best remembered for two genre films: the crime film Gun Crazy (1950), directed by Joseph H. Lewis in Hollywood, and the horror film Night of the Demons (1957), directed by Jacques Tourneur in Great Britain. For most of her career, Cummins, with her attractive face and blonde curly hair, was relentlessly typecast as the heroine in British comedies and romantic films.

Cummins began her film career in Britain as a teenager. Then 20th Century-Fox brought her to Hollywood to star in the controversial costume drama Forever Amber (1947). However, studio head Darryl F. Zanuck was disappointed in the rushes and replaced Cummins with Linda Darnell. Fox then cast her in other films, most notably as the blackmailer in Moss Rose (1947), until her contract expired. In 1949, independent producers Maurice and Frank King offered Cummins the role of Annie Laurie Starr in Gun Crazy. This gave her a rare opportunity on screen to display her talent, and she captured Starr's conflicting impulses—her love for John Dall offset by an uncontrollable desire to kill. After her return to Britain, Cummins costarred in a few crime films in the 1950s, such as Street Corner (1953), which focuses on the daily work of policewomen, and opposite Stanley Baker in Hell Drivers (1957). See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

CUSHING, PETER (1913–1994). Born at Kenley, Surrey, England, Peter Cushing trained at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He made his stage debut in 1935 and, after a period on Broadway in the late 1930s, appeared in his first film, the Hollywood production of The Man in the Iron Mask (1939). Cushing returned to Great Britain during World War II and alternated stage work with supporting roles in films throughout the 1940s and 1950s—until 1957 and The Curse of Frankenstein. This film transformed the careers of Cushing and his costar Christopher Lee, as well as director Terence Fisher. This Hammer film was followed by an even more successful film, Dracula (1958), and then The Mummy (1959), also with Lee and Fisher. To capitalize on the success of Cushing and Lee, Hammer cast both actors in The Hound of Baskervilles (1959), with Cushing as an imperious Sherlock Holmes and Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville. In 1961, Hammer gave Cushing one of his best nonhorror roles as a bank manager forced to reconsider his cruel treatment of his employees by a bank robber in the clever crime film Cash on Demand (1961).

Cushing appeared as Baron Frankenstein seven times over a 15-year period for Hammer. He also starred as the vampire hunter in Roy Ward Baker's The Vampire Lovers (1970), the doctor who exposes the curse of the Fengriffen family in Baker's And Now the Screaming Starts (1973), the puritanical witch-hunter Weil in Twins of Evil (1971), and the deranged headmaster in Fear in the Night (1972). In 1977, Cushing appeared as the evil commander of the Deathstar in Star Wars. He died of cancer in 1994.
D

DAHL, JOHN (1956– ). Born in Billings, Montana, John Dahl, after working as a director of musical videos, began his feature film career with a trio of visually accomplished and inventive film noirs. The first, Kill Me Again (1989), starred Val Kilmer as a less-than-savvy private detective who is set up by a femme fatale (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) and her violent boyfriend (Michael Madsen). The second film, with a larger budget, was Red Rock West (1992), starring Nicholas Cage as a drifter who is mistaken as a hit man by the owner of a bar who wants his wife (Lara Flynn Boyle) murdered. The third, The Last Seduction (1994), an even more disturbing film noir, showcases Linda Fiorentino as the quintessential femme fatale who sets up a small-town man (Peter Berg) to kill her criminal husband (Bill Pullman).

Unfortunately, none of these films led to a sustained career in feature films, and Dahl subsequently alternated between edgy noir television series such as Dexter and Breaking Bad and the occasional independent film. His films include Unforgettable (1996), with Ray Liotta as a police pathologist who injects himself with a serum to find the killer of his wife. This was followed by the road film Joy Ride (2001), where three young people are stalked by a murderous truck driver, and You Kill Me (2007), starring Ben Kingsley as an alcoholic Polish hit man who, with the assistance of a young woman (Téa Leoni), confronts an Irish gang threatening his family business, a criminal enterprise, in Buffalo.

DANCE WITH A STRANGER (1985). Based on the true story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in Great Britain, director Mike Newell and scriptwriter Shelagh Delaney emphasize two strands: the obvious class differences between Ellis (Miranda Richardson) and her lover, racing car driver David Blakely (Rupert Everett), and the sexual obsession that ultimately destroys them. Ellis, a bar manager with a shady past, divorced and an ex-prostitute, establishes a volatile relationship with the spoiled, immature Blakely while trying to care for her young son, Andy. The film depicts the destructive, neurotic relationship between Ellis and Blakely, as the narrative follows a regular pattern of confrontation followed by sex, followed by betrayal, followed by more sex, followed by violence. Desmond Cussen (Ian Holm), Ellis's long-suffering admirer, and Andy (Matthew Carroll), Ruth's son, both suffer as a result of this relationship. Ellis declares at one point that "I've never had any kind of peace," and her obsession with Blakely proves fatal for both of them. After firing six bullets into Blakely, Ellis writes to his mother in a clumsy attempt to explain her actions. In her letter, which concludes the film, she blames Blakely's friends Anthony (Tom Chadborn) and Carol Findlater (Jane Bertish) for provoking her actions because of their class-based prejudice to her relationship with Blakely.

The dark visuals and bleak settings reinforce the sense of fatalism that pervades the entire film. Near-perfect performances, especially from Richardson and Holm, strengthen the film. Holm, as her hapless admirer, has the more difficult role. He even manages to project a sliver of dignity while ritually humiliating himself.

The story of Ruth Ellis also provided the basis for J. Lee Thompson's 1956 film Yield to the Night, starring Diana Dors. However, this film did not use the real-life names as it was filmed less than a year after the execution of Ellis. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

DANGEROUS CROSSING (1953). John Dickson Carr's radio play "Cabin B-13" was broadcast by CBS in March 1943 on its radio anthology series Suspense. The play was so popular that CBS produced it again, with a different cast, on 9 November 1943. In 1949, one of the characters from "Cabin B-13," the ship's doctor, received his own program for a 25-week series on CBS titled Cabin B-13. Carr also published "Cabin B-13" in the May 1944 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

In the early 1950s, 20th Century-Fox had actors such as Jeanne Crain and Michael Rennie under contract, together with director Joseph M. Newman, cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, screenwriter Leo Townsend, and composer Lionel Newman. The studio wanted a film it could quickly put into production so as to utilize the contract staff as well as the standing sets built for its large-budget films Titanic (1953) and Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1953). As the studio owned the screen rights to Carr's radio play, screenwriter Townsend quickly adapted the story. However, because of the need to expand it from a 30-minute radio play to a 75-minute film, he had to devise additional characters, such as the sinister German passenger with a cane and the duplicitous stewardess.

The script was written in December 1952, and the film went into production on 9 January 1953. After 19 days of filming, it was completed on 30 January, allowing for one day lost when Crain was ill and one day for retakes in February. It was released in August 1953. The story concerned a newlywed couple, John Bowman (Carl Betz) and Ruth Stanton Bowman (Crain), a wealthy young woman suffering from the recent death of her father. They board a luxury liner for a honeymoon cruise to Europe, and upon entering their allotted cabin, they find stewardess Anna Quinn (Mary Anderson) waiting for them. John decides to place their passports and valuables with the purser and tells Ruth to meet him in the ship's bar. However, he never turns up.

After reporting his disappearance, Ruth discovers that she is registered under her maiden name and that there is no record, or evidence, of a John Bowman on the ship. Also, her honeymoon cabin contains no sign of their arrival, such as their clothes, and she is told that this cabin was not allocated to passengers. Crew members, including the ship's purser (Gayne Whitman), Quinn, and the second officer Jim Logan (Casey Adams), fail to verify Ruth's story. Her mental condition deteriorates after the ship's captain, Captain Peters (Willis Bouchey), receives a telegram that there is no evidence that Ruth is married and warns that she suffered a nervous breakdown after her father's death four months prior.

All of the passengers and crew, except for the ship's doctor Paul Manning (Rennie), doubt Ruth's sanity. Finally, Captain Peters, fearing that Ruth will harm herself and that she may endanger other passengers, orders her confined to her cabin. However, John is exposed as a member of the crew, Third Officer Barlow, who has been hiding in his cabin after pretending to be ill. His plan to murder Ruth, on the basis that she is insane and committed suicide by jumping overboard, is foiled by Dr. Manning. Barlow's accomplice, Quinn, confesses and tells of their plot to drive Ruth insane.

Dangerous Crossing is a significant film because it is not only a fine adaptation of Carr's radio play and, in turn, an exemplary example of the "impossible mystery" subgenre but also one of the last medium-budget crime films produced by 20th Century-Fox. It was produced when television was threatening the financial basis of the film industry, and the major film studios responded by cutting back on costs. Thus, while the final cost of Dangerous Crossing was only $519,000, the film's production values appeared to be those of a more expensive film. This was achieved because of rigorous planning. For example, the swimming pool scene with Crain and Rennie in Dangerous Crossing used the same set as Gentleman Prefer Blondes, filming the day after that picture finished using the set. Similarly, the ship's interiors in Dangerous Crossing utilized the expensive sets built for Titanic and Gentleman Prefer Blondes. It benefited from the studio's roster of contract players, such as Crain and Rennie, and the expertise of studio personnel such as LaShelle, who had photographed such big-budget crime films as Laura (1944), Fallen Angel (1946), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), and The Thirteenth Letter (1951), all directed by Otto Preminger.

At a time of falling audiences, these savings were not sufficient to generate a sufficient profit for the film, and its 75-minute running time meant it was relegated to those theaters that programmed double bills. Hence, half of the film's rentals came from a flat fee rather than the more lucrative percentage fee paid by the major first-run theaters. Consequently, while the film grossed $903,000, with $500,000 coming from the overseas market, this was not a strong financial return. Fox soon moved in a different direction with the first Cinemascope film The Robe, released on 16 September 1953. The success of that film meant the end for low- and medium-budget black-and-white crime films like Dangerous Crossing as the studios shifted production to large-scale epics and westerns, filmed in color and presented in a wide-screen format. See also LOCKED-ROOM MYSTERIES.

Dangerous Crossing (1953) directed by Joseph M. Newman and based on the radio play "Cabin B-13" by John Dickson Carr.

DASSIN, JULES (1911–2008). Born in Middletown, Connecticut, Jules Dassin—like many other left-wing actors, directors, and writers—joined the radical theaters that proliferated in New York in the 1930s, including the Group Theater and the Yiddish Artef (Arbeter Teater Farband, or Workers' Theater Organization), which was founded as an agitprop theater based on a Soviet model. Dassin began in the Artef as an unpaid actor and director while working in a paid occupation during the day. During this period, he worked with Elia Kazan on a Federal Theater Production of the Marxist children's play Revolt of the Beavers that was terminated after three weeks by the New York police commissioner.

When the radical theaters collapsed in the late 1930s, Dassin left New York for Hollywood. Although RKO was interested in Dassin as an actor, MGM offered him the chance to direct, beginning with Nazi Agent in 1941 starring Conrad Veidt. He also directed one of Joan Crawford's last MGM films, Reunion in France (1942), and the film adaptation of the Oscar Wilde short story The Canterville Ghost (1944).

Dassin soon tired of the lightweight fare offered to him at MGM, and he left in 1946 for Universal, where he teamed up with producer Mark Hellinger for two influential 1940s crime films: Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948). Brute Force, scripted by Richard Brooks, reworked familiar wartime themes of collective action against fascist tyranny, only this time the setting was transferred from the combat unit to a prison. However, unlike the optimistic tone of the combat films, Brute Force is a violent, fatalistic melodrama where the sadistic Captain Munsey runs his prison as his personal fascist state with the liberal authorities powerless to stop him. Death provides the only relief for the prisoners. The Naked City, a pioneering police procedural, represented a shift for Dassin, who shot virtually every scene on the streets of New York.

Dassin's next move was to 20th Century-Fox and Thieves' Highway (1949), another crime film with strong social themes. Scripted by proletarian writer A. I. Bezzerides from his novel Thieves' Market, the film exposes the corrupt side of capitalism in its tale of an ex-GI (Richard Conte) battling a greedy wholesaler (Lee J. Cobb) at San Francisco's wholesale fruit market. Dassin followed this series of strong film noirs with the even more bleak and fatalistic Night and the City.

In 1949, Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of production at 20th Century-Fox, went to Dassin's home in Los Angeles and gave him Night and the City, a book by Gerald Kersh, and told him to get to London and begin filming. He also told Dassin to shoot the most expensive scenes first so that it would be costly for the studio executives in New York to remove him from the film. Dassin did this, but after completing filming in London, he was prevented from supervising postproduction work in Los Angeles because he had been placed on a blacklist. Even Zanuck could no longer protect him, and Night and the City was Dassin's last Hollywood film.

Dassin stayed in Europe and investigated the possibility of directing a film about a Communist and a priest, Le petit monde de Don Camillo. This possibility ended when he learned that he had been named as a Communist in the United States. Dassin was then offered the chance to direct L'ennemi public no 1, starring Ferdandel. However, as filming was about to begin Roy Brewer, an influential Hollywood union official, pressured the film's producer into removing him. Although the French press took up Dassin's cause, this did not help his film career, and Dassin's passport was revoked. The same situation arose with his next project, the Italian film Mastro Don Gesualdo, where Dassin was again removed after the U.S. ambassador to Italy, Clare Boothe Luce, intervened and Dassin was forced to leave Italy.

Finally, after five years of unemployment, the French caper film Du rififi chez les hommes (Rififi, 1955) gave Dassin the opportunity to revive his career. Although he had reservations about the source material, Dassin embraced the project and reworked Auguste Le Breton's novel, casting himself in a crucial supporting role. The film, with its celebrated 25-minute burglary sequence played without any dialogue, was a major commercial success. He followed with the French-Greek production Celui qui doit mourir (1956), starring Greek actress Melina Mercouri. Four years later, Dassin wrote, directed, and costarred with Mercouri in a major financial and critical success, Pote tin Kyriaki (Never on Sunday, 1960). Mercouri, as the earthy, fun-loving prostitute, was nominated for an Academy Award, and Dassin was nominated for both his direction and his screenplay. Dassin and Mercouri married in 1966. Dassin followed with a series of European films, and he retired in 1980 after the disappointing Canadian production Circle of Two, starring Tatum O'Neal and Richard Burton.

DEARDEN, BASIL (1911–1971). Basil Dearden was born Basil Clive Dear at Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, England. He moved from theater direction to working as a film assistant to Basil Dean, changing his name to avoid confusion with Dean. He began directing comedy films at Ealing in 1942 and directed portions of the famous British portmanteau horror film Dead of Night (1945). In 1943, he formed a creative partnership with art director and producer Michael Relph that lasted until Dearden's death in a car accident in 1971.

Relph was born at Broadstone in Dorset, England; began his career in 1932 in the art department at Gaumont-British; and in 1942 moved to the art department at Ealing. Relph also produced the black comedy-murder masterpiece Kind Hearts and Coronets (1948), which was not directed by Dearden but by Robert Hamer.

The partnership of Dearden and Relph included a number of socially conscious crime films such as The Blue Lamp (1950). In 1959, the murder-mystery Sapphire combined an attack on racial prejudice with a crime plot involving an investigation into the death of a young music student. Two years later, Dearden directed and Relph produced their best crime film, Victim (1961), with Dirk Bogarde as a married lawyer and nonpracticing homosexual embroiled in the death of a young gay man. Their other crime films include The Gentle Gunman (1952), The Violent Playground (1957), the caper film The League of Gentlemen (1959), and All Night Long (1961).

DE DOMINEE (2004). This gangster film produced in the Netherlands is based on the real-life story of Dutch drug kingpin Klaas Bruinsma who, in the period from the early 1970s until his death on 27 June 1991, was the major importer of marijuana throughout Western Europe. In the film, Klaas's surname is changed to Donkers. De Dominee radically reworks the facts to conform to the classic rise-and-fall narrative structure of the genre, beginning with an ambitious young man, Klaas (Peter Paul Muller), who takes over the drug business of American Hugo Duvall (Keith Davis). After attempting the murder of Hugo, Klaas achieves the top of his profession and, in accordance with the demands of the genre, there is nowhere to go except down. Despite protestations that he detests violence, Klaas kills his best friend Adri (Frank Lammers) and, later, his wife Annet (Chantal Janzen) when they threaten his business interests. Klaas's brutal death in a parking lot opens and closes the film. His redeeming quality is that he refuses to distribute hard drugs and longs for the day when marijuana will be legalized.

DEKKER, ALBERT (1905–1968). Relentlessly typecast as villains, mostly in westerns and crime films during his 31-year film career, Albert Dekker was born in Brooklyn and established his career as a stage actor before his film debut in 1937 in The Great Garrick. Because of his burly build, thin moustache, and pointed features, Dekker, an accomplished and versatile actor, was unable to escape typecasting in films, although he periodically returned to the stage for a greater variety of roles.

One of his best film opportunities was in the early film noir Among the Living (1941), in which he was cast as twins John and Paul Raden—one sane and the other insane and believed dead. As the insane Paul, Dekker projects a degree of pathos and childlike qualities in a small southern town. He was also the duplicitous villain Colfax in Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946) and the tough theater owner betrayed by his wife in Monogram's most expensive film, Suspense (1946). Dekker remained within the confines of this persona in crime films throughout the 1940s and 1950s, including The Pretender (1947), Search for Danger (1949), Destination Murder (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Illegal (1955), and Machete (1958). A notable exception was the opportunity provided by Republic in 1946 when it cast Dekker in the film adaptation of Frank Gruber's novel The French Key. In this film, Dekker was Gruber's private detective Johnny Fletcher. Dekker died in bizarre circumstances in 1968 after completing his scenes in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969).

DELON, ALAIN (1935– ). Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born in Sceaux, a suburb of Paris. After service in the French Navy, including the Indochina War, he was dishonorably discharged. Later, he was spotted by a talent scout for David O. Selznick. Although he preferred to remain in France rather than move to Hollywood, in the mid-1960s, Delon accepted roles in Hollywood-produced films such as Texas across the River (1966). After his debut in Quand la femme s'en mêle (1957), Delon attracted attention as the amoral Tom Ripley in René Clément's Plein soleil (Purple Noon, 1960), based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, and the similarly amoral con man in Les félins (Joy House, 1964). He also costarred with Jean Gabin in Mélodie en sous-sol (1963) and with Jean-Paul Belmondo in the highly successful gangster film Borsalino, directed by Jacques Deray in 1970, in which Delon and Belmondo are rival gangsters in the 1920s who come together to eliminate their opposition in Marseilles.

It was Delon's glacial good looks that made him the ideal actor for French director Jean-Pierre Melville. Melville effectively exploited these qualities with Delon as the hit man in the masterly crime film Le samouraï (1967). He was also effective in Le cercle rouge (1970). In these films, together with Un flic (1972), Melville gave Delon a tragic dimension of the archetypal loner alienated from a harsh society. Although Delon branched out into other genres, he continued his association with crime films and directed Flic story (Cop Story) in 1975.

Delon's other crime films include La veuve Couderc (1971), Le gang (1976), Mort d'un pourri (1977), Pour la peau d'un flic (1981), Tegeran-43 (1981), Le choc (1982), Parole de flic (1985), Ne réveillez pas un flic qui dort (1988), and Un crime (1993).

DE NIRO, ROBERT (1943– ). Although he is often perceived as the quintessential Italian-American actor, Robert De Niro's father was of Italian and Irish descent and his mother was of English, German, French, and Dutch ancestry. His first film was Brian De Palma's The Wedding Party (filmed in 1963 but not released until 1969). But it was De Niro's role as Johnny Boy in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) that attracted the attention of critics and the Hollywood film industry. It also led to his breakthrough role of Vito Corleone in The Godfather: Part II (1974) after Francis Ford Coppola, having watched Mean Streets, cast De Niro. The character of Vito, as made famous by Marlon Brando as an old man in The Godfather (1971), elevated De Niro to stardom with both actors, Brando and De Niro, winning Academy Awards. De Niro continued his association with director Scorsese in Taxi Driver (1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), and Casino (1995). During this rich period, he also starred in the unsettling Vietnam War film The Deer Hunter (1978).

Each film was different and each performance was layered with the techniques he learned at the Stella Adler Conservatory and Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio in the 1960s. His dedication included gaining 60 pounds and learning how to box for his role as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull and learning the saxophone for New York, New York. In 1981, he was able to project his characteristic intensity without the physical violence in the role of Father Des Spellacy in True Confessions (1981). This challenging film, which exposed civic, ecclesiastical, and personal corruption in the Catholic Church in Los Angeles during the 1930s, allowed De Niro's character to mature from an ambitious fixer for the Church to an elderly priest with a terminal illness serving a remote desert community.

The pervasive sense of melancholy and self-doubt in True Confessions provided De Niro with the kind of challenging material that characterized his best roles in the 1980s and 1990s—including Sergio Leone's 1983 epic gangster film Once upon a Time in America (1983) with De Niro as David "Noodles" Aaronson, a complex gangster able to elicit sympathy despite a disturbing rape scene in which he violates his childhood sweetheart. He was also a terrifying Satan who manipulates a hapless private detective (Mickey Rourke) in Alan Parker's film noir hybrid Angel Heart (1987).

Determined to avoid typecasting in gangster and crime roles, De Niro gravitated to less intense roles, including comedy films, in the 1980s and 1990s. These included Analyze This (1999) and, beginning in 2000, his ongoing role as Jack Byrnes, the uptight father in Meet the Parents (2000), Meet the Fockers (2004), and Little Fockers (2010). It is in the crime genre—such as Mean Streets, The Godfather: Part II, De Palma's The Untouchables (1987), with De Niro as Al Capone—where De Niro excels. This includes one of his best films as master criminal Neil McCauley in Heat (1995), a melancholic figure who dies when he breaks his professional code by forming an attachment to a bookstore clerk. John Curran's Stone (2010) also gave De Niro the opportunity to deliver a subdued but powerful performance as Jack Mabry, a parole officer about to retire who is forced to confront the fact that his entire life has been predicated on denial and evasions. This revelation emerges when Mabry violates both the ethics of his vocation and his rigid moral code by sleeping with the wife of a convict (Edward Norton) he is evaluating for parole.

In the 1990s, De Niro set up his own production company, TriBeCa Productions, and directed A Bronx Tale (1993), based on Chazz Palminteri's play about a young boy torn between the influence of his honest working-class father (De Niro) and the charismatic appeal of a neighborhood gangster (Palminteri). Thirteen years later, De Niro returned to directing with the complex spy film The Good Shepherd (2006), playing the supporting role of Gen. Bill Sullivan, who recruits Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), a key figure in the history of the CIA.

De Niro's other crime films include the lackluster 1992 remake of Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1992), The Fan (1996), Cop Land (1997), Jackie Brown (1997), Ronin (1998), The Score (2001), 15 Minutes (2001), City by the Sea (2002), Righteous Kill (2008, which reunited De Niro with Al Pacino), Machete (2011), and The Killer Elite (2012).

DE PALMA, BRIAN (1940– ). Visually extravagant, formally innovative director Brian De Palma, the son of a surgeon, was born in Newark, New Jersey. While some of his films have been in different ways influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, De Palma is rarely interested in the complex morality that characterizes Hitchcock's cinema. Instead, he appears more intent on devising visually complex set pieces that, in some cases, almost overwhelm the film. The thematic link in his films is a fascination with the perverse side of human nature, the bizarre, the erotic, and the violent. There is also a recurring desire to shock, both thematically and formally, which may be a by-product of his early iconoclastic experiences as a young director in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1960s, as a student at Columbia University, De Palma followed his interest in filmmaking by progressing through 16-mm shorts to low-budget feature films. As a postgraduate student, he wrote, edited, and directed Murder à La Mod (1967). His first commercially produced feature film, Greetings (1968), starred Jonathan Warden and a young Robert De Niro. This film, which cost only $43,000, made a profit, and De Palma followed with a sequel, Hi Mom! (1970), also featuring De Niro.

His breakthrough film was the Hitchcock-influenced horror film Sisters (1972), starring Margot Kidder as the murderous survivor of a pair of Siamese twins. The film benefited from the score provided by Hitchcock's favorite composer, Bernard Herrmann. De Palma also employed Herrmann's music to great effect in Obsession (1976), De Palma's homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). The bizarre plot involves a man (Cliff Robertson) who loses his wife and child to kidnappers only, years later, to fall in love with a young woman (Genevieve Bujold) who looks a lot like his wife. The young woman, unknown to the man, also happens to be his lost daughter who, in an attempt to exact revenge against her father, participates in the hoax. Other Hitchcock-influenced films include Dressed to Kill (1980), which updated aspects of Psycho (1960), and Body Double (1984), which borrowed from both Vertigo and Rear Window (1954). For a change, Blow Out (1981), arguably De Palma's best film, jettisoned Hitchcock and took its initial premise from Francis Ford Coppola's low-key political thriller The Conversation (1974).

De Palma directed his best-known film in 1983, an updated remake of the 1933 gangster film Scarface. De Palma's version stars Al Pacino as Tony Montana, an ambitious Cuban refugee determined to make it to the top of the Florida drug trade.

In 1987, De Palma directed The Untouchables, an updated adaptation of the long-running 1960s television series. This film, based on an excellent script by David Mamet, was a more disciplined effort, although the film's final shoot-out was constructed as a homage to the famous Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei M. Eisenstein's Russian classic Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925). De Palma followed with a series of less financially successful, yet visually and thematically interesting, crime films, including Carlito's Way (1993), Femme Fatale (2002), and The Black Dahlia (2006), based on James Ellroy's 1987 novel.

DE ROCHEMONT, LOUIS (1899–1978). Influential producer Louis de Rochemont was born in Boston. He established his reputation with the March of Time newsreels in the 1930s, with his "Inside Nazi Germany" entry in January 1938 attracting attention for its critical approach to the German regime at a time when America was divided with regard to the growing turmoil in Europe. In the mid-1940s, de Rochemont applied these newsreel techniques, with extensive location filming, to feature films that exploited topical issues in such films as The House on 92nd Street (1945) and 13 Rue Madeleine (1946). The former re-created the investigation of a Nazi spy ring operating in the United States, with director Henry Hathaway using actual locations in New York and Washington, D.C. The film also employed the use of the stentorian narrator that de Rochemont used to dramatic effect in his newsreels. 13 Rue Madeleine (also directed by Hathaway) followed the same pattern with its story of OSS operatives set in World War II.

De Rochemont had strong links with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and his films such as Walk East on Beacon (1952) shifted their attention to the fear of Communist subversion. De Rochemont also produced, with direction from Elia Kazan and a screenplay by Richard Murphy, the gripping crime drama Boomerang! (1947). It was based on an article by Anthony Abbott concerning the real-life case of an innocent man arrested for the murder of a minister and starred Dana Andrews as the district attorney who fights for the innocent man.

DETECTIVE FILMS. Early detective films were mostly based on characters already established in literature. The first screen detective was Arthur Conan Doyle's creation, Sherlock Holmes, who appeared in the trick film Sherlock Holmes Baffled, produced at Biograph Studio between 1900 and 1903. The film, which was only 30 seconds long, depicted a burglar robbing a home when Sherlock Holmes enters the room smoking a cigar. He sees the burglar, who disappears. The cigar explodes and the burglar reappears, whereupon Holmes shoots at him causing the burglar to disappear again.

These early films were so brief that any plot development was impossible. This changed with a series of two-reel films featuring Sherlock Holmes produced by Nordisk Films in Denmark between 1908 and 1911 starring Viggo Larsen as Holmes. In the United States, actor and playwright William Gillette worked with Conan Doyle in 1916 in adapting Gillette's long-running play Sherlock Holmes to the screen. In Great Britain, George Treville starred in 12 Sherlock Holmes films. This was followed in 1921 by a long series produced by Stoll Picture Productions, totaling nearly 50 films with Eille Norwood as Holmes. While the first few films were shorts, such as The Man With the Twisted Lip (1921), the company soon switched to feature films with The Hound of the Baskervilles (1921) as its first feature. In 1922, an American production of Sherlock Holmes, starring John Barrymore in the title role, was filmed in London. Buster Keaton also starred in a spoof on Conan Doyle's character in Sherlock, Jr. for Metro Pictures in Hollywood in 1924.

The gentleman crook Raffles first appeared on screen in an American short film in 1905 and an Italian serial in 1911. Another literary detective, Arthur B. Reeve's Craig Kennedy—a "scientific detective" who was known, at the peak of his fame, as the "American Sherlock Holmes"—was a popular screen detective in the silent period. His first appearance on the screen was in the serial The Exploits of Elaine (1915), starring Pearl White, with Arnold Daly as Kennedy, battling the Clutching Hand who is after Elaine's inheritance. Kennedy returned in the sequels The New Exploits of Elaine (1925) and The Romance of Elaine (1916) and in other silent serials. He was still battling his nemesis in the sound serial The Clutching Hand (1936) with Jack Mulhall as Kennedy.

Other literary ex-criminals brought to the screen included Arsène Lupin, who first appeared in 1910, and Boston Blackie, in 1918, while the British adventurer Sexton Black made his appearance in 1909. However, except for the serials, the detective was not a prominent screen character in silent films. In 1920, Howard Hawks directed a silent version of E. C. Bentley's 1913 detective novel Trent's Last Case, starring comedian Raymond Griffith as the detective Trent. The film was remade in Britain in 1953 with Michael Wilding as Trent and Orson Welles as the American millionaire who is murdered.

The arrival of sound generated more interest in the screen detective in Hollywood, and British actor Clive Brook was cast as Holmes in Paramount's The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1929). In Britain, The Sleeping Cardinal (1931), with Arthur Wontner as Holmes, was produced at the Twickenham Film Studio; it was released as Sherlock Holmes's Fatal Hour in the United States. In the 1930s, Wontner starred in four more British films as Holmes, while Reginald Owen played him in an American production of A Study in Scarlet (1933).

In 1922, American actor Carlyle Blackwell starred as Capt. Hugh Drummond in Bulldog Drummond, a British film version of H. C. McNeile's 1920 novel. More successful, in terms of the box office, was Sam Goldwyn's 1929 Hollywood sound version, with Ronald Colman as the dashing detective. The success of this film encouraged the Fox Film Corporation to produce Temple Tower (1930) with Kenneth MacKenna as Drummond. However, it failed at the box office, and Colman returned as Drummond in Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934). In Britain, Ralph Richardson starred as Drummond in The Return of Bulldog Drummond (1934). The following year, Richardson reversed the roles by appearing as the master villain Morelle in a spoof on the Drummond series, Bulldog Jack (1935), starring comedian Jack Hulbert as the man who opposes Morelle.

Paramount embarked on a regular series of Drummond films after the studio purchased the film rights for 10 years from McNeile. The first film in the series was Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1937), and it features Ray Milland as Drummond. However, the studio had more ambitious plans for Milland, so Paramount cast John Howard as Drummond for the remaining films in the series, beginning with Bulldog Drummond Comes Back in 1937. Howard continued in this role for a further eight films, and the series concluded with Bulldog Drummond's Bride in 1939. Columbia resurrected the character in 1947 for two films with Australian actor Ron Randell as Drummond, followed by ex-Falcon star Tom Conway in two more independently produced low-budget films. In 1951, MGM revived the character yet again with Walter Pidgeon as Drummond in Calling Bulldog Drummond, and in 1967, Richard Johnson starred as Drummond in a radically updated version, Deadlier than the Male.

S. S. Van Dine's gentleman detective Philo Vance was a popular literary detective in the 1920s and 1930s, beginning with The Benson Murder Case in 1926. The first screen appearance of Vance was in Paramount's The Canary Murder Case in 1929 with William Powell as the amateur detective. The film, directed by Malcolm St. Clair, began production as a silent in 1929. However, additional footage directed by Frank Tuttle with dialogue dubbed by the actors was added before the film's release. The Greene Murder Case (1929) and The Benson Murder Case (1930) soon followed. MGM then purchased the rights to The Bishop Murder Case (1930) and cast Basil Rathbone as Vance, although the film failed at the box office. The next studio to utilize Vance was Warner Bros., which, after acquiring William Powell, cast him in The Kennel Murder Mystery (1933), the most popular Vance film. After Powell left the studio for MGM, Warner Bros. cast Warren William in The Dragon Murder Case (1934) before the series switched back to MGM with The Casino Murder Case (1935) with Paul Lukas as Vance. This was followed by Edmund Lowe as Vance in The Garden Murder Case (1936). William returned to the role at Paramount for The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939) before Warner Bros. made one last attempt in Calling Philo Vance in 1940, a remake of The Kennel Murder Case, with James Stephenson as the detective.

Other screen detectives in the 1930s included Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, played by Edward Arnold in Meet Nero Wolfe (1934); a series based on the teenage female detective Nancy Drew; William Powell and Myrna Loy in the highly successful Thin Man series that comprises six films made between 1934 and 1947; Stuart Palmer's schoolteacher-detective Hildegarde Withers series at RKO; John Marquand's Japanese detective Mr. Moto, played by Peter Lorre; and Boris Karloff as Mr. Wong in a cheaply produced series for Monogram Studio. Although Charlie Chan was a Honolulu police officer, not a private detective, he was the most popular screen detective in the 1930s and early 1940s.

At the end of the 1930s, 20th Century-Fox revived Sherlock Holmes with two large-budget films starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939). These films were financially successful, so in March 1942 Universal Studio purchased the film rights from the son of Conan Doyle and cast Rathbone and Bruce in 12 films between 1942 and 1946, updating the setting to the 1940s.

The various studios developed their own detectives in the 1940s, including the Saint, the Falcon, the Lone Wolf, Nick Carter, the Crime Doctor, the Shadow, Michael Shayne, and Boston Blackie. Concurrent with these low-budget series were bigger budgeted films with hard-boiled detectives such as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, for example, in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944), and The Big Sleep (1946), with major stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell.

In France, hard-boiled detective Lemmy Caution was featured in nine films between 1953 and 1967, while in Britain Alec Guinness starred as priest Father Brown in 1954 and Margaret Rutherford as Miss Jane Marple in a series of films produced between 1962 and 1964. In the 1950s, the private detective shifted from the big screen to television, although Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer lingered in films such as I, the Jury (1953), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and My Gun Is Quick (1957).

In 1966, the hard-boiled detective reappeared in Harper, with Paul Newman as Ross MacDonald's private detective Lew Archer (Newman changed the surname of the detective to Harper). The film was based on MacDonald's first Archer novel, The Moving Target (1949). A sequel based on MacDonald's second Archer novel, The Drowning Pool, was released in 1975. Frank Sinatra starred as a Florida-based detective in Tony Rome (1967) and its sequel, Lady in Cement (1968). In 1969, MGM brought Philip Marlowe back to the screen in Marlowe, an updated version of Raymond Chandler's 1949 novel Little Sister, with James Garner in the title role. This was a prelude to a revival of the detective film in the 1970s, including Klute (1971), Chandler (1972), Shamus (1973), The Yakuza (1975), and Robert Altman's revisionist 1973 interpretation of Chandler's most ambitious novel, The Long Goodbye, with Elliott Gould as Marlowe. An interpretation of Marlowe more in keeping with the heroic nature of Chandler's sleuth was the 1975 remake of Murder, My Sweet, released under the title of Chandler's source novel, Farewell, My Lovely, with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. A British remake of The Big Sleep, also starring Mitchum, was released in 1978.

Director Roman Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne drew upon the conventions of the hard-boiled detective for Chinatown (1974), their bleak critique of American society. Although the film was set in 1937, it was also intended as a comment on America in the 1970s following the political and social ramifications of the Watergate scandal. The film starred Jack Nicholson as private detective Jake Gittes and John Huston as the villain, Noah Cross. Nicholson directed and starred in a less successful sequel, The Two Jakes (1990).

Arthur Penn, in a different setting and different period, also challenged the conventions of the genre in Night Moves (1975), starring Gene Hackman as detective Harry Moseby. A less complex presentation of the detective appeared in the black private detective series beginning with Shaft in 1971. The series comprised three films and a two-year television series. Richard Roundtree starred as Shaft, a character created by Ernest Tidyman. At the end of the 1970s, comedian Art Carney starred as an aging private detective in Robert Benton's The Late Show (1977), and Richard Dreyfuss played a former radical student turned private detective, Moses Wine, in the 1978 screen adaptation of Roger L. Simon's 1973 novel The Big Fix.

With the demise of the series detective films in the 1940s, the amateur detective virtually disappeared, and the hard-boiled variety dominated the screen for the next three decades. An exception to this trend was the 20th Century-Fox big-budget production And Then There Were None (1945), directed by René Clair and based on the 1939 Agatha Christie novel Ten Little Niggers, which was published in the United States as Ten Little Indians. The film was remade three times, in 1966, 1975, and 1989. There were also sporadic film adaptations of Christie's stories, including The Spider's Web (1960); The Alphabet Murders (1966), with Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot; and Endless Night (1971), based on one of Agatha Christie's less conventional, more psychologically inclined novels, published in 1967. In 1974, EMI-British revived interest in Christie with its lavish adaptation of Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express, directed by Sidney Lumet, with Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Perkins, Richard Widmark, and Albert Finney as Poirot. Another international-star cast, including Bette Davis, David Niven, Angela Lansbury, and Peter Ustinov as Poirot, appeared in the screen adaptation of Christie's 1937 novel Death on the Nile (1978), directed by John Guillermin; however, this film failed to match the commercial success of the 1974 film.

Since 1980, television has been the dominant form for the detective genre. A commercially unsuccessful attempt to bring Sara Paretsky's Chicago-based female private detective to the screen in V. I. Warshawski was released in 1991 starring Kathleen Turner. Director Carl Franklin's excellent screen adaptation of Walter Mosley's 1990 novel featuring black detective Easy Rawlins in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), starring Denzel Washington as Rawlins, was more successful with the critics but failed to ignite a sequel. See also CLASSICAL DETECTIVE FILMS; SUN TAAM.

DE TOTH, ANDRÉ (1912–2002). André De Toth directed five films in his homeland, Hungary, after moving from the stage to film. He left Hungary for England at the beginning of World War II and, after one film in Britain, moved to Hollywood in 1942, where he established himself as an expert director of genre films. His films are characterized by their hard edge, realistic presentation of violence, and dramatic compositions. The director had only one eye, but this disability did not stop De Toth from directing one of the very best 3-D films, House of Wax (1953), starring Vincent Price as the crazed sculptor who transforms his human victims into wax figures for his museum.

Although he is best remembered for his cycle of westerns with Randolph Scott in the early 1950s, De Toth also directed a number of excellent crime films in the 1940s and 1950s. These included Dark Waters (1944), starring Merle Oberon in a gothic tale of a woman threatened by her relatives. In 1948, De Toth directed the film noir Pitfall, starring Dick Powell as the bored insurance agent who has an affair with Lizabeth Scott—which, of course, leads to murder and pain for the agent, his wife (Jane Wyatt), and Scott's character. He followed this superior film with a number of noir-inflected crime films, including Crime Wave (1954), starring Sterling Hayden as the hardened police detective who pursues an innocent man (Gene Nelson), and Hidden Fear (1957), shot in Copenhagen, with John Payne as an American policeman who fights counterfeiters while trying to clear his sister of a murder charge. One of De Toth's final films, The Two-Headed Spy, a World War II thriller starring Jack Hawkins, was filmed in Great Britain in 1958.

De Toth was married to actress Veronica Lake from 1944 to 1952, and in 1948 he directed her in the noir western Ramrod with Lake as the femme fatale who intensifies the hostility between sheepmen and cattlemen in a western community.

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (1995). Devil in a Blue Dress came near the end of a brief cycle featuring African-American actors in lead roles in crime films. This series included Deep Cover (1992), directed by Bill Duke, an African American, with Laurence Fishburne as a uniformed cop who goes undercover to expose a narcotics ring. Duke's A Rage in Harlem (1991), adapted from a Chester Himes novel, was another strong example, together with One False Move (1992), directed by black filmmaker Carl Franklin, which concerned an African-American woman named Fantasia (Cynda Williams), the companion of a vicious gangster (Billy Bob Thornton), and her desire to travel to Arkansas to see her young son and his father, the local sheriff (Bill Paxton).

Franklin directed and wrote the script for Devil in a Blue Dress, which was based on Walter Mosley's first published novel. The film is set in the late 1940s in an African-American community in South Central Los Angeles. Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington), recently unemployed, is approached by Dewitt Albright (Tom Sizemore), a white man, to find Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals), the (seemingly) white girlfriend of Todd Carter (Terry Kinney), a wealthy mayoral candidate. Daphne is hiding in the black community as she appears to have an interest in black men. Rawlins's investigation takes him into Raymond Chandler's world of hostile cops, corrupt politicians (including a pedophile), failed relationships, betrayal, and vicious gangsters. Rawlins is assisted by Mouse (Don Cheadle), a psychopathic thug from Rawlins's hometown in Louisiana.

The very fact that Rawlins is black creates a different dynamic. While Mosley set his novel in the same city (Los Angeles) and the same time (the 1940s) as Chandler, the perspective in both the novel and the film is very different, as everything is filtered through a racial perspective. This point is made explicit with the revelation that Daphne is the daughter of a Creole. Her part-black origins become a central plot element because her association with Carter damages his political aspirations. The film omits Daphne's incestuous relationship with her brother and her sexual relationship with Rawlins. This softens the impact of the film. Despite excellent reviews, the film's poor showing at the box office killed any possibility of a continuing series of films featuring Rawlins.

DILLINGER, JOHN. John Dillinger was one of the more flamboyant and popular real-life gangsters in the 1920s and 1930s. A popular mythology emerged presenting Dillinger as a kind of Robin Hood through his refusal to take money from the customers when robbing banks and his reluctance to shoot people. His celebrity status was confirmed when, after his capture, the Crown Point Sheriff's Department arranged a "photo shoot." Dillinger's subsequent escape only enhanced his reputation.

J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, eager to exploit Dillinger for his own reasons, declared the gangster "Public Enemy Number 1" and dispatched government agent Melvin Purvis to apprehend or kill him. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to corner Dillinger, Purvis received a tip-off from Romanian brothel owner Anna Sage that Dillinger was planning to accompany her to a screening of the Clark Gable–William Powell gangster film Manhattan Melodrama on 22 July 1934 at the Biograph Theater in Chicago. Purvis, with 16 FBI agents, trapped and shot Dillinger dead as he was leaving the theater. Sage had betrayed Dillinger on the understanding that Purvis would oppose her deportation order from the United States, but she was subsequently deported anyway.

Specific details from Dillinger's life, including Purvis's failed raid on his Wisconsin hideout and the gangster's death outside the Biograph Theater, were reworked in a number of films, such as Public Hero Number One (1935). However, the censors of the Production Code Administration prohibited the use of Dillinger's name until the King Brothers, at Monogram, challenged them by producing Dillinger in 1945 starring Lawrence Tierney. This film portrayal of the gangster as a vicious killer was reversed by John Milius's 1973 version starring Warren Oates as the charismatic gangster. Similarly, bravery, audaciousness, and charisma define Johnny Depp's interpretation in Michael Mann's Public Enemies (2009). This film emphasizes Dillinger's romance with hatcheck girl Billie Frechette, although it includes Dillinger's two jailbreaks, the raid on his Wisconsin hideout, and his death outside the Biograph. Dillinger was also played by Myron Healey in Guns Don't Argue (1957), Scott Peters in The FBI Story (1959), Eric Sinclair in Ma Barker's Killer Brood (1960), Nick Adams in Young Dillinger (1964), William Jordan in Kansas City Massacre (1975), and Robert Conrad in The Lady in Red (1979). Mark Harmon starred in the 1991 made-for-television film Dillinger.

DMYTRYK, EDWARD (1908–1999). Edward Dmytryk was born in Grand Forks, British Columbia, to Ukrainian parents. Following his mother's death, his father moved to San Francisco when Dmytryk was six. He was studying mathematics and physics in 1923 when he took a part-time job at Paramount. From 1930 to 1939, he worked as a film editor, although he also directed a low-budget western, The Hawk, in 1935. In 1939, he resumed directing, mainly low-budget features, first at Paramount (1939–40) and then at Columbia (1940–42), where he directed series crime films such as Secrets of the Lone Wolf (1941); Counter Espionage (1942), starring Warren William as Michael Lanyard; and Confessions of Boston Blackie (1941), featuring Chester Morris as Boston Blackie. It was his second film at RKO, Hitler's Children (1943), that elevated Dmytryk, due to the film's surprising success at the box office.

Dmytryk's first major crime film was RKO's second adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel Farewell, My Lovely. Made in 1944 with Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe, it was retitled and rereleased as Murder, My Sweet in 1945 when, after the film's initial release in Minneapolis, studio executives learned that audiences expected a musical. Dmytryk's crime films included Cornered (1945), which also starred Powell, and the controversial film Crossfire (1947). Based on Richard Brooks's novel The Brick Foxhole, Crossfire substituted the killing of the homosexual in Brooks's novel with the murder of a Jewish man by an anti-Semitic soldier. This film galvanized conservative forces, and both Dmytryk and the film's producer Adrian Scott came under close scrutiny.

Due to political pressure, Dmytryk left for Great Britain, where he directed three films, including the suspense thriller Obsession (1949) starring Robert Newton. His first British film, So Well Remembered (1948), antagonized American gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who conducted a political campaign against the director. In 1950, he was sentenced to six months in jail as a result of the investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. After his release, he appeared before the committee and supplied the names they requested.

Dmytryk was hired by producer Stanley Kramer to direct three films, including The Sniper (1952), the story of a mentally disturbed young man who feels compelled to kill women. For the rest of the 1950s and the early 1960s, he worked on large-budget studio films in a variety of genres. Dmytryk's other crime films include Television Spy (1939), Emergency Squad (1940), Golden Gloves (1940), Under Age (1941), Seven Miles from Alcatraz (1942), The Falcon Strikes Back (1943), Walk on the Wild Side (1962), and Mirage (1965).

DONLEVY, BRIAN (1901–1972). Waldo Brian Donlevy was born in Portadown, Ireland, and when he was 10 months old his parents moved to Racine, Wisconsin, and, eight years later to Cleveland, Ohio. After a period in the army, Donlevy began a new career as an actor in New York, followed by small roles in films in the 1920s and early 1930s. He received his major break in 1935 as Knuckles Jacoby in the sea melodrama Barbary Coast. He consolidated his status in the industry with an Academy Award nomination for his performance as the sadistic Sergeant Markoff in Beau Geste (1939) and a starring role in Preston Sturges's political satire The Great McGinty (1940) for Paramount. Also at Paramount, Donlevy had one of his best roles as the shady political manipulator Paul Madvig in the 1942 remake of Dashiell Hammett's novel The Glass Key.

Thereafter, Donlevy had various lead roles, such as the businessman marked for death by his wife and her lover in Impact (1949) and the hard-nosed district attorney who pressures Victor Mature into exposing a sadistic gang leader (Richard Widmark) in Kiss of Death (1947). After his role as the crusading senator determined to expose a criminal syndicate in Hoodlum Empire (1952), Donlevy was consigned mainly to supporting roles, such as the aging gangster with a hearing aid in Joseph H. Lewis's The Big Combo (1955). In Britain, director Val Guest cast Donlevy as the dominating, obsessive scientist Prof. Bernard Quatermass in The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass II (1957), the film versions of Nigel Kneale's teleseries. Despite their commercial success, Kneale expressed his strong reservations of Donlevy's interpretation of the scientist as brusque and pushy and refused to license the rights to his character until 1967, when Donlevy was too old for the role.

DONNIE BRASCO (1997). Based on the real-life story of FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone, who infiltrated the Mafia in the late 1970s, director Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco eschews the glamour and wise-guy mythology that characterizes the genre in favor of a restrained, low-key approach. Paul Attanasio's screenplay, while not avoiding the violence associated with the criminal activities of the Mafia, focuses less on the actual crimes and more on the relationship between Brasco (Johnny Depp) and midlevel Mafia criminal Benjamin "Lefty" Ruggiero (Al Pacino). Lefty, who suffers from cancer, is frustrated at his lack of advancement in the organization after 30 years and 26 kills. He is relegated to the lower levels, while others, including Sonny Black (Michael Madsen), advance through the ranks. He tells Donnie that he feels like a "spoke in a wheel" and treats Brasco as a surrogate son and an emotional replacement for his own drug-addicted son. However, unknown to Lefty, Donnie is Joe Pistone, the FBI agent charged with infiltrating the Mafia. At this point, the film takes an unexpected turn as Brasco develops a deep sense of compassion for the older man, which jeopardizes both of them. When Lefty becomes suspicious that Donnie is an informer, he gives the agent the benefit of the doubt. Brasco refuses to relinquish his undercover status as he knows that it will condemn Lefty to death. Even after Brasco is exposed as an agent, Lefty forgives the FBI man and tells his wife that he is glad that the informer was Donnie.

A subplot involves Donnie and his wife, Maggie (Anne Heche), as the three-month undercover period extends to six years, and tensions between husband and wife escalate until the marriage virtually disintegrates. Maggie tells Donnie, "I pretend I am a widow." His response is that, after many years undercover, he is no longer "like them [the criminals]. I am them." This damages his relationship with his superiors at the FBI, Tim Curley (Zelko Ivanek) and Dean Blandford (Gerry Becker). Brasco's reward for six dangerous years as an undercover agent is a medal and a paltry $500—and a Mafia contract of $500,000 on his head. Based on the book by Pistone and Richard Woodley, Donnie Brasco is a multilayered film, and Attanasio's superb screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.

DOSSIER K (2009). This tough, violent Belgian police procedural film is centered on two Albanian Mafia groups at war with each other. When Besjan Tahari (Cun Lajqi), a member of the Shehu clan, is assassinated by two members of the rival Gaba clan in Antwerp, policeman Eric Vincke (Koen De Bouw) and his small squad, Freddy Verstuyft (Werner De Smedt) and Linda de Leenheer (Hilde De Baerdemaeker), are called in to investigate. Meanwhile Tahiri's son Nazim (Blerim Destani) returns to Antwerp from Albania to undertake his own investigation. He is motivated by the protocols of the Kanun, an Albanian law from the 15th century that mandates that he avenge the death of his father. Revenge becomes the film's dominant motif when Pjeta Gaba, the son of the patriarch of the Gaba clan, murders Linda de Leenheer. Thereafter, both Vincke and Nazim share a common goal—an intense desire for retribution.

Based on the novel by Jef Geeraerts, the film represents a sequel to De Zaak Alzheimer (2003), which was released in the United States as The Memory of a Killer and elsewhere as The Alzheimer Case. Detectives Vincke, Verstuyft, and de Leenheer from the 2003 film return for Dossier K. Both films utilize the police procedural format to explore issues involving police corruption, family loyalty, betrayal and, above all else, honor. While Dossier K contains a number of visually exciting action sequences, these moments are never allowed to overwhelm the personal drama involving Vincke, Nazim, Pjeta, and the two criminal families.

DOUGLAS, KIRK (1916– ). Born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York, Kirk Douglas has been a major star for more than six decades. His parents, Jewish immigrants from Belarus, changed their name to Demsky and Douglas grew up as Izzy Demsky. He legally changed his name to Kirk Douglas when he joined the navy during World War II. He received a scholarship to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.

Douglas began his film career in two film noirs, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) and Out of the Past (1947). He followed with another film noir, I Walk Alone (1948). These roles were atypical in light of Douglas's career in the cinema, as he played weak, morally compromised figures in these early films. He soon developed his characteristic strong and independent, if flawed, screen persona, which extended from the early 1950s to his retirement in 2004 in films such as Detective Story (1951); Town without Pity (1961); Seven Days in May (1964), where he exposes a military plot to overthrow the president; A Lovely Way to Die (1968); and Tough Guys (1986). A versatile actor, Douglas starred in a wide range of genres, including Stanley Kubrick's antiwar film Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960). In 1951, Billy Wilder gave Douglas one of his best roles as the ambitious, morally corrupt reporter Chuck Tatum who exploits the entrapment of a man in an ancient ruin in New Mexico in Ace in the Hole (also known as The Big Carnival). See also DOUGLAS, MICHAEL.

DOUGLAS, MICHAEL (1944– ). Michael Douglas was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the first son of Kirk Douglas. His mother was Bermudian actress Diana Dill. After a number of roles in low-budget films in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Douglas attracted attention with his leading role, opposite Karl Malden, in the police television series The Streets of San Francisco, which screened from 1972 to 1976. After the series finished, Douglas was elevated to lead movie roles, including crime films such as the medical thriller Coma (1978) and The China Syndrome (1979). The latter, which costarred Jane Fonda, concerned a conspiracy to cover up an accident at a California nuclear plant; Douglas also produced the film. In 1975, he won an Academy Award as the producer of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. In 1983, he starred in Peter Hyam's vigilante film The Star Chamber as a young judge who joins a clandestine judicial society that punishes criminals who, due to technicalities, escape the judicial system unscathed.

Later, as he matured, Douglas starred in more morally complex roles, such as the married attorney in Fatal Attraction (1987) who succumbs to a one-night affair with an unstable woman (Glenn Close). In Disclosure (1994), he was a computer specialist charged with sexual harassment by a former lover and boss, played by Demi Moore. Wall Street (1987), another successful film at the box office, gave Douglas another Oscar, for Best Actor. Resisting typecasting, he followed with diverse roles in War of the Roses (1989), The Game (1997), and A Perfect Murder, the 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954). This list of flawed characters culminated in his reckless cop attracted to a sadistic femme fatale (Sharon Stone) in Basic Instinct (1992).

Along with these dark, morally compromised characters, Douglas starred in a series of adventure films such as Romancing the Stone (1984) and its sequel, Jewel of the Nile (1985). More conventional crime films included his role as a New York policeman in Black Rain (1989) and a New York psychiatrist trying to rescue his daughter from kidnappers in Don't Say a Word (2001). His most challenging role was as American everyman William "D-Fens" Foster, who, after suffering a nervous breakdown, wanders the streets of Los Angeles on a violent journey into oblivion in Joel Schumacher's Falling Down (1993).

DRIVE (2011). Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn and Iranian-born screenwriter Hossein Amini inject life into film noir and the gangster film with Drive, based on James Sallis's 2005 novel. The film is clearly influenced by many other films and directors, including the plot from George Stevens's 1953 western Shane, starring Alan Ladd as the mysterious cowboy who protects a vulnerable family from a hired gunfighter. This elemental storyline is used by Winding Refn and Amini as the narrative basis for the film's spare, stripped-down style, similar to Walter Hill's 1978 crime film The Driver, starring Ryan O'Neal as a professional driver of getaway cars. This also has its echoes in the visual style and characterizations found in the gangster films of French director Jean-Pierre Melville, especially Alain Delon's hit man in Le samouraï (1967). Yet, while assimilating these influences, Drive retains it own unique take on the crime genre, especially its unusual compositions and its languid narrative rhythm that alternates with bursts of violence and sudden action.

The style and tone of the film is evident in the film's opening sequence as the Driver, who is a "wheelman" for hire, impassively waits while two criminals complete a robbery. His instructions are conveyed through his voice-over: "If I drive for you, you get your money. That's a guarantee. Tell me where we start, where we're going and where we're going afterwards, I give you five minutes when you get there. Anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours, no matter what. Anything a minute either side of that and you're on your own. I don't sit in while you're running it down. I don't carry a gun. I drive." By day he works at a garage with occasional employment as a stunt driver in the movies. His carefully controlled world, however, is jeopardized when he meets a vulnerable young woman, Irene (Carey Mulligan), with a young son and a convict husband. After the Driver extends his protection to Irene, he reluctantly agrees to help her husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) after he is released from jail, by driving the getaway car while Standard carries out what seems to be a routine robbery of a pawnbroker. He agrees to do this so that Standard can extricate himself from a prison debt. However, after they are double-crossed, the robbery turns sour, Standard is killed, and gangsters Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and Nino (Ron Perlman) pursue the Driver who holds the money.

Drive (2011) directed by Nicolas Winding Refn starring Ryan Gosling.

Drive is no run-of-the-mill action film. Winding Refn inserts a number of brutal scenes that counterpoint the Driver's seemingly gentle, if disaffected, persona. He is a morally complex figure, which the film deliberately refuses to explain. The main gangster, Rose (in an atypical performance from Brooks), uses his civility as a cover for his brutality and ruthlessness. Director Winding Refn deservedly won the Best Director award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, the film was a success at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival, and it was selected to close the 2011 Melbourne Film Festival.

DRUMMOND, BULLDOG. In Bulldog Drummond Escapes, released by Paramount in 1937, Inspector Neilson (Guy Standing) tells Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond (Ray Milland) that he needs to give up his "eternal quest for melodrama and romance." Drummond merely laughs at this ridiculous suggestion as it would remove the reason for his existence. Melodrama and romance, with a dashing hero constantly in peril, characterize the Drummond series—both in print and on the screen—and represent a snapshot of values that prevailed prior to World War II.

Drummond was created by Herman Cyril McNeile, who published his early stories as "Sapper." The first book, Bull-Dog Drummond, subtitled The Adventures of a Demobilised Officer Who Found Peace Dull, was published in 1920. In this book, Drummond defeats a deadly enemy (Carl Peterson) who reappears in subsequent stories, kills a large number of men and one ape, romances and marries a woman (Phyllis Benton), and saves British society in the process. Assistance for Drummond is provided by the aristocratic Algy Longworth, army friend Peter Darrell, pilot Jerry Seymour, and Drummond's valet James Denny. Only Longworth and Denny (changed to Tenny) made it into the films, although Inspector Neilson and Phyllis are retained, with Phyllis's surname changed to Clavering. This book became the basis of a 1922 British film Bulldog Drummond starring Carlyle Blackwell as Drummond. McNeile published his second Drummond book, The Black Gang, in 1922. In this book, Drummond foils a Communist plot. This was followed by The Third Round in 1925, which was filmed in Great Britain the same year, starring Jack Buchanan as Drummond; its American title was changed to Bulldog Drummond's Third Round.

In 1921, McNeile's first book was adapted to the British stage, followed by a long run on Broadway. The play was an ideal vehicle for Samuel Goldwyn's first sound film, Bulldog Drummond, which was released on 2 May 1929 in the United States. It starred Ronald Colman as Drummond and was scripted by playwright Sidney Howard for director F. Richard Jones. This was, in terms of box office and the critics, the most popular Drummond film, and Goldwyn provided a large budget for the elaborate sets. It was also the most verbose of the films, as Goldwyn was determined to exploit Colman's cultured, if mannered, delivery of Howard's witty script. Goldwyn's film premiered at the Apollo Theater in New York, where Colman's appearance provoked a rapturous welcome from the audience. Eighteen-year-old Joan Bennett, in her first major role, costarred as Phyllis, Drummond's love interest.

The Fox Film Corporation followed with a less successful film, Temple Tower (1930), based on McNeile's novel, with Kenneth McKenna as Drummond. Determined not to repeat this failure, the newly formed 20th Century-Fox studio hired Colman for the next Drummond film, Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934), with Loretta Young as Lola. In the same year, a British production, The Return of Bulldog Drummond, based on McNeile's 1932 novel, was released with Ralph Richardson as Drummond and Ann Todd as Phyllis. Paradoxically, Richardson appeared the following year as the master villain Morelle who tries to take over the world in the comedic adventure Bulldog Jack (1935), which featured comedian Jack Hulbert as Jack Pennington who is forced to impersonate Drummond (Atholl Fleming) after the hero becomes injured early in the film.

In 1937, Paramount, after negotiating a 10-year license for the film rights to McNeile's books, produced Bulldog Drummond Escapes, the first in a series of eight films. Ray Milland was Drummond, with Sir Guy Standing as Neilson, Heather Angel as Phyllis Clavering, Reginald Denny as Algy Longworth, and E. E. Clive as Tenny. Scripted by Edward T. Lowe, it was based on the play Bulldog Drummond Again by McNeile and Gerard Fairlie, and this film established the formula for the remaining films. The comedy was provided by Denny as Algy, who in this film is agitated by the fact that his wife, Gwen, is about to give birth to their first child. Drummond, on the other hand, has a prickly, if affectionate, relationship with Inspector Neilson of Scotland Yard. Drummond is also supported by his loyal valet Tenny. The plot involves a nefarious scheme by the aristocratic Merridew (Porter Hall) to imprison Phyllis in his large mansion as a mental patient so that he can acquire her inheritance. The film begins with Drummond finding Phyllis distraught on a lonely rural road at night. After falling in love with her, a recurring joke throughout the series concerns the inability to consummate their wedding plans as each adventure intrudes upon their happiness. In the final film in the series, Bulldog Drummond's Bride (1939), they marry in a small French town.

Milland was replaced by John Howard for Bulldog Drummond Comes Back (1937). This film also marked the first appearance of John Barrymore as Inspector Neilson, who was top billed for the next three films. This was a superior film, although Barrymore, unable to remember his lines anymore, was forced to deliver his dialogue from notes strategically placed off-camera. Louise Campbell replaced Angel as Phyllis, with Denny and Clive retaining their respective roles, which they kept for the rest of the series. The plot follows McNeile's novel The Female of the Species, with a vindictive widow determined to destroy Drummond's happiness by kidnapping Phyllis, thereby forcing Drummond and his colleagues to undertake a game of cat and mouse via carefully placed clues and limericks.

Bulldog Drummond's Revenge (1937), based on McNeile's The Return of Bulldog Drummond, begins with Drummond and Phyllis off to Switzerland for their marriage. Their plans are disrupted by an international crook (Frank Puglia), who steals a new, unstable explosive compound. Howard, Campbell, Denny, Clive, and Barrymore returned for this film, as they did for the next one, Bulldog Drummond's Peril (1938), based on McNeile's novel The Third Round and scripted by Stuart Palmer. Palmer also wrote the screenplay for Arrest Bulldog Drummond (1938) and Bulldog Drummond's Bride. A thief interrupts the wedding party for Drummond and Phyllis in Bulldog Drummond's Peril by stealing a synthetic diamond produced by Gwen's father, Prof. Bernard Goodman (Halliwell Hobbes). Forced to investigate, Drummond uncovers a complex plot involving a rival scientist, Dr. Boutulian (Porter Hall), and a respected diamond manufacturer, Sir Raymond Blantyre (Matthew Boulton), determined to prevent Professor Goodman from publicizing his discovery.

H. B. Warner replaced Barrymore as Neilson, with Heather Angel back as Phyllis, for Bulldog Drummond in Africa (1938). In this film, Drummond, Phyllis, and friends are forced to travel to Morocco to save Neilson, who has been kidnapped by Richard Lane (J. Carroll Naish), a mercenary arms dealer with a lion in his courtyard. In Arrest Bulldog Drummond, Drummond and his group travel to a tropical island to prevent the use of a death ray.

The best film in the series, Bulldog Drummond's Secret Police (1939), begins, as usual, on the eve of the wedding between Drummond and Phyllis, when Hugh learns that the Drummond family residence contains a secret passageway leading to a hidden treasure. In true melodramatic fashion, the villain, Henry Seaton (Leo Carroll), insinuates himself into the Drummond household as a servant while killing those who interfere with his plans to acquire the treasure. This film has a stunning visual climax, reminiscent of the cliffhanger endings employed by the Republic Studio serials in the 1930s and 1940s. At one point, Drummond, Algy, and Tenny are trapped in a cavern under the house while the ceiling, embedded with long steel spikes, descends upon them. Meanwhile Phyllis, captured by Seaton, helplessly watches their plight until she is able to break free and rescue the men. Bulldog Drummond's Secret Police was based on McNeile's novel Temple Tower.

Bulldog Drummond's Bride ended the Paramount series in 1939, although a British production, Bulldog Drummond at Bay, was released during the Paramount series in 1937 with John Lodge as Drummond. It was another eight years before the next Drummond film, when Columbia resurrected the character for two low-budget films starring Australian actor Ron Randell as Drummond. Bulldog Drummond at Bay (1947) was the first. While Phyllis, Tenny, and Neilson are omitted, Algy, played by Pat O'Moore, returns to assist Drummond, together with cub reporter Seymour (Terry Kilburn) and love interest Doris Hamilton (Anita Louise). Neilson was replaced by Scotland Yard inspector McIvar (Herbert Holmes). This was followed by Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1947), with Randell, O'Moore, Kilburn, and Herbert in the same roles as the previous film.

When Columbia lost interest in the character, an independent company, Edward Small Productions, cast Tom Conway as Drummond in The Challenge (1948) and 13 Lead Soldiers (1948). These were released by 20th Century-Fox. In 1951, Calling Bulldog Drummond was released by MGM with Walter Pidgeon as Drummond. Drummond, now retired, assists Scotland Yard in combating a crime wave. The film, a cut above the Columbia and Edward Small films, cast David Tomlinson as Algy and veteran British actor Charles Victor as Inspector McIver. Margaret Leighton, as Sgt. Helen Smith, dominates much of the film at the expense of Drummond.

The final Drummond films bear little resemblance to McNeile's stories. Following the James Bond films in the 1960s, the British Rank Organisation reworked the Drummond character in Deadlier than the Male (1967). The film starred Richard Johnson as Drummond, who fights his old nemesis, master criminal Carl Peterson (Nigel Green). The film's real focus is attractive women, such as Elke Sommer as Irma Eckman and Suzanna Leigh as Grace. They are employed by Peterson to carry out a series of assassinations (dressed in skimpy clothes or bikinis). Algy and Tenny are omitted, and Drummond is assisted by his American nephew (Steve Carlson). Rank followed with Some Girls Do (1969), a similar film with Johnson returning as Drummond to fight Peterson (James Villiers) and his female assassins once again. This time, the women are robots. Both films were released in the United States by Universal.

DUFF, HOWARD (1913–1990). A prolific actor in B crime films in the 1940s and 1950s, Howard Duff was born in Bremerton, Washington. His initial claim to fame was as Dashiell Hammett's private detective Sam Spade on radio from 1946 to 1950. When he made his film debut in Jules Dassin's violent prison film Brute Force (1947), Duff's name on the film's credits appeared as "Radio's Sam Spade." Duff followed as the wealthy wastrel Frank Niles in Dassin's influential police procedural The Naked City (1948). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Duff, although never directly caught up in the blacklist, was consigned to a long cycle of low-budget crime films, including Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949), Illegal (1949), Shakedown (1950), and Woman in Hiding (1950). In this last film, Duff plays a drifter who rescues Ida Lupino from her murderous husband (Stephen McNally). The film also brought Duff and Lupino together off-screen, and when she divorced Collier Young, her partner in their film company The Filmakers, she married Duff in 1951. For the next few years, the careers of these two stars were virtually inseparable; they made four crime films together: Jennifer (1953), Private Hell 36 (1954), Women's Prison (1955), and While the City Sleeps (1956). A television series starring both Duff and Lupino and many guest appearances followed, until they separated in 1966, although they did not formally divorce until 1984. For the rest of his career, Duff alternated between supporting roles in films—including The Late Show (1977), Double Negative (1980), and No Way Out (1987)—and television appearances.

DURYEA, DAN (1907–1968). Born in White Plains, New York, Dan Duryea was attracted to acting while studying at Cornell University. He made his Broadway debut in Dead End in the mid-1930s and followed this with Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes. When The Little Foxes was purchased by Warner Bros., he was invited to repeat his Broadway role in the 1941 film. In 1944–45, Duryea made two crime films for director Fritz Lang: The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). In both, he played the villain opposite Joan Bennett and physically threatens Bennett; in Scarlet Street he even slaps her around. Duryea, who had been working steadily in Hollywood since The Little Foxes, suddenly received an unexpected boost in his popularity as his fan mail, mainly from women, increased. For the rest of the 1940s, Duryea was typecast as a villain prone to sudden bouts of violence. In five films released in 1944 and 1945 (Lang's Ministry of Fear, 1944; The Woman in the Window; Anthony Mann's The Great Flamarion, 1945; Lady on a Train, 1945; and Scarlet Street), he consolidated his place as a distinctive villain closely associated with the off-center world of film noir.

Universal's 1946 production of Cornell Woolrich's 1943 novel Black Angel gave Duryea a rare opportunity to play a more sympathetic character—even if he is eventually revealed to have murdered his unfaithful wife during an alcohol-induced blackout. He returned to typecasting in Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross (1949), where he kills his wife (Yvonne De Carlo) and her former lover (Burt Lancaster); Too Late for Tears (1949), in which he torments Lizabeth Scott until she kills him; and Manhandled (1949), where he threatens Dorothy Lamour. There were sporadic attempts to break away from this typecasting, such as playing a journalist in The Underworld Story (1950), an alcoholic photographer in Chicago Calling (1952), an innocent soldier accused of murdering his wife in Terror Street (1953), and a private detective in World for Ransom (1954). His last significant crime film was the 1957 screen version of David Goodis's bizarre novel The Burglar. In this film, shot in Philadelphia, Duryea stars as a middle-aged thief in an odd relationship with his guardian, played by Jayne Mansfield. Duryea's other crime films include Larceny (1948), Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949), One Way Street (1950), Storm Fear (1956), Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1957), and Walk a Tightrope (1964).
E

EASTWOOD, CLINT (1930– ). Spanning six decades as an actor and, since 1971, director, Clint Eastwood has been a significant influence in the cinema, most notably in the crime and western genres. Born in San Francisco, Eastwood struggled as a young actor in the mid- and late 1950s, until 1958 when he was cast as Rowdy Yates in the long-running television western series Rawhide. In 1963, after many other actors turned down the role of the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's Italian western A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Eastwood welcomed the opportunity to play a more morally ambivalent figure after years on television as the virtuous Yates. Eastwood and Leone agreed that his character should remain mysterious and speak as little as possible. Instead, they developed his character through movement and facial gesture. The film was a major success in Italy, and Leone immediately cast Eastwood in For a Few Dollars More (1965), followed by a third film, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).

These films, after their screening in the United States in 1967, had a profound affect on Eastwood's career, reinforced by his role in the Hollywood-made contemporary crime film Coogan's Bluff (1968), with Eastwood as a sheriff from Arizona who travels to New York City to bring back an escaped killer. Coogan, the maverick loner who easily resorts to violence and has little time for the indulgences of big city life, was a precursor to Eastwood's most famous role, San Francisco policeman Insp. Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry (1971). Callahan, in his pursuit of psychotic killer Scorpio, reveals a number of disturbing traits that he shares with his quarry. This form of narrative "doubling" is found in other Eastwood films. Dirty Harry was a phenomenal success, and aspects of the film soon entered popular culture ("Go ahead, make my day"). It was followed by four sequels—Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988).

Play Misty for Me (1971), Eastwood's first film as a director, was a taut, atmospheric thriller, with Eastwood as radio disc jockey Dave who has a casual affair with Evelyn (Jessica Walter), an unstable female fan who often phones the station requesting her favorite song, Errol Garner's "Misty." When Dave rejects Evelyn, her psychosis blossoms into murder as she fixates on the disc jockey and his new girlfriend. Eastwood continued to star in both westerns and crime films throughout the 1970s, including the action caper film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), with Eastwood as an experienced bank robber and Jeff Bridges as his protégé. He followed with another action crime film, The Gauntlet (1977), playing the cop who tries to protect a prostitute (Sondra Locke). Escape from Alcatraz (1979) was a superior film based on actual events, with Eastwood as Frank Lee Morris, who, with John and Clarence Anglin, escaped from Alcatraz in 1962. This film also marked Eastwood's final association with director Don Siegel.

The doubling motif, where Eastwood's character displays similar traits with the villain, is most evident in the 1984 cop film Tightrope, which was also directed by Eastwood. In this film, Eastwood starred as New Orleans detective Wes Bloch, who shares a fascination for violence and sadomasochism with a serial killer. The motif was reprised in In the Line of Fire (1993), where Eastwood played a troubled loner, veteran FBI agent Frank Horrigan, who suffers from the memory of his failure to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Years later, he is tormented by hit man Mitch Leary (John Malkovich), who exploits Horrigan's weakness as part of his plot to assassinate the current president. Less successful was The Rookie (1990), with Eastwood as another cop who acts as a mentor for a rookie cop played by Charlie Sheen.

In 1992, Eastwood regenerated his career as both actor and director with the critically celebrated western Unforgiven (1992). He starred as aging gunman William Munny, who undertakes one last killing. Eastwood won an Academy Award for Best Director and was nominated for Best Actor. In True Crime (1999), one of Eastwood's few failures at the box office as a director, he plays a journalist recovering from alcoholism assigned to cover the execution of a murderer. In Blood Work, based on the novel by best-selling crime author Michael Connelly, Eastwood is an ex-FBI profiler forced to retire after heart transplant surgery. He is persuaded by the sister of the woman who supplied his new heart to investigate the donor's death. Eastwood also directed the film.

It was his film adaptation of Dennis Lehane's morally complex novel Mystic River (2003), a tale of three working-class boys from a Boston neighborhood whose lives interconnect with tragic results years later, that restored Eastwood's status as a major director. This was reinforced by Million Dollar Baby (2004), with Eastwood as a grumpy boxing trainer-manager who takes on a 31-year-old woman (Hilary Swank) as a client. Eastwood won another Academy Award for direction for it, and the film also won the Oscar for Best Picture. Eastwood followed as retired autoworker Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino (2008). This film, with a progressive social message, traces Kowalski's regeneration when, as a Korean War veteran with a strong prejudice against Asian families moving into his Detroit neighborhood, he befriends and protects them from gang violence.

Eastwood also directed two films based on real events. In The Changeling (2008), Angelina Jolie is a distraught mother in 1928 who refuses to be pushed aside and bullied by the Los Angeles police force after the disappearance of her nine-year-old boy and the subsequent police cover-up. In J. Edgar (2011) Leonardo DiCaprio plays J. Edgar Hoover, the controversial, and very powerful, head of the Bureau of Investigation from 1924, which became the FBI in 1935, until his death in 1972. The film also examines Hoover's close relationship with his associate director, Clyde Tolson, played by Armie Hammer.

EL SECRETO DE SUS OJOS (2009). The winner of the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Film at the 82nd Academy Awards ceremony, El secreto de sus ojos, which was released overseas as The Secret in Their Eyes, is a poignant police procedural with strong political overtones. This Argentinean film was expertly directed by Juan José Campanella based on the novel La pregunta de sus ojos by Eduardo Sacheri. The multilayered story centers on the rape and murder of a young woman, Liliana Coloto, in 1974. The investigating officer, Benjamin Espósito (Ricardo Darin), promises the woman's husband Ricardo Morales (Pablo Rago) that he will find the killer. However, the corrupt military government attempts to pin the crime on two itinerant Bolivian workers. Espósito refuses to cooperate and has them released. Twenty-five years later, Espósito, now retired, decides to write a book about the murder. This brings him into contact again with Irene Mendéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), his superior in the 1970s and the women he has loved for 25 years.

The film begins with Espósito's narration that "on June 21st, 1974, Ricardo Morales had breakfast with Liliana Coloto for the last time. For the rest of his life he'd remember every single detail of that morning." This narration introduces the two dominant motifs in the film—romantic loss and memory—which are integrated into a political context that provides a critique of the military junta that controlled Argentina in the 1970s. This is particularly evident when Espósito corners the killer, Isidoro Gómez (Javier Godino), during a soccer match at Buenos Aires's Tomás Ducó Football Stadium. In a stunning set piece amid the yelling and excitement of the soccer crowd, Gómez is captured, only to be eventually released by the government for political reasons.

Memories, the film suggests, easily turn into obsessions that are painful. While moral, if not legal, justice is ultimately reinstated, the fate of the killer is only one strand in this complex film. The other strands involve guilt, revenge, and passion. Passion eventually wins out—however delayed.

ENDFIELD, CY (1914–1995). Cyril Raker Endfield was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. After attending Yale University, he worked as a theater director and drama coach. He worked for a period with Orson Welles at RKO. After Welles's expulsion from the studio, Endfield moved to MGM, where he directed a number of short films. He graduated to directing a number of low-budget feature films, mainly crime films, for the poverty row studios such as Monogram. This included the clever antifascist crime film The Argyle Secrets (1948) for Film Classics Studio with William Gargan as a newspaper reporter. The Underworld Story (1950) dramatized the moral regeneration of a crooked newspaper reporter, played by Dan Duryea, who saves an African-American woman charged with murder. Endfield's next film, The Sound of Fury (1951), which was also released as Try and Get Me, ended his career in Hollywood. Based on Joe Pagano's novel The Condemned, it dramatizes the events in San Jose, California, in 1933 when a mob lynched two men in the town square. The film was a transparent commentary on the anticommunist hysteria in the late 1940s as well as a savage indictment of lynch-mob mentality and the vindictive role of the media.

These socially progressive films attracted the attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and after he was named as a Communist, Endfield was place on the blacklist. Unable to find work in Hollywood, he left for Britain, where he directed a number of low-budget crime films such as The Limping Man (1953), which starred graylisted American actor Lloyd Bridges in a story involving narcotics and murder. Endfield did not receive screen credits at this time because of his blacklisting, which meant that his films would be unable to secure distributors, especially in the United States. The direction for The Limping Man was credited to Charles De Latour. The same situation occurred on one of Endfield's best films, Impulse (1954), written by Endfield under the name of "Jonathan Roach" and directed by him, although the direction was again credited to De Latour. The film stars Arthur Kennedy as a married real estate agent who becomes involved with an attractive brunette and a jewel robbery. By 1957, Endfield was able to receive screen credit for his best crime film, Hell Drivers, starring Stanley Baker. This is an energetic, visually powerful film. Endfield went on to direct the highly successful period film Zulu (1964) featuring Michael Caine and Baker.

ENTERPRISE STUDIO. David L. Loew, the twin brother of Arthur M. Loew and the son of Marcus Loew, formed Enterprise Productions in 1946. David Loew, who had worked as a producer on Jean Renoir's The Southerner (1945) and The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), formed a partnership with Charles Einfeld (who had worked in advertising and marketing at Warner Bros.) and A. Pam Blumenthal. The financing of their first six films was secured by a $10 million loan from the Bank of America. On 15 February 1946, they leased four sound stages at Harry "Pop" Sherman's Californian Studios, where they built an additional stage. For distribution in North America, Enterprise signed with United Artists, which took a 25 percent fee. For the rest of the world, MGM distributed the films. The studio's first production, which began in May 1946, was the offbeat film noir–western hybrid Ramrod, starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake. Expectations at the studio increased with the signing of John Garfield, who established a production company with his former business manager Bob Roberts. They agreed to equally divide the profits with the new studio on all films produced by and starring Garfield.

Ramrod premiered in Salt Lake City in February 1947 and was followed by The Other Love (1947) starring Barbara Stanwyck. In April 1947, Body and Soul was completed. It premiered in August and became the studio's greatest commercial and critical success; the budget for the film was $1.8 million, and it grossed $4.7 million. The film starred Garfield as a boxer from the slums who falls in with gangsters. It was this film that, more than any other produced by the studio, cemented the impression that Enterprise was dominated by left-wing filmmakers. Screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, producer Bob Roberts, and actors Garfield, Anne Revere, Lloyd Gough, Canada Lee, Art Smith, and Shimen Ruskin were placed on the blacklist following the investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) into the film industry in 1947. The film's director, Robert Rossen, avoided the blacklist only by appearing before HUAC in May 1953 and supplying names requested by the committee. Cinematographer James Wong Howe was also investigated, and although he was not formally blacklisted, his career suffered because of guilt by association.

The studio's next film, Lewis Milestone's adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque novel Arch of Triumph (1948), virtually destroyed the studio due to poor box-office returns and an extravagant budget of $5.2 million. Enterprise signed with MGM for three films: No Minor Vices, a comedy involving marital jealousy, and two film noirs—Tucker's People, which was released in December 1948 as Force of Evil, and Wild Calendar, released in February 1949 as Caught. Force of Evil, directed and written by Polonsky, was based on Ira Wolfert's novel Tucker's People and starred Garfield as Joe Morse, a lawyer for a powerful gambling syndicate. Caught, costarring Robert Ryan as Smith Ohlrig, a neurotic millionaire who marries and torments Leonara Ames (Barbara Bel Geddes), a charm school graduate, was directed by Max Ophüls. Caught failed at the box office and was Enterprise's final production. The studio ceased production late in 1948.
F

FALCON, THE. After RKO decided in 1941 to discontinue its Saint series of films, it purchased a short story, "The Gay Falcon" by Michael Arlen, with the aim of developing a similar series without having to pay for the rights to the Saint series. RKO also wished to avoid further public criticism from the Saint's creator, Leslie Charteris, about the studio's treatment of his literary character. Arlen's character's name, Gay Stanhope Falcon, was changed to Gay Lawrence for the first film, The Gay Falcon (1941). However, after George Sanders, the star of the five Saint films, was cast as Lawrence, Charteris became convinced that the Falcon was in fact a thinly veiled re-creation of the Saint. This similarity was reinforced when Wendy Barrie, who costarred with Sanders in three Saint films, was cast in the first two Falcon films. Consequently, Charteris brought a lawsuit against RKO, and the studio settled the matter out of court.

The Gay Falcon began production in March 1941 with Lawrence, the Falcon, engaged to Anne Hunter, who urges the playboy to give up crime detection and womanizing by entering her family's brokerage firm. The Falcon soon becomes bored with the brokerage company, though, and at the request of Anne Hunter (Wendy Barrie) investigates jewel thieves who are robbing wealthy patrons at society balls. RKO was pleased with the film and soon followed it with A Date with the Falcon (1941), in which Lawrence rescues the inventor of an artificial diamond from criminals.

The third film in the series, The Falcon Takes Over (1942), was less straightforward. The screenplay by Lynn Root and Frank Fenton, who wrote the first two Falcon films, was based on Raymond Chandler's second novel, Farewell, My Lovely. This hybrid of Chandler's hard-boiled fiction and RKO's formulaic character resulted in an urbane, self-assured sleuth who bore little resemblance to Chandler's tough detective Philip Marlowe. Screenwriters Root and Fenton retained key figures from Chandler's book, including the pathetic and murderous Moose Malloy (Ward Bond); the duplicitous femme fatale, renamed Diana Kenyon (Helen Gilbert); the drunken Jessie Florian (Ann Revere); the thinly veiled homosexual socialite Lindsey Marriott (Hans Conried); the gangster Laird Burnett (Selmer Jackson); and the sinister psychic Jules Amthor (Turban Bey).

The next film, The Falcon's Brother (1942), was one of the few American crime series films where the detective dies at the end. Sanders wanted to leave the series and insisted that his character die. RKO, to appease him, cast Sanders's real-life brother Tom Conway as Tom Lawrence, Gay's brother. The Falcon's Brother was so successful that RKO decided to continue the series with Conway as the Falcon.

Conway's first film as the Falcon was The Falcon Strikes Back (1943), directed by Edward Dmytryk. In this film, the Falcon becomes involved in a war bonds racket. Conway continued Sanders's presentation of the Falcon as a philandering, witty playboy who seemingly pursues villains only as a consequence of his pursuit of attractive women. The Falcon and the Co-eds (1943) was much better. Written by Ardel Wray and Gerald Geraghty, the film was set in an isolated girls' school positioned at the top of a cliff by the sea, where a disturbed psychic (Rita Corday) accurately predicts the deaths of several inhabitants at the school. Lawrence investigates and uncovers a convoluted tale of jealousy and murder.

Thereafter, the rest of the Falcon series starring Conway, except The Falcon in San Francisco (1945), were light, predictable films. The Falcon in San Francisco, with its echoes of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, was a superior film. This was largely due to Joseph H. Lewis's direction, as he transformed the normally debonair, perpetually flippant, occasionally arrogant Falcon into a hard-boiled detective. In comparison with the other films, there is a sense of danger—especially when a femme fatale lures him to her apartment, where he is brutally beaten. The Falcon in San Francisco was the last Falcon film produced by Maurice Geraghty. After he left, the budget was reduced and location filming was largely abandoned for the last two Falcon films, The Falcon's Alibi (1946) and The Falcon's Adventure (1946). Film bookings in the United States fell from their peak of 15,000, and the studio ceased production and then offered the rights for sale.

Two years later, independent Hollywood producer Philip N. Krasne bought the rights, as he had done with Charlie Chan after 20th Century-Fox ceased production of that series in 1942. Film Craft produced three low-budget films starring magician and part-time actor John Calvert as the Falcon, although the character was based less on the RKO series and more on the radio series, where the Falcon was known as Mike Waring, not Tom Lawrence. Charles McGraw starred as the Falcon in a 1954–55 television series, The Adventures of the Falcon.

FALCON'S BROTHER, THE (1942). The fourth entry in the Falcon series was notable for the fact that RKO planned to end the series with this film because its star, George Sanders, who played Gay Lawrence, wanted to leave the role. To get one more film out of Sanders, it offered to cast his brother Tom Conway as Tom Lawrence. Sanders agreed, providing that his own character was killed. The script was developed in May and June 1942 by five writers, including Earl Fenton, who preceded his brother Frank Fenton and his writing partner Lynn Root. Female mystery writer Craig Rice, the pseudonym of Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig, also worked on it with another mystery writer, Stuart Palmer. Only Rice and Palmer received credit on the film.

The script, completed just seven months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, assimilated a number of topical references involving Axis spies within the constraints imposed by a typical Falcon story involving a murder committed in a fashion store. Tom Lawrence arrives back in the United States from the Bahamas to stop an Axis plot designed to disrupt U.S.–South American relations by assassinating a Latin American envoy visiting the United States. After Gay Lawrence is killed trying to prevent the assassination, brother Tom vows to continue the fight. When the film was a success, the studio dropped its plan to end the series and subsequently produced nine more Falcon films between 1943 and 1946 starring Conway as Tom Lawrence.

FARROW, JOHN (1904–1963). Born in Sydney, Australia, Farrow began a career in accounting before embarking on an adventurous period of sailing throughout the Pacific where he met filmmaker Robert Flaherty. He worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s before establishing himself as a director. In April 1947, Farrow directed The Big Clock, based on the 1946 novel by poet Kenneth Fearing. The film starred Ray Milland as a magazine editor forced to investigate a murder that only serves to lead the criminals and the police back to him. The film's impressive opening, with Milland trapped in a large building, is an iconic film noir scene. After completing The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), based on Cornell Woolrich's (writing as George Hopley) 1945 novel, Farrow left Paramount for the Howard Hughes–controlled RKO studio, where he directed two crime films with strong noir overtones: Where Danger Lives (1950) stars Robert Mitchum as a doctor who falls victim to a psychotic woman (Faith Domergue), and Farrow followed this with His Kind of Woman (1951), also starring Mitchum. Farrow's last crime film was The Unholy Wife (1957), with Rod Steiger as a wealthy winery owner married to Diana Dors, who wants him dead so that she can take up with rodeo rider Tom Tyron.

FEMME FATALE. Generally stereotyped as the deadly female or spider woman, the femme fatale is often considered a key figure in film noir in the 1940s. Her importance, however, extends beyond just a filmic convention into the social sphere, because her revival during World War II and the immediate postwar period occurred at a time when women in the workforce were encouraged to return to their prewar domestic roles. Hence, a crucial trait of the femme fatale was a sense of independence within a predominantly male-dominated, patriarchal society. While this independence was often associated with her sexual power, it was also a product of her intelligence, resourcefulness, and ruthlessness. The femme fatale in film noir was, in most films, determined to avoid the traditional gender roles of wife and mother. Instead, she wanted the same power and material wealth that motivated her male counterparts.

The femme fatale, however, was not a 1940s Hollywood creation; she has a long literary and theatrical history stretching back more than a hundred years. The sexual, heartless woman was evident in many gothic novels, for example, the sexually formidable character of Matilda in Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk, published in 1796. During the Romantic period, this figure was popularized by John Keats in 1819 as "La Belle Dame sans Merci," the beautiful lady without pity. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's seductive female vampire in Carmilla (1872) was part of the same literary stereotype. These literary influences shifted across to stage productions and, eventually, to the silent cinema, especially the cycle of "vamp" films starring Theda Bara for the Fox studio, beginning with Bara's enormously successful melodrama A Fool There Was in 1915 and lasting until 1919.

A similar cycle, inspired by the conventions of hard-boiled fiction, began in the late 1930s and gathered strength during the mid- and late 1940s. While not noticeable in early noir films such as Convicted (1938), The Stranger on the Third Floor (1941), and High Sierra (1941), the femme fatale emerged with Mary Astor's sexually assertive, duplicitous Brigid O'Shaughnessy in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941). This film, the third and most popular adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel, reinforced many of the character traits found in the novels by Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler. Astor's O'Shaughnessy established a pattern that was intensified by, among others, Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder's adaptation of the Cain novella Double Indemnity (1944). Other examples include Claire Trevor's Mrs. Grayle in Edward Dmytryk's adaptation of Chandler's novel Farewell, My Lovely, which was retitled and rereleased by RKO as Murder, My Sweet (1944), and Lana Turner's Cora Smith in MGM's adaptation of Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

Perhaps the most memorable screen femme fatale in the 1940s was Jane Greer as Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past (1947), a potent mixture of beauty, sensuality, ambition, and cruelty. Rita Hayworth was the tormented seductress in Gilda (1946), a femme fatale who becomes a victim after she marries Glenn Ford; she was also a less problematic femme fatale as Elsa Bannister, the amoral wife of a rich man in Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai (1948). The most extreme representations of this figure were not found in big-budget films, which, to maximize their chances of attracting a large audience, often tempered this iconic figure with a modicum of sentimentality involving a last-minute transformation (as in Gilda and Double Indemnity). Rather, they were in the films from the minor studios such as Monogram and Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), which did not face such constraints because their films were often sold via a fixed-price system rather than as a percentage of the box office. Hence sentimentality or moral complexity was jettisoned and the femme fatale in these films was presented as the epitome of evil. Ann Savage in Detour (1945), British-born Jean Gillie in Decoy (1946), Leslie Brooks in Blonde Ice (1948), and Janis Carter as a society woman who exudes sexual pleasure while watching a young girl murdered in Night Editor (1946) are representative examples of the unfettered B-movie femme fatale.

The femme fatale began to disappear in the mid-1950s, aside from the occasional independent film. In 1981, Kathleen Turner's Matty Walker in Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat and Jessica Lange's Cora Smith in the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice revived the femme fatale. No longer constrained by the tight censorship restrictions of the 1940s, the sexual aspect was intensified. Now the femme fatale could, literally, get away with murder—most noticeably Walker in Body Heat, Linda Fiorentino's Brigit Gregory in John Dahl's The Last Seduction (1994), and Sharon Stone's Catherine Trammell in Basic Instinct (1992). See also BENNETT, JOAN; CRAWFORD, JOAN; DETECTIVE FILMS; HOUSE ACROSS THE LAKE, THE; JOE MACBETH; PROSTITUTION; RAINES, ELLA; SCOTT, LIZABETH; TOTTER, AUDREY; WINDSOR, MARIE; WITHERS, GOOGIE; WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, THE; WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

FENG SHENG (2009). Released on the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, Feng sheng, screened overseas as The Message, is a stylish hybrid film that assimilates Chinese propaganda into the format of a historical thriller predicated on many of the conventions of Agatha Christie mysteries such as And Then There Were None (1945). Based on a novel by Jia Mia and directed by Kuo-fu Chen and Qunsha Gao, the film opens in Nanking in 1942 with the assassination of members of the Japanese-controlled Chinese puppet government. A Japanese officer, Colonel Takeda (Huang Xiaoming), is charged with finding the leader of the insurgents, code name Phantom, and his second in command, Magnum.

Takeda releases a false document to flush out the mole working within the puppet government. He reduces the number of suspects to five people working in the counterinsurgency center, which is staffed by Chinese officials who seemingly support the Japanese invaders. They are code breaker Li Ningyu (Li Bingbing); Gu Xiaomeng (Zhou Xun), a lowly dispatcher responsible for sending and receiving Morse code transmissions; Wu Zhiguo (Zhang Hanyu), a battle-hardened soldier; Jin Shenghuo (Ying Da), the cowardly, portly director of the military office; and Bai Xianonian (Alec Su), the effeminate secretary to a senior Japanese officer. In accordance with the conventions of classical detective fiction, Takeda takes the five suspects to an isolated mansion hidden in the mountains, where a cat-and-mouse game takes place as Takeda and his officers interrogate, and torture, the suspects in a desperate attempt to expose Magnum and Phantom and break the resistance movement.

The gothic setting and escalating violence results in an enthralling thriller as each character, including the villain Takeda, occupies center stage at various times in the story. The tension mounts as the number of suspects is reduced by suicide (Jin), torture (Bai), and murder (Gu). The film efficiently updates the Christie tradition with its use of red herrings, obscure clues (such as songs), and devious actions by the Japanese interrogators. The resolution, where Magnum and the Phantom are finally revealed, is fully explained via a series of flashback scenes. It is both logical and well executed, while also serving its propaganda purpose, as the film in its final moments segues into a full-blown exercise in jingoism, celebrating those who valiantly fought the Japanese while condemning the Japanese and those who cooperated with them.

FERRARA, ABEL (1951– ). Born in the Bronx in New York City, Abel Ferrara is a director of low-budget, independently produced crime films, often with unsettling stories and characters and a large quota of violence. Working with writer Nicholas St. John, Ferrara directed Ms. 45 (1981, also known as Angel of Vengeance), which concerns a mute woman (Zoë Tamerlis, also known as Zöe Lund) who wages a one-woman retribution campaign against men in general after she is twice raped. More conventional was Cat Chaser (1989), with Peter Weller as a disturbed ex-Vietnam veteran. Christopher Walken starred as a brutal drug dealer who attempts to wipe out his opposition in King of New York. This was followed by Ferrara's best film, Bad Lieutenant (1992), which stars Harvey Keitel as a cop searching for redemption while suffering from a drug and gambling addiction and, paradoxically, abusing women during the course of his job. This film was reworked by German director Werner Herzog, who shifted the setting from New York to post-Katrina New Orleans and cast Nicholas Cage as the drug-addicted cop in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call (2009). Ferrara also directed Body Snatchers (1993), a substantially changed third remake of Don Siegel's 1956 science-fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

FILM NOIR. There is no single definition, or even agreement, as to what constitutes film noir. The term refers to more than just the visually distinctive films produced in the 1940s and 1950s, with deep shadows and black-and-white lighting populated by hard-boiled detectives and the femme fatale. Not all noir films utilize first-person narration, convoluted flashbacks, and bleak or downbeat endings. Instead, film noir is essentially a discursive construction created retrospectively by critics and scholars long after the first wave of noir films was produced between 1940 and 1959.

The genesis of the term came in France in 1945 due to a unique situation. As Hollywood films were banned during the German occupation, French audiences did not see any of the early 1940s productions until suddenly, in the summer of 1946, they were exposed to an influx of scores of Hollywood films produced between 1941 and 1945. French critics such as Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier were in an ideal position to detect the changes in the Hollywood cinema in this period. Frank, who coined the term film noir, or films noirs, argued that movies such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Laura (1945), and Double Indemnity (1944) represented a different moral sensibility, reflected not only in the stories but also in the formal elements, compared to the sentimental films that dominated the American cinema prior to 1941. Chartier reached a similar conclusion, although he was less complimentary than Frank when he wrote that it was "hard to imagine story lines with a more pessimistic or disgusted point of view regarding human behavior" than that found in films like Double Indemnity.

Film noir, unlike genres such as the western and the musical, was not an industry term, so it cannot be defined by tracing the films back through trade documents and industry publications such as Variety. Billy Wilder, Edward Dmytryk, Robert Siodmak, and other directors closely associated with film noir were not aware of the term when they made their films in the 1940s and 1950s. Instead, they considered films such as The Maltese Falcon, This Gun for Hire (1942), Phantom Lady (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), The Killers (1946), Gilda (1946), and Out of the Past (1947) to be a special kind of melodrama. Trade journals often described such films as "psychological melodramas."

A common element in many of these films is a profound sense of vulnerability, self-doubt, and loss of moral purpose. These elements emerge in a few films in the late 1930s and early 1940s and then intensify during the last years of World War II and the immediate postwar period through 1949. Guilt and a sense of alienation were recurring elements. Similarly, a clear distinction between good and evil disappeared in many films. Often the dramatic focus shifted from the external, the battle between good and evil forces, to the internal or psychological dimension, where characters battled forces within themselves as much as clearly defined enemies of society.

The formative influences in the development of film noir are familiar. They include hard-boiled fiction—especially two novels by Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key) and most of Cornell Woolrich's fiction—the gangster film, and the distinctive expressionist lighting used in 1930s horror films. To this can be added the deep-focus photography and other stylistic devices used by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941). European filmmakers fleeing Nazi Germany, such as Fritz Lang, Siodmak, and others, also played a significant part, and these elements combined to present a hard, less sentimental vision of the world. The result, whatever the cause or causes, was a distinct shift in the crime film in the 1940s.

It is impossible, however, to restrict film noir to a specific genre and a precise time period. The majority of noir films were released between 1941 and 1959, but there were noir films in the 1930s, such as The Glass Key (1935), The Saint in New York (1938), and Convicted (1938), the last based on Woolrich's short story "Face Work." Post-1959 noir films include Underworld U.S.A. (1961) and The Naked Kiss (1964). Mainly due to the release of John Boorman's Point Blank, 1967 is sometimes cited as the year in which "neo-noir" emerged, although the rupture from the past is often overstated. Certainly the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the production of noir films that assimilated some of the formal and narrative traits associated with the French New Wave while retaining the tough, bleak worldview of the hard-boiled novel. Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) and Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975) added a political layer in this period of disenchantment with American politics.

Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat (1981) marked a new phase, with less formal and narrative experimentation and a more explicit presentation of sex, mostly through foregrounding the power and duplicity of the femme fatale. Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (1992) generated numerous imitations, although John Dahl's The Last Seduction (1994) represents a disturbing extension of the patterns evident in the early and mid-1990s. By the late 1980s, neo-noir had developed into an industrial genre as films such as Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997) were promoted and marketed by the film industry and critics as "film noir." There were also innovative attempts in the 1990s to imbue the narrative and formal traits associated with film noir with progressive social and cultural values. Such films included Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), Carl Franklin's One False Move (1992), and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), films that explored aspects of the black experience in both contemporary and postwar America. See also BIG CLOCK, THE; BIG SLEEP, THE; GUN CRAZY; HOUSE ACROSS THE LAKE, THE; JOE MACBETH; LEWIS, JOSEPH H.; NEW ZEALAND NOIR; SAVAGE, ANN; SCOTT, LIZABETH; SO EVIL MY LOVE; TIERNEY, LAWRENCE; WINDSOR, MARIE; WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

FIORENTINO, LINDA (1958– ). Linda (Clorinda) Fiorentino was born in Philadelphia of Italian-American Catholic background. A graduate of Rosemont College in Philadelphia, she studied photography and has had a long interest in it. Her screen debut was in Vision Quest in 1985. She also had an eye-catching role as an eccentric performance artist in Martin Scorsese's black comedy After Hours (1985). However, her place in the pantheon of femmes fatales was secured in John Dahl's film noir The Last Seduction (1994). Fiorentino starred as Bridget Gregory, a manipulative, sexually assertive, utterly ruthless professional woman who outsmarts both her criminal husband (Bill Pullman) and her gullible lover (Peter Berg). Despite strong reviews, Fiorentino's compelling performance was rendered ineligible for an Academy Award nomination because the film debuted on cable television prior to its theatrical release. With her dark hair and sensual attributes, Fiorentino should have been a major star, but unlike Sharon Stone, she has been unable to find that breakthrough film. She was cast as another morally problematic woman in the film noir Jade (1995), but the film failed at the box office. Subsequently, Fiorentino's career has languished in lackluster films such as Dahl's Unforgettable (1996) and Liberty Stands Still (2002). See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

FISHER, STEVE (1912–1980). Born in Marine City, Michigan, Steve Fisher joined the navy after attending military school in California. While serving on a submarine in the early 1930s, he began writing short stories. He left the navy in 1933 and wrote his first novel, Spend the Night, in 1935 under the pseudonym Grant Lane. This was followed by two murder novels and many short stories for magazines such as Black Mask. In 1941, Fisher published I Wake Up Screaming, his most important crime novel. It was filmed in 1942 by 20th Century-Fox, starring Betty Grable, Victor Mature, and Laird Cregar as the disturbed cop who is obsessed with Grable's character. It was remade as Vicki in 1953. Although Fisher had been writing screenplays since 1939, his status in Hollywood improved after the release of I Wake Up Screaming. His crime films include Johnny Angel (1945); Dead Reckoning (1947), starring Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott; The Song of the Thin Man (1947), the final entry in MGM's long-running Thin Man series; Lady in the Lake (1947), based on Raymond Chandler's 1943 novel; Roadblock (1951); Terror Street (British title 36 Hours, 1953), starring Dan Duryea; and City That Never Sleeps (1953). From the mid-1950s, Fisher also wrote for television, with more than 200 credits before his death in 1980.

FISHER, TERENCE (1904–1980). Born in London, Terence Fisher spent a lengthy period as a clapper boy and editor in the 1930s before he was promoted to director at Rank's Highbury Studios with his first film, the 1948 comedy Colonel Bogey. His best films during this period, however, were not comedies but crime films, including the excellent period mystery film So Long at the Fair (1950), which Fisher codirected with Anthony Darnborough. This film stars Jean Simmons, who searches for her brother (David Tomlinson) who disappeared during the 1889 Paris Exposition. Dirk Bogarde assists Simmons, and they solve the mystery. Fisher's other crime film of note during this period was the cautionary tale To the Public Danger (1948), based on a radio play by Patrick Hamilton, which warned of the disastrous consequences of drunken driving and reckless behavior.

Throughout the 1950s, until his breakthrough horror films for Hammer (The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957; Dracula, 1958), Fisher specialized in low-budget crime films, mainly for Hammer. These include The Last Page (1952), starring George Brent and Diana Dors; Wings of Danger (1952), starring Zachary Scott; Stolen Face (1952), starring Lizabeth Scott; The Black Glove (1953), starring Alex Nichol; and Murder by Proxy (1955). While the rest of Fisher's career was dominated by the horror genre, he also directed a fine version of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959, starring Peter Cushing as Holmes and Christopher Lee as an ill-fated member of the Baskerville family.

FORD, GLENN (1916–2006). Although Glenn Ford is best known for his westerns such as The Fastest Gun Alive (1956), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), and The Sheepman (1958), he starred in a number of significant crime films in a career that stretched from 1939 to 1993. Many of his westerns and crime films were characterized by his morally problematic and vulnerable characters. The most extreme presentation of these traits occurred in the noir western The Man from Colorado (1948), with Ford as a military hero who cannot control his sadistic impulses. This followed Ford's best known performance in the 1940s as the tormented, possibly bisexual nightclub manager Johnny Farrell in Gilda (1946), opposite Rita Hayworth as the equally troubled woman married to George Macready.

Ford, the son of a Canadian railroad executive, was born in Quebec and moved to California with his parents when he was eight. He performed on stage with a traveling theater company in the late 1930s and, after a film test, made his movie debut with Richard Conte in Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (1939). With his low-key acting style, Ford immediately connected with audiences. He signed with Columbia, where he remained for the next 10 years. Although Gilda made him a star, Columbia cast him in a wide range of genres, including such comedies as The Mating of Millie (1948). But it was crime films, such as his portrayal of the fall guy set up by femme fatale Janis Carter in Framed (1947) and his intense, troubled Treasury Department agent pursuing the "big fellow" in Joseph H. Lewis's The Undercover Man (1949), that consolidated his career.

Ford was a policeman seeking revenge for the death of his wife in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953) and a railroad engineer who becomes embroiled with a married woman (Gloria Grahame) in Lang's Human Desire (1954). His career blossomed in the mid- and late 1950s with his roles as a sensitive teacher in Blackboard Jungle (1955) and the law professor who defends an innocent Mexican boy in Trial (1955). In 1958, he was voted the number one box-office attraction.

His status gradually declined in the 1960s. He starred in Blake Edwards's tense thriller Experiment in Terror (1962) and the crime film The Money Trap (1965), a film that reunited Ford with Hayworth for the final time after five films together. Thereafter Ford continued in westerns while making cameo appearances in big-budget films, including as Clark Kent's foster dad in Superman (1978).

FRANKLIN, CARL (1949– ). African-American actor, screenwriter, and director Carl Franklin was born in Richmond, California. Raised by his mother and stepfather, he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he changed his major from history to theater arts. After acting experience in New York, he appeared in a number of television series, including The Rockford Files as well as a continuing role on The A-Team. At the age of 37, he returned to tertiary studies at the AFI Conservatory, where he studied directing and graduated in 1986. He moved to Roger Corman's Concorde Pictures and directed a number of low-budget films, including the murder mystery Nowhere to Run (1989) starring David Carradine.

His first major film was the critically celebrated One False Move (1992), coscripted by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson. This film assimilates many of the conventions of the crime film with a strong racial subtext. Three criminals (Thornton, Michael Beach, and Cynda Williams) commit a violent robbery in Los Angeles. While money motivates the men, the woman, Fantasia (Williams), merely wants to travel to her hometown, Star City, Arkansas, to see her young son. However, the local sheriff of Star City, Dale "Hurricane" Dixon (Bill Paxton), assisted by Los Angeles police officers, is waiting for the criminals. The racial aspect is intensified by the fact that Dixon, a married man, is the father of Fantasia's son, a fact that he does not learn until late in the film. Film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert declared that One False Move was the best film of the year, and the National Review Board listed it as one of the best 10 films of that year.

Franklin followed with an adaptation of Walter Mosley's first novel Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), starring Denzel Washington as Mosley's African-American detective Easy Rawlins. Franklin also wrote the screenplay for the film that was set in the postwar South Central section of Los Angeles. Rawlins is approached by Dewitt Albright (Tom Sizemore), a white man, to find Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals), the (seemingly) white girlfriend of Todd Carter (Terry Kinney), a wealthy mayoral candidate. Rawlins's investigation takes him into Raymond Chandler's world of hostile cops, corrupt politicians (including a pedophile), failed relationships, betrayal, and vicious gangsters. However, while Mosley and Chandler share the same city (Los Angeles) and the same period (the 1940s), Franklin's film reflects changing cultural attitudes in the United States in the past 60 years. Everything in his film is filtered through a racial perspective. Although the film received strong reviews, it was not a success at the box office, thereby killing off any chance for a series of film featuring Rawlins.

Franklin's One True Thing (1998), an adaptation of Anna Quindlen's novel concerning a woman caring for her mother who is dying of cancer, stars Meryl Streep and Renée Zellweger as mother and daughter. He returned to the crime genre with High Crimes (2002), a more formulaic, less challenging film than his first two films. Ashley Judd stars as a lawyer who defends her husband who is wanted for war crimes in El Salvador in 1988. His next film, the film noir Out of Time (2003), stars Denzel Washington as Matt Lee Whitlock, a police chief in a small Florida town involved with a local woman, Ann Harrison (Sanaa Lathan), while waiting for a divorce from his wife (Eva Mendes), a police detective in Florida. Whitlock keeps making mistakes and gets caught in murder and an insurance scam while attempting to stay one step ahead of the local police and Ann's abusive husband (Dean Cain). Franklin also directed the made-for-television crime film Last of the Ninth (2009) for HBO, about a New York cop who mentors a rookie, starring Ray Winstone.

FRENCH CONNECTION, THE (1971). In 1961, real-life narcotics detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso acted on a hunch when they saw a small-time crook, Sal Boca, living it up at the Copacabana nightclub. They wondered how this man, who supposedly was earning $7,000 a year from his shop, could afford such a lifestyle. They followed Boca and others for weeks and discovered an intricate heroin deal in which large quantities of the drug were smuggled into New York from Marseilles. Egan and Grosso traced the drug, worth $32 million, to the interior of a car imported from Marseilles by a French television personality.

After author Robin Moore recounted these events in a best-selling novel, producer Philip D'Antoni and director William Friedkin became involved in a proposed film based on Egan and Grosso's investigation. After rejecting scripts by Alex Jacobs and Richard E. Thompson, they accepted Ernest Tidyman's screenplay, although Friedkin later claimed that he used little of Tidyman's dialogue. The director also failed to finish reading Moore's book. The project was rejected by all of the major studios until Richard Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox approved it on the proviso that it could be made for less than $2 million.

While the casting of the easygoing Sonny Grosso (Buddy Russo in the film) was quick, with Friedkin selecting Roy Schneider after seeing him in a New York play, the more difficult role of the violent, impulsive, racist Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle, based on Egan, proved more difficult. Peter Boyle, James Caan, and Lee Marvin rejected the role, while the studio vetoed Jackie Gleason. Friedkin's plan to use Paul Newman was also dropped because of budgetary constraints. Friedkin then wanted newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin as Doyle, but after three weeks of rehearsals decided he could not act. Gene Hackman won the role by default; neither Egan nor Friedkin wanted him. Egan, in fact, lobbied for Australian actor Rod Taylor as Doyle.

Friedkin's approach to The French Connection revitalized interest in the police procedural by extending the notion of the tough, flawed cop—a development that began in the early 1950s in films such as Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) and On Dangerous Ground (1952). Hackman, however, found Doyle's racism repugnant. Friedkin also adapted Jules Dassin's semidocumentary approach to The Naked City (1948) by filming almost the entire film on the cold, squalid streets of New York, with some footage shot in Marseilles. Friedkin described the style of the film as "induced documentary," as he tried to engender a feeling of spontaneity and reality by rehearsing the actors and camera crew separately to simulate a sense of improvisation.

The film is virtually one long chase, beginning with Doyle and Russo's surveillance of the movements of Boca (Tony Lo Bianco). The chase becomes more complex when French drug lord Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) arrives in Manhattan to supervise the exchange of the drugs for money. The major set piece in the film is the elevated subway chase involving Doyle in a battered car racing French hit man Pierre Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi) in a runaway train through Bensonhurst. This sequence was suggested by producer Philip D'Antoni, who wanted to surpass his celebrated chase sequence in Bullitt (1968). Although Friedkin claimed that much of this spectacular sequence was filmed without planning, with actor Bill Hickman and Friedkin in a car traveling at high speeds for 26 blocks from Coney Island, cinematographer Owen Roizman said that it was carefully storyboarded and filmed over a five-week period. There was, however, an unplanned accident when Hackman's car collided with an innocent driver at the intersection of Stillwell Avenue and 86th Street.

The French Connection was the third highest grossing film in 1971 and swept the 1972 Academy Awards with five Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director (Friedkin), Best Actor (Hackman), Best Editing (Gerald B. Greenberg), and Best Writing (Tidyman). Schneider received a nomination for the Best Supporting Actor, as did Owen Roizman for Best Cinematography. The film's commercial and critical success was surprising, because it contained no established stars and the characterization of Doyle as violent, obsessive, and unstable was disturbing. Also, the film did not follow the conventional pattern of virtually all crime films. It refused to present a clear-cut ending and closed on an ambiguous note with an unexplained gunshot after Doyle follows Charnier into a waterfront warehouse. While the cops captured a record amount of heroin, the principal villains escaped justice—the end title explains that Charnier was not captured by Doyle, but escaped back to France and was never extradited to the United States. Most of the other criminals escaped with either light sentences or no penalty.

This bleak ending serves to reinforce the film's main discourse concerning the lack of justice on the streets of New York. This point is clearly established earlier in the film when the affluent, debonair Charnier is shown dining on fine food in a warm Upper East Side restaurant while Doyle, eating a stale slice of pizza, can be seen outside in the freezing cold. The only tangible success in the investigation—the $32 million worth of heroin recovered by the police—was eventually stolen from the office of the New York City property clerk.

Both Egan and Doyle appear in minor roles in the film. The sequel French Connection II (1975) was directed by John Frankenheimer with Hackman and Rey returning in a fictional film partly shot in Marseilles. A television film, Popeye Doyle (1986), stars Ed O'Neill in the title role. See also CITIES.

FRENCH CRIME FILMS. The French serial Fantômas (1913) was the first crime film masterpiece. It was based on stories published monthly featuring the supercriminal Fantômas. After the French film studio Gaumont purchased the rights, the studio allocated the project to director Louis Feuillade to adapt the Fantômas stories to the screen. This stunning film, made up of five separate stories, contains one visually inventive set piece after another. Feuillade's next crime serial, Les Vampires (1915), was a 10-part series. In this film, the Vampires are a criminal gang controlled by a woman, Irma Rep (Musidora). Dressed in black, they roam the city at night. Feuillade went on to make more crime serials, including La nouvelle mission de Judex (1917), Tih Minh (1918), and Barrabas (1919).

French poetic realism—a term that was first used in 1933 to describe urban-based crime films featuring working-class or lower-middle-class characters in doom-laden stories—emerged in France in the early 1930s. This strand of doomed romanticism never disappeared from the French crime film. These films also prefigured film noir Hollywood of the 1940s. An important creative partnership in the development of this cycle was scriptwriter Jacques Prévert and director Marcel Carné, who made seven films together, including Quai des brumes (1938) and Le jour se lève (1939).

The morally complex, sometimes perverse, stories from French author Georges Simenon were also important to the genre. Adaptations of his stories provided continuous material, beginning in 1932 with Jean Renoir's La nuit du carrefour, Julien Duvivier's La tête d'un home, and Jean Tarride's Le chien jaune.

A recurring theme in the 1930s involved the danger of sexual desire as manifested through the presence of the femme fatale. An influential film in this regard was Renoir's second sound film, La chiene, in 1931. This controversial film, based on a novel by Georges de La Fouchardière, was not shown in the United States until 1975 due to censorship problems. The story involves a meek bank clerk, Maurice (Michel Simon), trapped in a loveless marriage with an overpowering woman. His only escape is painting. One night he rescues a prostitute, Lulu (Janie Maréze), from a man who is beating her, and he falls in love. The man attacking Lulu is Dede (Georges Flamant), her pimp. The prostitute and the pimp swindle Maurice by selling his paintings. When Maurice catches them in bed together, he kills Lulu, and Dede goes to the gallows for the murder. A sanitized Hollywood version, Scarlet Street, directed by Fritz Lang and featuring Edward G. Robinson as the pliable husband, Joan Bennett as the prostitute, and Dan Duryea as the pimp, was released in 1945. In this version, the Parisian setting was transferred to New York's Greenwich Village.

The French gangster film Pépé le Moko (1937), directed by Duvivier with Jean Gabin as the gangster Pépé, was a key film and consolidated the actor's status in France, cementing his image as the archetypal doomed antihero. In the film, Pépé is forced to take refuge in the Casbah, the self-regulating criminal ghetto in Algiers. He is safe as long as he remains there. However, after he falls in love with a cabaret singer, he becomes reckless and dreams of returning to Paris. The film ends with his suicide. It was remade in Hollywood the following year as Algiers (1939), with Charles Boyer as the Parisian jewel thief. There were, however, significant differences between the two versions. Whereas Gabin's gangster exudes a degree of authority and violence, Boyer's thief remains a romantic figure. The film was remade as a musical in 1948.

The French gangster, as presented by Gabin in films such as Pépé le Moko, La belle équipe (1936), Guele d'amour (1937), La bandera (1935), Les bas-fonds (1936), Quai des brumes, and Le jour se lève, was considerably different from his American counterpart. A key difference concerns the use of vulnerability as a character trait in the French films. It was not until 1941 and John Huston's High Sierra (1941) that this trait emerged in the Hollywood gangster.

The German occupation of France during World War II interrupted the development of the crime genre. Only Henri Decoin's 1942 adaptation of Simenon's Les inconnus dans la maison and Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le corbeau (1943), both downbeat films, were noteworthy. There was a shift in the genre in the 1950s. Unlike the downtrodden working-class criminals in the 1930s, the 1950s gangster was shown to be living in luxurious apartments and wearing tailored suits in films such as Touchez pas us grisbi (1954) and Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur (1956). While this change can be attributed to the influence of Hollywood, local differences remained.

For example, the generic model for Jules Dassin's caper film Rififi (1955) was Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Dassin's film follows the three-part narrative structure in Huston's film: the recruitment of the criminals, the rehearsal and robbery, and the aftermath resulting in the death or capture of the gang due to a combination of human weakness and fate. But one obvious difference between the two films is the nudity and sexual violence in the French film. Early in Rififi, the film's main protagonist, gangster Tony le Stéphanois (Jean Servais), leaves prison and learns that his girlfriend Mado (Marie Sabouret) is living with another man. He takes her to his room and forces her to remove her fur coat and jewelry, the signs of her betrayal. He then, after forcing her to remove her clothes, hits her repeatedly with his belt, a scene that shocked American critic Pauline Kael. It ends with him pushing her, half-dressed, out of his apartment. On a different level, a thematic difference between the two films involves a sense of community in the French film, while The Asphalt Jungle presents a more nihilistic view of the world, with Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) dying alone in a Kentucky pasture in Huston's film. Dassin's gangster, on the other hand, sacrifices himself to save a young boy. Honor among thieves applies only to the French film.

The French New Wave directors in the early 1960s, especially Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut, borrowed heavily from American sources. Truffaut adapted the 1956 novel Down There by American David Goodis for Tirez sur le pianiste (1960). He shifted the setting from Philadelphia to a seedy bar in Paris, but retained the basic plot involving murder and revenge. However, the tone of the film is different from the novel with its sense of absurdity. Godard's debut film À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1959) was an early example of "nouvelle vague" in its experimentation with formal and narrative patterns. He creates a modernist antihero operating in an absurd universe.

Jean-Pierre Melville, on the other hand, was not interested in comedy or the absurd, and he stripped the genre back to its minimalist essence so that he could explore themes of loyalty and honor in films such as Le samouraï (1967), Le cercle rouge (1970), and Un flic (1972), all starring Alain Delon. There is also an overtly political strand in the genre in the early 1970s with films such as L'attentat (1972), which concerns the kidnapping and possible murder of a dissident Moroccan in 1965 by a French policeman, and Chabrol's Nada (1974), which examines the morality of terrorism after a U.S. ambassador is kidnapped.

One of France's biggest box-office successes was Le clan des Siciliens (1968, released overseas as The Sicilian Clan). The film starred Gabin, Delon, and Lino Ventura. Gabin was the head of the Manalese family, Delon a killer, and Ventura a cop. It was based on the novel by Auguste le Breton (Rififi was also based on one of Breton's novels). The plot in Le clan des Siciliens concerns a jewel heist by the Manalese family that is foiled by Ventura, leading to Gabin's arrest and Delon's execution.

Borsalino, released in 1970, surpassed Le clan des Siciliens at the box office. Based on Eugène Saccomano's book about two gangsters in Marseilles in the 1920s, the film was a flashy, lighthearted buddy movie that largely depended on the charismatic star power of Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo. It was followed in 1974 by Borsalino & Co. The commercial success of these films, set in the 1920s and 1930s, can be attributed, at least in part, to the clothes worn by the actors as well as the furniture, architecture, and designs, as the country was experiencing a fascination with retro styles.

Corrupt cops, or sometimes just troubled cops, were a recurring theme in the 1970s and 1980s, in films such as Un condé (1970), Max et les ferrailleurs (1971), and Police Python 357 (1976). This continued into the next decade. Sometimes it was cops abusing their suspects, as in Bertrand Tavernier's L.627 (1992), or accepting bribes, as in Police (1985) and Le cop (1984). The apotheosis of this cycle was Philippe Noiret as a psychotic cop who kills without any sense of guilt in Coup de torchon (1981), Tavernier's masterly adaptation of American author Jim Thompson's novel Pop. 1280. Tavernier transferred the setting from Texas in the novel to French-controlled colonial Africa.

Director Jacques Beineix, with films such as Diva (1981) and La lune dans le carniveau (1983), a radical updating of the Goodis novel The Moon in the Gutter, are highly stylized crime films that deviate from the dominant pattern in French cinema involving morbid, noir-infected themes in films such as Feux rouges (2004), based on the novel by Simenon; Sur mes lèvres (2001); De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté (2005); and Irréversible (2002). This pattern, of morally complex and vulnerable characters, continues with films such as Les rivières pourpres (2000), 36 quai des Orfèvres (2004), and MR73 (2008).

FUERA DEL CIELO (2007). This bleak Mexican crime film begins as a simple revenge story involving an ex-convict, Malboro (Demián Bichir), and a crooked cop, Rojas (Damián Alcázar). However, this only provides the framework for a number of interrelated stories that unfold over a 24-hour period. The film begins at 6 a.m. with Malboro, recently released from prison after serving five years, returning to his impoverished neighborhood. His aim is to win back his former lover Sara (Doloros Heredia) while assisting his troubled younger brother Cucu (Armando Hernández). Malboro, hoping to leave town with Sara and her teenage daughter Elisa (Martha Higareda), makes a fatal mistake while celebrating Cucu's 22nd birthday when he steals an expensive car and kidnaps its occupant, Sen. Garcia Luna (Ricardo Blume). This action gives Rojas the excuse he needs to eliminate his rival.

Working from a complex script by veteran Mexican screenwriter Vicente Leñeru and newcomer Guillermo Rios, director Javier Patrón uses this seemingly simple revenge tale to explore the aspirations and anxieties of characters who are caught up in this battle between two willful men. Senator Luna, for example, is forced to comfort his daughter who has recently been diagnosed with an inoperable cancer. This is complicated by the fact that his wife seems oblivious to her daughter's condition. Rebecca (Elizabeth Cervantes), who works at a strip club frequented by Cucu and Malboro, wants Cucu to commit to her in a mature fashion and not just consider her a sex object. Sara despises her husband Rojas but refuses to trust Malboro, while Elisa, her daughter, is attracted to Malboro, and her teenage crush provokes a provocative sexual response from the middle-aged ex-convict. Cucu shares Malboro's penchant for violence (he enjoys, and responds, to being punched), and boxing appears to be the only possibility for his escape from a life of petty crime. However, boxing in Mexico City is riddled with corruption, and young boxers are recruited not to win but to deliberately lose. The only hint of sentimentality concerns the identity of the person who informed on Malboro prior to his last prison sentence. Malboro believes it was Cucu, but in a bittersweet scene, he discovers that the informer was his beloved guardian, Tío Jesús (Rafael Inclán). Devoid of hope, and wishing to thwart Rojas, Malboro commits suicide at 6 a.m.

FULLER, SAM (1912–1997). An energetic, inventive director, Sam Fuller conveyed his bleak, cynical worldview across many genres, including crime films. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Fuller's early career as a tabloid crime reporter may have contributed to the lurid, confrontational style of his films. Military service with the First Infantry Division during World War II reinforced his cynicism and lifelong rejection of the political orthodoxies from both the left and the right. This is reflected in crime films such as Pickup on South Street (1953) when his protagonist Skip McCoy, a small-time thief, unwittingly steals a stolen military microfilm. The film provoked anger from both the left and J. Edgar Hoover—especially when McCoy laughs at attempts to appeal to his patriotism ("Are you waving the flag at me?"). Fuller's House of Bamboo (1955) involves a military robbery by American ex-servicemen in Japan, while The Crimson Kimono (1959) dramatizes the effect of an interracial love affair on two policemen. Underworld USA (1961), Shock Corridor (1963), and The Naked Kiss (1964) continued Fuller's confrontational crime films into the 1960s.

FU MANCHU. Dr. Fu Manchu, the diabolical Oriental criminal mastermind, was the creation of author Sax Rohmer, born Arthur Henry Ward in Birmingham, England, in 1883. Rohmer died in 1959. He was a prolific creator of bizarre characters that included a psychic amateur detective called Morris Klaw, who receives his inspiration from sleeping on a special pillow. Rohmer developed Fu Manchu while researching a newspaper story involving a dangerous Chinese gang leader in London's Limehouse district. The resultant short story, "The Zayat Kiss," was published in October 1912 and marked the first appearance of the evil mandarin intent on world domination.

Rohmer's short stories involving Fu Manchu were collected and published in 1913 as The Mystery of Fu Manchu. More novels followed until 1917, when Rohmer's interest shifted to other characters. Fu Manchu returned in 1931 with the Daughter of Fu Manchu, and seven more novels continued until 1949. He again reappeared in 1957 as a fighter against communism in Re-Enter Dr. Fu Manchu, followed by Emperor Fu Manchu (1959). The Fu Manchu books exploited long-held Western fears of the "yellow peril," the perceived threat to the West. Fu Manchu, with his shaved head and ingenious disguises, was presented as virtually invincible despite the efforts of the crime-fighting duo of Sir Denis Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie. Nayland Smith and Petrie were modeled on Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Dr. Watson.

The first screen appearance of Fu Manchu was in a series of short films adapted by the British Stoll Company from Rohmer's short stories. They were released in 1923 under the title The Mystery of Fu Manchu. In 1929, The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, starring Warner Oland as the title character, was the first sound version (it was also filmed as a silent). It was followed by two sequels with Oland: The Return of Fu Manchu (1930) and Daughter of the Dragon (1931). However, the most elaborate screen version of Rohmer's character was MGM's 1932 production The Mask of Fu Manchu, starring Boris Karloff as Fu Manchu and Myrna Loy as his evil daughter Fah Lo See. This large-budget production concerned the efforts of Fu Manchu to acquire the mask and scimitar of Genghis Khan in an attempt to pit the East against the West. Both Karloff and Loy fully exploited the melodramatic possibilities of the script, especially Fah Lo See's lust for Terence Granville (Charles Starrett).

A similar plot, without the budget or excesses of the 1932 film, was used in the 15-chapter serial from Republic Drums of Fu Manchu (1940), with the evil doctor, as the head of a secret organization (Si Fan), intent on fomenting war throughout Asia by acquiring the long-lost scepter of Genghis Khan. Fu Manchu was played by Henry Brandon. Opposing him and his team of lobotomized henchmen, called Dacoits, was William Royle as Nayland Smith and Olaf Hytten as Dr. Petrie.

In 1965, producer Harry Alan Towers began a series of Fu Manchu films starring Christopher Lee. The first film, The Face of Fu Manchu, ended with the apparent death of the evil doctor after he is caught in an explosion. However, the film concludes with his voice on the soundtrack, "The world shall hear from me again," a device that was employed in the next four films. In 1980, Fu Manchu was resurrected for the dismal comedy The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu with Peter Sellers as both Fu Manchu and Nayland Smith.
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GABIN, JEAN (1904–1976). Born in Paris, Jean Gabin made his film debut in 1929 after a career in the theater. However, it was Julian Duvivier's celebrated gangster film Pépe le Moko (1936) that established Gabin as a major film star. In this film, he is a French gangster who uses the Casbah of Algiers as a hideout from police capture. Eventually he is captured after being lured out of his hiding place. As Pépe le Moko, a doomed, alienated figure with sentimental overtones, Gabin developed a screen persona that he refined over the next 40 years. His characters were tough, vulnerable outsiders who participated in love affairs that were, like the character himself, generally doomed to fail. These attributes were found in films such as Les bas-fonds (The Lower Depths, 1936), Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938), La bête humaine (The Human Beast, 1938), Le jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939), and Remorques (Stormy Waters, 1940).

Gabin left France during the German occupation in the early 1940s, and his career stalled until the success of Touchez pas au grisbi (Honor among Thieves) in 1954. In the 1950s and 1960s, he regularly shifted to the other side of the law, including three films as Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret: Maigret tend un piège (Maigret Lays a Trap, 1959), Maigret et l'affaire Saint-Fiacre (Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case, 1959), and Maigret voit rouge (1963). See also FRENCH CRIME FILMS.

GANGSTER FILMS. D. W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) is sometimes cited as the first gangster film, as it contains a gun battle in an alley between gangs. However, it was merely one of a number of similar films made in the 1910s. Earlier, in 1904, Edwin S. Porter had directed The Ex-Convict for Edison studio. There was also a cycle of Black Hand films, beginning with The Black Hand in 1906; this film, along with titles such as The Moonshiners (1904) and Desperate Encounters between Burglars and Police (1905), is now lost.

In 1913, The Wages of Sin provoked a major controversy by reenacting a notorious murder of the owner of a New York gambling house and featuring criminals involved in the crime. Two years later, director Raoul Walsh made Regeneration; he claimed that this film was the first feature-length gangster film because it was partly based on the life of Owen Kildare, a gang leader in the 1890s. Other relevant films during this period include The Making of Crooks and The Gangsters and the Girl (both 1914). The latter film shows a detective, played by Charles Ray, posing as a gang member and included a car chase and a gunfight. In 1920, Lon Chaney starred in The Penalty, a bizarre film where he plays Blizzard, the criminal mastermind who controls San Francisco and enslaves women in a sweatshop to make hats. That was also the year in which Prohibition began with the enactment of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution through the Volstead Act, which prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. However, this was not followed by a sudden proliferation of gangster films, as most silent gangster films ignored Prohibition; even when it was acknowledged, in Those Who Dance (1924), with Warner Baxter as a government agent, and Twelve Miles Out (1927), it was not the focus of the story.

Most gangster films in the late 1920s were redemption stories like Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927). Based on an original story by Ben Hecht, its plot involved gangster "Bull" Weeds (George Bancroft) who befriends a drunken lawyer, "Rolls-Royce" (Clive Brook). When Weeds discovers that Rolls-Royce is in love with Feathers, Weeds's girlfriend, the gangster sacrifices himself for the lovers. Von Sternberg repeated this sentimental love triangle in the sound film Thunderbolt (1929), while other gangster films such as Me, Gangster (1928), Dark Streets (1929), and The Racketeer (1929) were also redemption stories.

The Racket (1928), on the other hand, was the first film to include aspects of Al Capone's career, although his name is changed to Nick Scarsi. Louis Wolheim plays the Chicago bootlegger who controls local politicians, and the film, based on the play by Bartlett Cormack, was banned in Chicago. The Scarsi role was played on the New York stage by Edward G. Robinson.

A month before the release of Little Caesar (1930), Warner Bros. released The Doorway to Hell (1930), with Lew Ayres as gangster Louis Ricarno. This character was loosely based on Capone's predecessor Johnny Torrio. Although it was successful at the time of its release, the film is now largely forgotten in favor of the three so-called classic gangster films: Little Caesar, The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932). For some film historians, these films mark the advent of the fully formed gangster genre that, because of a ban by the Production Code Administration (PCA), lasted less than three years. There were, however, an estimated 60 gangster films released during this period, with many not conforming to this classic pattern involving the rise-and-fall trajectory. In the classic formula, the gangster emerges as a brash young hood who takes over a major gang and rises to the top before hubris sets in, leading to his death. The genre was also characterized by familiar icons, including flashy clothes, expensive cars, guns, sexy women, and nightclubs—as evidenced by films such as Little Caesar, Quick Millions (1931), The Public Enemy, and Scarface. These films rejected the sentimentality of earlier films such as Underworld. Some gangster films, such as Ladies Loves Brutes (1930), City Streets (1931), and Night after Night (1932), focused more on the class difference between the gangster and the society woman he loves.

Melodrama was the basis of the genre. Paramount's controversial film The Story of Temple Drake (1933), an adaptation of William Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, was concerned with the violation of innocence. It stars Miriam Hopkins as the flirtatious southern belle Temple Drake and Jack La Rue as Trigger, the gangster who rapes her. There were also female gangsters, including two played by Alison Skipworth, swindling a succession of men in Madame Racketeer (1932) and taking control of a gang in Blondie Johnson (1933). The genre was also flexible enough to include Rowland Brown's Blood Money (1933), a perverse love triangle between a kinky socialite (Frances Dee), a gangster (George Bancroft), and a nightclub owner (Judith Anderson). In addition, there was a socially conscious cycle of films that expressed outrage over the inability of the police and judicial system to control gangsters in American society and endorsed vigilante action. This cycle included The Secret Six (1931), The Star Witness (1931), Beast of the City (1932), and Cecil B. DeMille's This Day and Age (1933).

There were many types of gangster films beyond those that featured the rise and fall of the gangster. In 1934, however, the PCA effectively blocked production of virtually any type of film that established the gangster as a sympathetic protagonist. Howard Hughes and Howard Hawks spent two years arguing with the censorship administration over Scarface. This resulted in cuts and the insertion of a scene denouncing the central character. Finally, an alternative ending was imposed. Hollywood's response to this prohibition on gangster films was to cast actors closely associated with the genre, such as James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, as policemen or government agents—which then gave them the same license to indulge in the violence that characterized their gangster films. In the first of these films, G-Men (1935), Cagney is a young man from an impoverished background who is put through law school by a benefactor, a gangster. After a friend is murdered by gangsters, Cagney switches sides and joins the FBI. In Bullets or Ballots (1936), Robinson undergoes the same change as a tough policeman who infiltrates a gang. Racket Busters (1938), starring Humphrey Bogart as the gangster and George Brent as the trucker who infiltrates Bogart's organization, follows the same pattern.

Hollywood bypassed censorship concerns by using a specific narrative device of contrasting the gangster with a more socially acceptable figure. Manhattan Melodrama (1934) is a typical example of this cycle, as the film follows three boys from the same background who take different paths—Clark Gable becomes a gangster, William Powell a lawman, and Leo Carrillo a priest. Eventually Powell, as district attorney, has to prosecute Gable and send him to his death after he murders a man. Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) follows the same pattern, with gangster Cagney and priest Pat O'Brien coming from the same impoverished neighborhood. At the end of the film, O'Brien, as prison chaplain, convinces Cagney to feign cowardice on his way to the electric chair so as to dissuade slum boys, the Dead End Kids, from following in his footsteps. William Wyler's Dead End (1937) is another example.

The release of High Sierra in 1941 signaled a change in the genre. The film stars Humphrey Bogart as the aging gangster Roy Earle, who, after his release from jail, discovers that the world has changed. He is now a sad, vulnerable criminal plagued by nightmares and a futile desire to return to his rural roots. Only death can provide relief for the urban gangster, and this occurs on the barren mountain slopes of Mount Whitney. Duke Berne (Bogart) in The Big Shot (1942) was another doomed gangster on his way down. These noir-inflected gangster films also included This Gun for Hire (1942), in which Alan Ladd plays a hit man mentally affected by the brutality inflicted on him by his aunt when he was a boy. Barry Sullivan was the doomed, emotionless, gangster in The Gangster (1947), while Dennis O'Keefe in Raw Deal (1948) and Farley Granger in They Live by Night (1948) are headed for death. John Dall in Gun Crazy (1950) makes the mistake of sharing his fetish for guns with a beautiful but disturbed young woman (Peggy Cummins); while he just likes guns, she wants to kill people with them. Burt Lancaster was also typecast as the fall guy for a variety of femmes fatales in films such as The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949). A rare deviation from this pattern was Edward G. Robinson as Johnny Rocco, opposite Bogart, in John Huston's Key Largo (1948). Rocco is a classic old-time gangster who takes over a hotel in Key Largo, Florida, in a vain attempt to escape from the United States.

One distinct influence film noir had on the genre in the 1940s was the presentation of the gangster as a psychopath, a mentally disturbed figure unable or unwilling to control his violent tendencies. In the British film Brighton Rock (1947), which was released in the United States as Young Scarface, Richard Attenborough stars as the troubled young gangster Pinkie Brown. In Hollywood, Lawrence Tierney made his mark as a violent John Dillinger in the commercially successful low-budget film Dillinger (1945), while Richard Widmark burst upon Hollywood as the sadistic, giggling Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947). James Cagney ended the decade as the mentally disturbed gangster Cody Jarrett with an intense mother fixation in White Heat (1949).

W. R. Burnett's 1929 novel Little Caesar shaped the gangster genre in the early 1930s, and High Sierra had a similar effect in 1941, while The Asphalt Jungle in 1950 was responsible for the development of a new subgenre, the caper film. This film and its successors, such as Rififi (1955), The Killing (1956), and The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (1960), emphasized the need for solidarity within the criminal group and shifted the empathy of the audience toward the criminals and away from the police. Henceforth, the individuality that characterized the genre in the past was replaced by an emphasis on the need for organization and the growth of criminal syndicates. This shift occurred in the late 1940s with films such as I Walk Alone (1948), Force of Evil (1948), and the Undercover Man (1949). The latter film starred Glenn Ford as a treasury agent who brings a mobster, designated only as the "big fellow" (Al Capone), to trial for tax evasion.

This trend accelerated after the televised investigations in the United States by Sen. Estes Kefauver in 1950 and 1951. These hearings exposed the extent of organized crime in the United States and resulted in films such as The Enforcer (1951), Appointment with Danger (1951), The Racket (1951), The Mob (1951), Captive City (1951), The Strip (1951), Hoodlum Empire (1952), Narrow Margin (1952), Turning Point (1952), The Big Heat (1953), Miami Story (1954), New York Confidential (1955), The Big Combo (1955), The Phenix City Story (1955), Slightly Scarlet (1956), and The Boss (1956).

There was also a return in the 1950s to the rise-and-fall stories of real-life gangsters in such films as Baby Face Nelson (1957), Machine Gun Kelly (1958), The Bonnie Parker Story (1958), Al Capone (1959), Pretty Boy Floyd (1959), Ma Barker's Killer Brood (1960), and The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960).

In the 1960s, the gangster film was revived in France by Jean-Pierre Melville with films such as Le doulos (1962), with Jean-Paul Belmondo as an informer, and Le samouraï (1967), starring Alain Delon as a sartorially resplendent hit man. In the United States, Roger Corman's The St. Valentine Day's Massacre, with Jason Robards as Al Capone and Ralph Meeker as George "Bugs" Moran, represented a return to the biographic gangster films of the 1950s. In 1967, British director John Boorman's Hollywood film Point Blank was influenced by the French New Wave and represented a significant break from the classical Hollywood style of filmmaking. Similar, although not as radical in its presentation, was Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which spurred interest in the genre.

The gangster genre in the 1970s was dominated by the critical and commercial success of The Godfather (1972) and its sequel The Godfather: Part II (1974). These films shifted the focus of the genre to the Mafia and its extended family, a shift that continued for many years, even embracing long-running television programs such as The Sopranos. In the early 1970s, the genre flourished with films such as Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972), Richard Fleischer's The Last Run (1971), William Friedkin's The French Connection (1972), Don Siegel's Charlie Varrick (1973), John Milius's Dillinger (1973), Michael Ritchie's Prime Cut (1972), and Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us, a remake of Edward Anderson's novel that had first been filmed by Nicholas Ray as They Live by Night in 1949. The genre also starred black actors in gangster films such as Cool Breeze (1972), Hit Man (1972), Superfly (1972), and Black Caesar (1973). These films often recycled old gangster films such as The Asphalt Jungle and Angels with Dirty Faces or, in the case of Hit Man, the British gangster film Get Carter (1971), which had been released only the year before.

Brian De Palma's 1983 remake of the 1932 gangster film Scarface shows how far the genre had developed. While both films follow the classic rise-and-fall narrative pattern, De Palma's literal depiction of violence, sex, and drugs (replacing alcohol in the earlier version) is vastly different. Similarly, the 1980s saw the release of films based on subject material drawn from earlier times—including a big-budget version of the 1960s television series The Untouchables (1987), Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club (1984), Sergio Leone's Once upon a Time in America (1984), Miller's Crossing (1990), Dick Tracy (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), and Bugsy (1991). Influential gangster films with contemporary settings included The Long Good Friday (1981) in Great Britain, John Woo's Hong Kong productions Yingxiong bense (A Better Tomorrow, 1986) and Diexue shuang diang (The Killer, 1989), and Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990). Scorsese was the producer of British director Stephen Frear's production of the Jim Thompson novel The Grifters in 1990.

Quentin Tarantino's debut film, Reservoir Dogs (1991), represented a return to the hard-edged caper films of the 1950s. Tarantino also wrote an early draft of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), although he disassociated himself from Stone's film and released his own gangster film, Pulp Fiction, the same year. Tarantino's distinctive style, mixing conversational dialogue and bursts of strong violence within convoluted narratives and overt set pieces, was copied many times in the next decade. Steven Soderbergh updated the 1949 film Criss Cross in The Underneath (1995), while Out of Sight in 1998 was an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel. Director Bryan Singer and Oscar-winning screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie took the genre in a different direction with the convoluted The Usual Suspects (1995), involving a failed multimillion-dollar drug deal. There was also a brief return to the black gangster films of the early 1970s with Rage in Harlem (1991), New Jack City (1991), and Deep Cover (1992). Following the success of Boyz n the Hood (1991), the Hollywood studios financed a series of films about "gangstas" located in the projects, such as South Central (1991), Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991), Juice (1992), Menace II Society (1993), and Sugar Hill (1994).

Scorsese returned to the genre with The Gangs of New York (2002) and The Departed (2006), which was based on the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs. Soderbergh revived the lighthearted caper film with his 2001 remake of the 1960 film Ocean's Eleven, followed by two sequels, Ocean's Twelve (2004) and Ocean's Thirteen (2007). In 2007, Ridley Scott directed American Gangster, based on the real-life story of two men, a drug importer played by Denzel Washington and a cop played by Russell Crowe. See also ANIMAL KINGDOM; BIYEOLHAN GEORI; BRAZILIAN GANGSTERS; CELDA 211; CHIKO; CHOW YUN-FAT; CITIES; DE DOMINEE; DONNIE BRASCO; DOSSIER K; FRENCH CRIME FILMS; GERMAN CRIME FILMS; GOMORRAH; HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, A; IN BRUGES; INDIAN CRIME FILMS; ITALIAN MAFIA; KITANO, TAKESHI; LES RIVIÈRES POURPRES; LEWIS, JOSEPH H.; LONG GOOD FRIDAY, THE; MOU GAAN DOU; NIGHT AND THE CITY; PRISON FILMS; PRIZZI'S HONOR; PROSTITUTION; PUBLIC ENEMIES; PUSHER; SERPICO; TAKAKURA, KEN; TRUANDS; 25 KILATES; YAKUZA.

GARDNER, AVA (1922–1990). Born in Grabtown, North Carolina, Ava Gardner's most notable crime role was as the femme fatale Kitty Collins in The Killers (1946). For most of her film career, however, filmmakers often seemed more interested in exploiting her exquisite beauty than in her acting ability. Early in her career, she had small parts in low-budget films such as Kid Glove Killer (1942), but after The Killers, Gardner was elevated to starring roles, appearing opposite Robert Taylor in the film noir The Bribe (1949), Gregory Peck in The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), and Clark Gable in Mogambo (1953). Her best film in the latter part of her career was the political thriller Seven Days in May (1964). As her career progressed, off-screen interests and controversies—including marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra—overwhelmed her screen performances. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

GARDNER, ERLE STANLEY (1889–1970). The creator of Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner was one of the most popular—if not the most popular—crime writers for more than four decades, with an estimated 200 million copies of his novels and short stories sold in the United States alone. Born in Massachusetts, he was a self-educated lawyer in California who wrote crime stories for the pulp magazines in his spare time. After selling his first story to Black Mask magazine in 1924, he contributed more than 100 stories for the magazine over the next 20 years. After the success of his first novel in 1933, The Case of the Velvet Claws, which featured the attorney Perry Mason, Gardner became a full-time writer. Gardner was not a great literary stylist, as his stories often depended on large chunks of dialogue rather than subtle characterizations and vivid descriptions. Nevertheless, he was prolific, and to meet the demand for his stories, he began dictating them to a team of secretaries. Also, he did not limit himself to Perry Mason and created a number of series characters, including the popular detective team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lamb.

Warner Bros. produced the first Perry Mason film, The Case of the Howling Dog, in 1934 with Warren William as Mason, followed by The Case of the Curious Bride in 1935. The films emphasized comedy rather than suspense and mystery. Gardner was not impressed with the film adaptations of his stories. Nevertheless, unlike the long-running 1950s and 1960s television series starring Raymond Burr, he had no control over the films, and Warner Bros. continued in much the same comedic vein with The Case of the Velvet Claws (1936) and The Case of the Black Cat (1936), with Ricardo Cortez replacing William as Mason. After The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (1937), with Donald Woods as Mason, Gardner refused to license any more of his books to the studio. See also HARD-BOILED FILMS.

GARFIELD, JOHN (1912–1952). A prominent victim of the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigation into the American film industry in the late 1940s, John Garfield was exiled from Hollywood and died in New York at age 39. His fatal heart attack followed intense political pressure due to his outspoken support for liberal causes and for films, such as Body and Soul (1947), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), and especially Force of Evil (1948). Born Jacob Julius Garfinkle in New York, Garfield acted with the left-wing Group Theater in New York in the 1930s before accepting a contract with Warner Bros. His early roles, in films such as They Made Me a Criminal (1939) and Dust Be My Destiny (1939), established Garfield as Warner's resident working-class young man who, through circumstances beyond his control, falls into crime in films such as Blackwell's Island (1939), Castle on the Hudson (1940), East of the River (1940), and Out of the Fog (1941).

Tired of these roles, Garfield went on suspension from the studio until a lack of money forced him back, whereupon, as punishment, he was cast in the low-budget espionage film Dangerously We Live (1942). However, away from Warner Bros., Garfield was able to attract more challenging roles, especially as a troubled veteran in the espionage-crime hybrid The Fallen Sparrow (1943) at RKO. In this film, based on the 1942 novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, Garfield is a traumatized Spanish Civil War soldier who returns to the United States after two years of torture by the Nationalists in Spain. His anxieties surface, although he eventually overcomes them and exposes a fascist ring of spies operating in New York. MGM's 1946 production of James M. Cain's controversial novel The Postman Always Rings Twice gave Garfield the role of drifter Frank Chambers, who is seduced by Lana Turner's character into helping her murder her husband.

Garfield left Warner Bros. in the mid-1940s for the freedom of Enterprise Studio, an independent film production company that attracted liberal and left-wing filmmakers, including director Robert Rossen and screenwriter Abraham Polonsky. Garfield's first film for the company was Body and Soul (1947), which allowed Garfield to assimilate social criticism within the conventions of a crime/boxing film. The film emphasized the high degree of corruption in the boxing industry and the role of greed in bringing down an ambitious boxer. Polonsky wrote the screenplay and Rossen directed. Garfield starred in an even more overt social parable in 1948 with Force of Evil, based on Ira Wolfert's novel Tucker's People. This socially conscious indictment of the association between capitalism and organized crime damaged Garfield's standing in Hollywood. He starred in only five more films before his death, including Breaking Point (1950), the second of three film versions of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. Garfield's other crime films include Nobody Lives Forever (1946) and He Ran All the Way (1951). See also BLACKLIST.

GASLIGHT (1940/1944). English novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play Gaslight was a great success in London, followed in 1941 with a long run (1,295 performances) on Broadway where the title was changed to Angel Street. The first and best film version of Hamilton's play was produced in London in 1940. It was titled Gaslight in Britain and Angel Street in the United States. This version was directed by Thorold Dickinson and starred Anton Walbrook as the sadistic husband Paul Mallen (also known as Louis Barre in the film) and Diana Wynyard as his tormented wife, Bella Mallen. This version benefits from Walbrook as the Continental villain who alternates between an icy demeanor and a superficial charm. Similarly, Wynyard is appropriately fragile, both physically and emotionally, as the troubled wife.

The film begins with a murder at 12 Pimlico Square when an elderly woman is killed by a man searching for her rubies. Twelve years later, Paul Mallen and his wife, Bella, take up residence in an adjoining apartment, and Bella begins to doubt her sanity as personal items disappear and then suddenly reappear. Also, when Paul leaves Bella alone, the gas lamps in their apartment flicker and dim, due to the fact that Paul is searching the apartment next door and turns up the gas in the empty apartment. Bella's anxieties deepen when Paul begins flirting with the family maid, Nancy (Cathleen Cordell). Nancy treats her mistress with disdain, despising Bella's weakness. Fortunately, a retired policeman, Rough (Frank Pettingell), expresses an interest in Bella's plight and assists her in exposing Paul's machinations. The film's ending is especially powerful, with Paul tied to a chair while pleading with Bella to let him escape by cutting the ropes that restrain him. This allows Bella to extract her revenge by feigning insanity, the very condition that Paul tried to induce.

MGM also produced a Hollywood version of Hamilton's play, with Charles Boyer as the husband, Ingrid Bergman as his wife, and Angela Lansbury as the flirtatious maid, titled Gaslight (1944) in the United States and Murder in Thornton Square in Britain. Bergman won an Oscar for her performance. The Hollywood studio not only bought up the rights to the film but also, allegedly, tried to destroy existing prints of the British version. Consequently Dickinson's film was not seen for many years until a print was discovered in his collection. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

GERMAN CRIME FILMS. The German crime film, unlike that of Hollywood or Great Britain, is not characterized by a great tradition of gangster and/or detective stories. Instead, there has been a sustained interest in the macabre and the perverse. The first major cycle was the Strassenfilm, or street film, a series of stylized, urban-based crime films released between 1923 and 1930. The cycle began with Karl Grune's Die Strasse (1923), and it prefigured many of the themes that appeared in film noir.

In Die Strasse, a bored, middle-class man leaves his wife for the excitement of the big city, where he discovers a nightmarish world of prostitutes and thieves, leading to humiliation and imprisonment. This morality play ends with the man returning to his secure, middle-class lifestyle. This is a highly stylized film as the city setting is re-created in the studio, rather than on location in a real city. Hence the lighting, sets, and composition are tightly controlled within the studio.

Die Strasse was followed by G. W. Pabst's Die Freudlose Gasse (1925), which was shown in the United States as The Street of Sorrow and in Great Britain as The Joyless Street. Pabst's critically celebrated film, although censored in some countries, depicts a mosaic of misery in Vienna in 1921. Murder and despair follow the actions of a corrupt butcher. Other films in this cycle include Dirnentragödie (1927) and Joe May's Asphalt (1927). May's film follows the dangerous relationship between a young cop and a female thief. The most influential film in this cycle was Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel (1930), which elevated the career of Marlene Dietrich as the femme fatale Lola Lola and provided her passage to Hollywood, where she worked on a series of films with von Sternberg.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the German film industry also adapted stories by British writer Edgar Wallace. Five were produced between 1927 and 1934 before the Nazis terminated the production of crime films; production resumed in 1959 with 32 film adaptations in the next decade. These films, mainly police procedurals set in Great Britain, were characterized by Wallace's bizarre plots and idiosyncratic elements. The series, which began with Der Frosch mit der Maske (1959), included a number of films directed by Alfred Vohrer, such as Die toten Augen von London (1961), a remake of the 1939 British film The Dark Eyes of London starring Bela Lugosi. Horst Tappert as Inspector Perkins also featured in a number of the films directed by Vohrer. One of these was Der Gorilla von Soho (1968), an odd film involving the murder of wealthy men as part of an insurance scam. The killer, however, roams the streets dressed as a gorilla. Vohrer and Perkins returned for the superior film Der Mann mit dem Glasange (1969), with the policeman chasing criminals between Great Britain and South America. Christopher Lee traveled to Germany for the role of an FBI agent in Das Rätsel der rotten Orchidee (1962). He assists the British police in fighting gangsters from Chicago. The highlight of the film, like many of the Wallace adaptations, is Klaus Kinski as the villain.

Between 1965 and 1969, a series of eight films was based on FBI agent Jerry Cotton, played by American actor George Nader. Cotton, a favorite literary figure in Germany since 1954, first appeared in Schüsse aus dem Geigenasten (1965) and Mordnacht in Manhattan (1965), directed by Harald Reinl. In 2010, Cyrill Boss and Philipp Stennert directed a new version entitled Jerry Cotton with Christian Tranitz as Cotton.

In the 1960s, German exploitation films that assimilated sex and nudity with crime first appeared. They included the St Pauli series directed by Rolf Olsen in such films as Der Arzt von St Pauli (1968) and Der Pfarrer von St Pauli (1970). Both films starred Curd Jürgens (who was usually billed as "Curt Jurgens" in his Hollywood films). In 1972, Olsen directed the violent caper film Blutiger Freitag, released overseas as Bloody Friday. This German-Italian coproduction concerned the activities of a criminal, Heinz Klett, played by Raimund Harmstorf. After escaping from a Munich courthouse, Klett recruits a gang to rob a bank. They invade the bank with submachine guns stolen from a U.S. Army base, and after the robbery goes sour, they are forced to take hostages. This leads to a rape and much violence.

The production in the 1920s and early 1930s of psychological crime films about aberrant characters, including Fritz Lang's M (1931), ended when the Nazis took over. This resulted in directors such as Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, John Brahm, and Robert Siodmak, together with a number of actors such as Peter Lorre, leaving Germany. In the 1940s, they played a significant role in the development of film noir in Hollywood.

A brief cycle of film noirs began in 1946 with the East German production Die Mörder sind unter uns, followed by Blockierte Signale (1948), Hafenmelodie (1948), Schicksal aus zweiter Hand (1949), and Tromba (1949), each featuring disturbed male characters. Lorre contributed to this cycle. After his Hollywood career went into the doldrums, he returned to Germany to direct and star in Die Verlorene (1951). The film concerned a man, Dr. Rothde (Lorre), a Nazi scientist and murderer, who fakes his own murder and takes on another identity. This excellent, downbeat film was not a commercial success, however, and Lorre returned to Hollywood.

Siodmak, Lang, and Brahm also returned to Germany later in their careers. Siodmak directed Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (1957). Based on an actual case, it involved Bruno Luedke (Mario Adorf), a man who murdered more than 50 women between 1928 and his arrest in 1943. Siodmak's film, however, was more interested in presenting Luedke as representative of the sickness of the Third Reich, which exploited Luedke to encourage public support for its policy of exterminating the mentally ill. Lang's final film, Die tausend Augen des Mabuse (1960), was a fantasy-thriller with anti-Nazi sentiments. Wolfgang Preiss stars as the vile Mabuse, as Lang presents a bleak world of criminals, psychopaths, nuclear terrorists, and failed relationships. Brahm returned for a series of films, including Schwarzer Kies (1961), which depicts a small town riddled with corruption.

Directors Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders reworked American neo-noir in the 1970s and 1980s as the means of providing a critique of German society—especially the social dislocation that followed postwar economic changes, the American influence, and apathy toward atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. This is particularly evident in Fassbinder's Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1982), the last film made by Fassbinder before he committed suicide and the final film in his trilogy that started with The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and Lola (1981). Influenced by Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss concerns a fading film star once associated with the Nazis. It was inspired by a news story involving Sybille Schmitz, the star of F. W. Murnau's Vampyr (1930). The films produced by Wenders were more elusive. Der amerikanische Freund (1982), an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game, follows the descent of a happily married man into a world of violent crime through the actions of Highsmith's recurring character, the amoral Ripley (Dennis Hopper).

Mainstream German crime films in recent years have included the highly popular Lola Rennt (1998), which was released overseas as Run Lola Run. Directed by Tom Tykwer, this high-concept film was based on the premise that a young woman must acquire 100,000 marks in 20 minutes to save her boyfriend following a failed drug deal. The film presents three different scenarios of what might happen in this visually flashy, action-intensive film. The film stars Franka Potente as Lola.

Potente also starred in Anatomie (Anatomy, 2000). In that film, directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, Potente plays Munich medical student Paula Henning, who accepts a place at the prestigious University of Heidelberg Medical School. However, everything is not what it seems. During an anatomy course, the body of a young student Paula met on the train to the university appears on the dissection table, and her tutor, Professor Grombeck, encourages her to dissect the heart. Paula begins her investigation into the medical school and discovers a secret society of doctors, the Anti-Hippocratic Society, that is not restrained by ethical practices. After a series of murders, the guilty party is exposed, although the film concludes on an ambiguous note as some of Paula's colleagues discuss their entry into the ongoing Anti-Hippocratic Society. The film was highly successful at the box office and was followed in 2003 by a sequel, Anatomie 2, with Ruzowitzky directing and Potente returning in a brief cameo as a detective investigating the Anti-Hippocratic Society.

The German penchant for the macabre is strongly represented by Tannöd (The Murder Farm, 2009). The film is based on Andrea Maria Schenkel's debut novel, and the story was influenced by an event in 1922 where six people were slaughtered on a remote Bavarian farm. Directed by Bettina Oberli, this atmospheric film assimilates a crime format—the investigation by a young nurse, Kathrin (Julie Jentsch), into the killings—with themes involving religious guilt, incestuous sex, betrayal, and family loyalty. While the film on one level resembles Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, where everybody has a reason to commit the murder, Tannöd uses the killings as a pretext to expose the dark secrets and repressed desires of the villagers, represented metaphorically by the dark forest that surrounds the town.

GET CARTER (1971). Get Carter, with a production budget of $750,000, was released by MGM in the United States. The studio, however, was in financial trouble, and the film was virtually thrown away on the drive-in circuit. Its release was not helped by the reviews of newspaper critics who were dismayed by the film's complex plotting and the violence employed by the main character, Jack Carter (Michael Caine). This response was compounded by Carter's lack of remorse for the pain inflicted on both men and women. It is these qualities that have established Get Carter as one of the finest British gangster films.

Carter is working in London for gangster Gerald Fletcher (Terence Rigby) when he learns of the death of his estranged brother in Newcastle. Although Carter is warned by Fletcher not to go north and interfere with local crime boss Cyril Kinnear (John Osborne), he ignores the gangster. As he moves closer to the truth in Newcastle, the locals turn nasty, and Carter is caught between the local gangster, Kinnear, and men sent by Fletcher to bring him back to London. His difficulties intensify when Fletcher learns that Carter has been sleeping with his wife, Anna (Britt Ekland).

The turning point occurs when Carter views a pornographic film showing the seduction of his dead brother's daughter Doreen (Petra Markham); there is even a vague suggestion that Doreen may be Carter's daughter. Carter's violence subsequently escalates as he lashes out against those involved in the production of the porn film: Carter throws one man, Cliff Brumby (Bryan Mosley), off the roof of a parking lot; stabs Albert Swift (Glynn Edwards) in the stomach; watches passively as Fletcher's thugs push a car, with a woman in the trunk, off a pier into the water; and injects another woman, Margaret (Dorothy White), with drugs before drowning her in Kinnear's lagoon in an attempt to frame the gangster. This unsettling context is reinforced in the final moments of the film, which was filmed by the sea at Blackhall Rocks Beach in County Durham. Here, in an evocative mixture of nature, the sea, and heavy industry, Carter places the man responsible for his brother's death, Eric Paice (Ian Hendry), in a coal cart heading out to sea. Carter is then executed by an unseen hit man hired by Fletcher, and the film's last forlorn image shows Carter's body by the water on a lonely beach.

Based on the novel by Ted Lewis, the film transfers the novel's setting from somewhere around Doncaster, possibly the steel town of Scunthorpe, to Newcastle. This decision by director Mike Hodges enhances the notion that Carter belongs to the past and is an anachronism with the rise of amoral criminals such as Kinnear. Newcastle, at the time of the film's production, was undergoing a major transformation, and the film captures the city's mixture of the old and the superficially modern. Fittingly, while traveling from London to Newcastle by train, Carter is shown reading Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. After viewing Doreen's sexual abuse in the porn film, Carter's actions can be perceived as an updated version of Chandler's "knight" who dispenses firm justice in a corrupt world.

Get Carter (1971) directed by Mike Hodges. Shown: Michael Caine.

GLASS KEY, THE (1935/1942). The 1942 film version of Dashiell Hammett's 1931 novel The Glass Key stars Alan Ladd as Ed Beaumont, Brian Donlevy as Paul Madvig, and Veronica Lake as Janet Henry and was directed by Stuart Heisler. An earlier version of the film appeared in 1935 with George Raft as Beaumont, Edward Arnold as Madvig, and Claire Dodd as Henry and was directed by Frank Tuttle; this version is often overlooked, yet it contains most of the elements of the 1942 film and is an early film noir.

Hammett's story is set in an unnamed city, probably Baltimore, where Ned (Ed in the films) Beaumont is a political fixer for the boss of the city, construction owner Paul Madvig. Paul, because of his obsession with Janet Henry, supports the reelection of her father, Senator Henry, and his reform ticket. This brings Paul into conflict with Shad O'Rory and his gambling interests. When Ned finds the body of Senator Henry's son Taylor, suspicion falls on Paul, because Taylor was conducting an illicit affair with Paul's daughter Opal. A series of anonymous notes sent to District Attorney Farr accuse Paul of the murder. Ned, in an attempt to protect Paul, destroys an incriminating affidavit. However, he suffers a terrible beating at the hands of Jeff and Rusty, two thugs working for O'Rory. When Opal accuses her father of Taylor's murder, Ned, to prevent the publication of her accusations, provokes the suicide of the editor of the local newspaper by seducing his wife. Despite Ned's efforts to protect Paul, the friendship between the two men falters after Paul tells him that he killed Taylor. This bitterness escalates when Ned tells Paul that Janet was only using him to get her father reelected and that she is responsible for the anonymous notes. In an effort to save his friend, Ned tries to get information from Jeff. Jeff, however, strangles his boss (O'Rory), while Ned passively looks on. Ned then forces Senator Henry to confess that he killed his son. The novel ends on a depressing note: Ned and Paul are totally estranged after Ned tells Paul that he is leaving the city with Janet.

Both films replace the novel's utterly bleak ending with upbeat closures. The 1935 film reunites Paul with Ed and suddenly converts Opal, Paul's daughter, into a romantic partner for Ed. Similarly, the 1942 film eliminates the hostility between Ed and Janet, and in a last-minute gesture of his friendship, Paul gives his blessing to Ed's union with Janet, his ex-fiancée. Both films also omit Janet's dream involving a glass key that provides the basis for the title of Hammett's novel. Janet's retelling of her dream reiterates Hammett's nihilistic view of the world and performs the same ideological function as the Flitcraft Parable in his earlier novel The Maltese Falcon. Essentially, it reaffirms Hammett's vision of a world predicated on moral chaos.

The major difference between the two films is that the 1942 film intensifies Ned's moral dilemma and emotional vulnerability. For example, only the 1942 version includes Ed's callous seduction of Eloise Matthews that leads to her husband's suicide. Nevertheless, both films retain Hammett's suggestion that Ned's protection of Paul is not solely motivated by their friendship but involves a perverse masochistic desire on Ned's part to experience the "pleasures" of brutal beatings inflicted on him by Jeff, O'Rory's sadistic henchman. While Hammett is more explicit in pointing to this aspect, including Jeff's reference to Ned as a "God-damned massacrist," both films include sufficient cues to make the same point—especially Jeff's references to Ed as "baby" and "sweetheart" while he is hitting him. On one occasion, when Ed shows up unexpectedly, Jeff greets him with a broad smile: "Look Rusty, little rubber ball is back. I told you he likes the way we bounced him around."

Both films emphasize the amorality of the central character. This is explicitly rendered in both the novel and the films when Ed, desperate to save Paul, seeks information from Jeff in a dingy bar. Exposing himself to the possibility of another beating, he allows Jeff to put his hands around him as he greets him. When Jeff invites Ed upstairs for a "drink," the sexual basis of their liaison is suggested by Jeff as he excuses himself from his drinking companions: "Excuse us, gents. We've got to go up and play handball, me and cuddles." Upstairs, Ed tries to get information out of the inebriated thug, but he is interrupted by the arrival of Jeff's boss (O'Rory in the 1935 film, Vanna in the 1942 film). When Jeff takes offense at his boss's desire to curb his drinking, he lunges at him, accidentally knocking the single overhead light. His boss, in an attempt to protect himself, pulls a gun from his pocket, but Ed takes it away and calmly watches Jeff murder the defenseless man. The 1935 film, in an almost textbook example of noir imagery, depicts the killing with a chiaroscuro lighting effect as Ed's face alternates between darkness and light. Even more startling is the way director Frank Tuttle suggestively implicates Ed in the murder by cutting between Ed's impassive gaze and Jeff slowly strangling O'Rory. Director Stuart Heisler achieves a similar effect in 1942.

GODFATHER, THE (1972), AND THE GODFATHER: PART II (1974). Paramount Pictures initially conceived The Godfather as a relatively cheap, conventional gangster film set in contemporary America. The ambitious vision of director Francis Ford Coppola changed this, and the first two Godfather films had a profound effect on the gangster film. While retaining the trappings of the genre, including the rise-and-fall structure common to early 1930s films such as Little Caesar (1930), Coppola focused on the rich domestic tapestry of Italian families while simultaneously presenting the Corleone family as a metaphor for the destructive power of American capitalism.

The first film, The Godfather, follows the transfer of power from the aging Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) to his youngest son Michael (Al Pacino). After the brutal death of Vito's eldest son Santino "Sonny" Corleone, Michael, who is initially not interested in joining his father and brothers, moves into the family business. He becomes involved in the Corleone's war with a rival family that wants to exploit Don Vito's political and police contacts to protect their drug sales. Michael's transformation takes place after he murders a rival gangster, Virgil "the Turk" Sollozo (Al Lettieri), and a corrupt policeman, Captain McCluskey (Sterling Hayden), following a failed attempt on his father's life. The completion of his transformation from naïve college graduate to ruthless successor to Don Vito is evident in the chilling climax when Coppola crosscuts between the baptism of Michael's sister's baby and his brutal extermination of everyone who threatens the family and its business interests.

While many actors were considered for the role of Vito Corleone, including Richard Conte (who was instead cast as the family's nemesis Emilio Barzini), Burt Lancaster, Joseph Calleia, Edward G. Robinson, and Orson Welles, Brando's multilayered performance won him the Best Actor Oscar, while Coppola won the Best Screenplay Award. The film won Best Picture. To achieve the raspy voice he wanted, Brando wore a specially fitted mouthpiece that enabled him to imitate the voice of real-life gangster Frank Costello. Italian director Sergio Leone and Peter Bogdanovich were also considered by Paramount, but it was Coppola's emphasis in the domestic rituals and tensions within the Corleone family that established the film's unique qualities. He also exposed the family's destructive attributes whereby everything could be justified in the name of business.

The Godfather: Part II begins in 1958, nearly a decade after the end of the first film, with Michael consolidating his power in Nevada rather than New York. While both films provide a critique of American capitalism, the second film shows what happens to the family when Michael ignores his father's advice about the two sides to life. While Michael is successful in eliminating the family's enemies by following his father's dictum to "keep your friends close but your enemies closer," his decision to ignore his father's second creed—that "a man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man"—proves disastrous.

At the end of the second film, Michael is alone, left with only those who fear him. His wife, Kay, has been banished after telling him that she killed their unborn son through an abortion rather than bring another Corleone into the world, while his brother Fredo (John Cazale) is murdered by Michael. Also, his mother has died. To emphasize the significance of his loss, Coppola ends the film with a flashback that records a family dinner in 1943. Around the table are people who have died, such as Sonny; people who have been banished, such as Kay; and people whom Michael has murdered, such as his sister Connie's husband, Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo), brother Fredo, and Corleone confidant Sal Tessio (Abe Vigoda). Michael's optimistic promise to Kay in the first film—that within five years the Corleone family would be legitimate—is no longer of any interest to him. Only revenge and the acquisition of more money occupy his thoughts.

The Godfather: Part II contains two stories: Michael's estrangement from the family in the 1950s, and the genesis of young Vito's (Robert De Niro) rise to power in New York 40 years earlier. Vito's story begins after he is forced to flee his village in Sicily to New York, at age nine, following the murder of his father, mother, and brother. These two stories work together to intensify the film's sense of loss. The optimism and energy of the earlier period highlight the alienation and decline of the latter. This is reinforced by Gordon Willis's cinematography. The early period is filmed with brown, a warm color, dominating the visuals to emphasize Vito's integration into family and communal life. The latter period, on the other hand, is filmed in cold blue colors that reinforce Michael's efficient, nonsentimental actions—a persona reinforced by his dark suits and coats.

The film also details Michael's ambitious plan, in association with gangster Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg), to exploit and extend gambling in Cuba. However, following the downfall of the corrupt Fulgencio Batista regime and the rise of Fidel Castro's revolution, this fails, with Michael fleeing the island. The rest of the time Michael spends defending himself from a government investigation and plotting the downfall of those who have insulted or betrayed him. Just as the first film ends with a brutal series of murders, the second one concludes with a similar set of killings. The difference between the two endings is that the first purge marked his ascendancy to the top of the Corleone empire, while the second completes the destruction of the family.

The Godfather: Part II won six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor for De Niro. Coppola returned to the Corleone saga in 1990, with less success, in The Godfather: Part III.

GOMORRAH (2008). Gomorrah, the winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes and seven David di Donatello Awards (including Best Film and Best Director for Matteo Garrone), is a searing film detailing endemic corruption in the province of Naples and Caserta. Based on Italian journalist Roberto Saviano's 2006 book, the film selects five stories from the novel. One concerns Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imperato), the man responsible for paying the families of imprisoned Mafia members. Another is based on Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese), a 13-year-old boy faced with a difficult decision while Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone), two boys influenced by Brian de Palma's film Scarface (1983), cause problems after finding a stash of weapons. Roberto (Carmine Paternoster) wants work, and Franco (Toni Servillo) offers him a position in toxic waste management, but the work proves disturbing. In another story, Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo), a tailor who rips off fashion lines, is threatened when he agrees to assist some Chinese competitors.

This complex film, with its mixture of professional and nonprofessional actors, approximates the tone and approach of a documentary. There is a sense that the film presents the "truth," a feeling reinforced by the knowledge that Saviano has been living under police protection since 2006. While drugs have been the subject of crime films for many years, Gomorrah emphasizes the pervasive nature of corruption in this Italian city by including more benign industries such as textiles, supermarkets, banking, and construction. The systematic corruption and the absence of positive forces or even "good" characters epitomize the film's title—a play on the lawless, ill-fated city in the Bible and a reference to the Italian Mafia family known as the Camorra.

GOODBYE PARADISE (1982). An Australian crime film, Goodbye Paradise was initially conceived by scriptwriter Denny Lawrence as a transformation of Raymond Chandler's world to Surfer's Paradise on Queensland's Gold Coast. The script, by Lawrence and Bob Ellis, was filmed in Surfer's Paradise and surrounding locations on a budget of $A1.1 million in the middle of 1981 under the direction of Hungarian-born director Carl Schultz. The film shares Chandler's mixture of fascination and disgust with the glitter and corruption of big cities, a theme that was evident in many of his novels, especially Little Sister (1949). In Goodbye Paradise, this aspect is addressed by the film's contempt for politicians, doctors, police, and the alternative cults found on the Gold Coast—often presented through the narration of the film's main protagonist, Michael Francis Xavier Stacey (Ray Barrett).

Stacey, a tired and disillusioned writer, is hired by Sen. Les McCredie (Don Pascoe) to find his wild daughter Cathy (Janet Scrivener). During his investigation, Stacey discovers a major conspiracy involving right-wing forces in the state, including sections of the armed forces, to separate the Gold Coast from the rest of Australia. The film tries to put forward a political agenda within the conventions of hard-boiled films, as is evident throughout the film in the characterizations and the tone of Stacey's narration. It resembles the feeling of despair and melancholy that characterizes Chandler's fiction. Both Philip Marlowe and Stacey convey a deep-seated sense of alienation: "I drove past a green and clean Pacific, not yet choked and corrupted with oil, and I thought about things in general, like Arabs and the Americans, and the profit-motive and the CIA-backed revolutions and how close they were getting to my home town."

Goodbye Paradise, except for a vital lapse during the film's climax when it suddenly reverts to an absurdist mode, reworks the hard-boiled detective genre to create a culturally relevant evocation of a confused society caught between the dubious values of the past and the corrupt values of the future. The film was produced when there were frequent charges of corruption in the state of Queensland. Barrett won the Best Actor Award and Lawrence and Ellis the Best Screenplay Award at the 1982 Australian Film Institute Awards, while Schultz was nominated for Best Director and Goodbye Paradise was nominated for Best Film.

GOODFELLAS (1990). Martin Scorsese's influential gangster film deviates from the conventional rise-and-fall pattern of the classic gangster form by focusing more on the domestic and social world of an ambitious hustler and, in this way, paved the way for television programs such as The Sopranos. It begins in the middle of Henry Hill's (Ray Liotta) rise and then jumps back to the 1950s, when Hill, as a teenager, ran errands for godfather Paul ("Paulie") Cicero (Paul Sorvino). Hill graduates to more serious crimes, such as hijacking, airport robberies, extortion, and stand-over activities, and during his jail term, he moves into drug dealing. Along the way, Hill forms a close association with the repressed, violent Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and the equally violent and overtly psychopathic Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), who punctuates each bout of sickening violence with a stream of profanities and confrontational, bigoted jokes.

Scorsese economically establishes the central traits of each character in the film's opening sequence, which shows three men in a car at night. They stop when they hear a knocking noise coming from the trunk. In the trunk is the bloodied body of a Mafia man named Frank Batts, who is still breathing. Disappointed and angry, DeVito attacks the body with a knife while Conway coolly fires his gun into the body. Hill watches this disgusting display of human behavior with a mixture of amusement and excitement while telling the audience that "as far as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." However, DeVito's impulsive action has its consequences later in the film when he is invited by the Mafia bosses to receive recognition as a "made man," his induction into the Mafia hierarchy, but it turns out to be a ruse for the Mafia to avenge the death of Batts.

The decision to focus on the domestic and social network, rather than the actual crimes, produces an episodic structure that includes Hill's marriage to a Jewish woman, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), his affairs with two other women, and his fall when he rejects Cicero's advice to stop dealing in drugs. This occurs when his courier, the family nanny, ignores Hill's advice and uses an outside phone to set up a drug deal. Hill is arrested and turns informer. His fall follows a major robbery, the biggest in American history. Conway responds by murdering virtually everyone involved in the robbery in a vain attempt to prevent colleagues from informing on him. He also wants all of the money. Hill enters the Witness Protection Program and, in the process, loses his wife and the excitement that motivated his entry into the privileged world of "wiseguys" and "goodfellas"—a place where thugs can be treated like princes.

Goodfellas is a dramatized account of Henry Hill's 30-year career as a criminal and is based on Nicholas Pileggi's book Wise Guy: Life in a Mafia Family. Pesci won an Academy Award for his performance as the unstable DeVito.

GOODIS, DAVID (1917–1967). Davis Goodis's first novel, published in 1939 when he was 21 years of age, was titled Retreat from Oblivion. This was an apt title, as Goodis, in real life and in his novels, expressed a desire to retreat from a harsh world. Goodis was educated at Temple University in Philadelphia, graduating with a major in journalism. He left for New York and published extensively in the pulps while also writing scripts for radio serials. After the Saturday Evening Post serialized his most popular novel, The Dark Passage, in 1946, Humphrey Bogart expressed a desire to star in a film version. Despite misgivings that the studio's number one star would only be heard but not seen for the first section of the film, Warner Bros. agreed to the project, which costarred Lauren Bacall. Warner also offered Goodis a three-year contract that allowed him six months each year to work on his novels. However, he was not comfortable in the studio system, especially after a happy ending was imposed on Dark Passage, and he failed to make an impact as a screenwriter—his only screen credit was The Unfaithful (1947). During this period, he produced one of his best crime novels, Nightfall, which was filmed by director Jacques Tourneur in 1957. Goodis left Hollywood in 1950 and returned to Philadelphia, where he lived with his parents. After losing his prestigious publishing contract, Goodis wrote for the paperback market until his death at the age of 49.

The bleak view of the world presented in Goodis's novels was never going to be attractive to the Hollywood studios, although an independent company, Samson Productions, commissioned him to adapt his 1953 novel The Burglar for the 1957 film starring Dan Duryea, released by Columbia. Goodis, however, has always been popular with French intellectuals, and his novels have enjoyed reasonably frequent adaptations by French filmmakers. His 1950 novel Of Missing Persons was filmed as Section des disparus in 1956. This was followed by the most prestigious adaptation of his work when, in 1960, French director François Truffaut transferred the setting of the 1956 novel Down There from Philadelphia to Paris for Shoot the Piano Player. A French version of The Burglar was released as Le casse in 1971, and this was followed the next year by La course du lièvre à travers les champs, based on the 1954 novel Black Friday. A big-budget version of the 1953 novel The Moon in the Gutter was produced in France as La lune dans le carniveau in 1983, followed in 1984 by Rue barbare, based on the 1952 novel Street of the Lost. In 1986, Goodis's 1955 novel The Wounded and the Slain was released as Descente aux enfers. Sam Fuller's last film, Street of No Return, based on Goodis's 1954 novel, was financed in France and filmed in Lisbon in 1989. See also FILM NOIR; HARD-BOILED FILMS.

GRAHAME, GLORIA (1923–1981). A unique presence in many Hollywood film noirs, Gloria Grahame was able to combine sensuality and a childlike innocence in a time of strict censorship. Born Gloria Hallward in Los Angeles, she was renamed by Louis B. Mayer after accepting a contract with MGM in the early 1940s. However, MGM's sanitized filmic world did not suit Grahame, and she made her mark at RKO in Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire (1947) as the "dance hall hostess" Ginny who offers the comforts of her apartment to a troubled soldier. She starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950) as a vulnerable, sensual woman who forms a romantic relationship with an unstable man accused of murdering a young woman. This film noir gave Grahame her best opportunity to play a complex woman who is both attracted to and afraid of the man she loves. This strange story had its parallel in the off-screen background as Grahame's marriage to Ray disintegrated during production, a development matched by the theme of the film concerning a doomed relationship.

After winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Grahame wanted the opportunity to display her classically trained acting ability, although she was regularly typecast as a femme fatale or a victim of violence. In The Big Heat (1953), she is Debby Marsh, a gangster's girl whose face is grossly disfigured when he (Lee Marvin) pours hot coffee over her. This film, directed by Fritz Lang, was followed by another Lang film, Human Desire (1954), an adaptation of a novel by Émile Zola that had first been filmed in 1938 by Jean Renoir. Grahame costarred as Vicki Buckley, an adulterous wife who tries to persuade her lover Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford) to kill her violent husband (Broderick Crawford). Grahame appeared in similar roles in The Good Die Young (1954) and Naked Alibi (1954).

By 1959, her career was on the wane, and in the caper film Odds against Tomorrow she is relegated to the supporting role of a promiscuous neighbor who becomes sexually aroused when a criminal, Robert Ryan, describes what it is like to kill a person. Grahame's other crime films include Song of the Thin Man (1947), A Woman's Secret (1949), Macao (1952), Sudden Fear (1952), The Glass Wall (1953), Chandler (1971), The Todd Killings (1971), The Loners (1972), Tarot (1973), and Mama's Dirty Girls (1974). See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

GRAY, SALLY (1918–2006). Born Constance Vera Steadman in London, this attractive, popular British actress with an appealing voice starred in a number of important crime films. Gray received her training at Fay Compton's School of Dramatic Art. As a teenager, she appeared on stage and in revues, making her film debut in School for Scandal (1930). She returned to the screen in 1935 for a further 18 films, which included two films in the popular RKO Saint detective series: The Saint in London (1939), starring George Sanders as Simon Templar, and The Saint's Vacation (1941), starring Hugh Sinclair as Templar. In the latter, Gray costarred as Mary Langdon, a newspaper reporter.

Gray did not make another film for five years after suffering a nervous breakdown. Her comeback began with the murder-mystery Green for Danger (1946), with Gray as nurse "Freddie" Linley. This superior crime film, based on the 1944 novel by Christianna Brand, was set in a wartime hospital where several murders occur. It revitalized Gray's film career. In 1947, she costarred with Trevor Howard in Alberto Cavalcanti's They Made Me a Fugitive, playing a woman brutalized by a vicious criminal. In 1949, she was the promiscuous Storm Riordan in Obsession, directed by Edward Dmytryk, in which her adulterous behavior provokes her husband, Dr. Clive Riordan (Robert Newton), into plotting the death of her lover, Bill Kronin (Phil Brown). Gray retired in 1952 to marry Lord Oranmore. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

GREENE, GRAHAM (1904–1991). British author Graham Greene, in his 24 novels and short stories, created such a distinct fictional universe that critics labeled his world "Greeneland." Greene's fiction cannot be easily categorized as thrillers or spy stories, although he often employed suspense and mystery. He was less interested in the mechanics of clever plotting than exploring the moral dilemmas facing his characters. His regular themes are predicated on guilt and redemption.

Greene was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England, where his father was headmaster of the local school. He had an unhappy childhood and suffered a nervous breakdown at an early age. After studying at Oxford University, Greene worked as a copy editor at the London Times before establishing himself as a film critic and literary editor at the Spectator. In 1927, prior to his marriage to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a Catholic, he converted to Catholicism, although he was anything but a conventional Catholic. Like the characters in his novels, Greene struggled with doubt and anxiety, and he described his faith as "Catholic agnostic." The Catholic Church condemned Greene's 1940 book The Power and the Glory because of its depiction of the unnamed Mexican priest as an alcoholic who fathered a child; in 1947, John Ford directed a film version, starring Henry Fonda as the priest.

During World War II, Greene served as an intelligence officer for the Foreign Office. After the war, he traveled the world as a correspondent to dangerous areas, such as Cuba just prior to the revolution. His travels informed his fiction, including his 1955 novel The Quiet American, based on U.S. diplomacy in Vietnam. That book was filmed on location in Saigon, with interiors in Rome, in 1958 by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, starring Michael Redgrave as the British journalist who causes the death of an American idealist, played by Audie Murphy. Mankiewicz's film altered the anti-American political perspective of Greene's novel, and the author disowned the film. Australian director Phillip Noyce directed a more faithful version in 2002 starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser.

In an attempt to distinguish between his "serious" fiction and his less serious novels, Greene divided his work into "novels" and "entertainments." Yet this distinction is not very helpful, as one of his most important novels, Brighton Rock, was labeled an entertainment by its American publisher, while Greene considered it one of his novels. It was filmed in 1947, with direction by John Boulting and a screenplay by Greene and Terrence Rattigan. It starred Richard Attenborough as the psychotic young gangster. The U.S. release title was Young Scarface. In 2010, an updated version, titled Brighton Rock, was released.

The first film based on a novel by Greene was the 1934 Hollywood production Orient Express, starring Norman Foster as a young man on the Orient Express who falls in love with a dancer (Heather Angel) involved with a Communist agent. This film was based on Greene's 1932 novel Stamboul Train (published in the United States as Orient Express). An early British film noir, The Green Cockatoo (U.S. title Four Dark Hours, 1937), was based on one of Greene's short stories. His 1936 novel A Gun for Sale formed the basis for the Hollywood production This Gun for Hire (1942), adapted by W. R. Burnett and Albert Maltz; this film elevated Alan Ladd to stardom as the young hit man and was remade as Short Cut to Hell in 1957 with James Cagney directing.

Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear (1944), starring Ray Milland, was based on Greene's 1943 novel of that name. The 1945 film Confidential Agent, starring Charles Boyer as a Spanish Republican agent caught up in political intrigue in London, was based on Greene's 1939 novel. Greene's first novel, The Man Within, published in 1929, was filmed in London in 1947 starring Michael Redgrave; it was released in the United States as The Smugglers. Greene adapted his short story "The Basement Room" for Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (U.S. title The Lost Illusion, 1948), and he again worked with Reed for one of the most successful films of the postwar period, The Third Man (1949). Greene also provided the original story for the Italian/British coproduction La mano dello straniero (The Stranger's Hand, 1954), a thriller concerning a young boy kidnapped by enemy agents; the film starred Richard O'Sullivan as the boy and Trevor Howard as his father. Other suspense films adapted from Greene's writings include Across the Bridge (1957) and Double Take (2001).

GREEN FOR DANGER (1946). This British mystery film, based on the 1945 novel by British writer Christianna Brand (the pseudonym of Mary Christianna Lewis), is set in a country hospital in Kent that is under infrequent attack by German V-2 rockets. The narration by Inspector Cockrill (Alastair Sim), the film's deceptively amiable policeman, opens the film by telling the audience that the village postman, Joseph Higgins (Moore Marriott), will be the first to die. Higgins is taken to the hospital when he is injured by debris from a German rocket. There are five suspects after he dies on the hospital operating table: the surgeon Mr. Eden (Leo Genn), the anaesthetist Dr. Barnes (Trevor Howard), Nurse "Freddie" Linley (Sally Gray), Nurse Esther Sanson (Rosamund John), and Nurse Woods (Megs Jenkins). Although Linley was not in the operating theater, she assisted Higgins when he entered the hospital. The fifth person in the theater, Sister Marion Bates (Judy Campbell), is eliminated as a suspect when she is murdered early in the film.

Green for Danger epitomizes the finest qualities of classical detective films. These include a confined setting (the hospital grounds and buildings); multiple suspects, each with a strong motivation to kill; and an eccentric, intelligent detective. The film, in the best tradition, even brings all of the suspects together at the end so that Cockrill can expose the murderer. The script by director Sidney Gilliat and Claud Gurney cleverly reworks these conventions while retaining the attention of the audience with clever dialogue. At one point, Barnes explains that it is the impurities in the "laughing gas" (nitrous oxide) that cause people to laugh, and Cockrill replies: "Rather like our music halls." Sim is near perfect as the deceivingly complex policeman. There are also moments of genuine suspense, particularly following the hospital dance. Sister Bates, inflamed by jealousy following Eden's rejection of her in favor of Linley, breaks up the festivities to announce that she knows how Higgins was killed. She then runs through the grounds at night to the operating theater only to be confronted by the killer dressed in a white operating gown in the darkened room.

GREENSTREET, SYDNEY (1879–1954). Sydney Greenstreet appeared in films for only eight years, from 1941 to 1949, with 23 films during that period (including a brief cameo in Hollywood Canteen [1944]). However, he made a lasting impression on the film industry, largely due to his performance as the duplicitous Kaspar Gutman in John Huston's version of The Maltese Falcon (1941). Born in Kent, England, Greenstreet made his stage debut in the 1902 production of Sherlock Holmes in Ramsgate and followed with his New York debut three years later. Having established a strong reputation as a stage actor in both America and England, Greenstreet received, and rejected, film offers over the next 40 years until, at age 62, he agreed to The Maltese Falcon. Audiences were fascinated by the on-screen chemistry and physical comparison between Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, and the two actors costarred in a further eight films. The portly, soft-spoken Greenstreet provided an ideal foil to the whining, hysterical Lorre, although both actors often suggested layers of evil and decadence beneath their seemingly benign mannerisms.

In the 1944 film adaptation of Eric Ambler's 1939 novel The Mask of Dimitrios and the 1946 production of Three Strangers, Greenstreet was top billed—a rare occurrence in Hollywood for a character actor. As psychiatrist Dr. Mark Hamilton in Conflict (1945), he cleverly exposes a wife killer (Humphrey Bogart). Although he appeared in the comedy Pillow to Post (1945) and the sentimental romance Christmas in Connecticut (1945), Greenstreet excelled in roles with a sinister edge, such as the evil Count Fusco who plots against Eleanor Parker in The Woman in White (1948) and Sheriff Titus Semple, who makes life difficult for Joan Crawford in Flamingo Road (1949). Age and bad health forced Greenstreet into retirement from the screen, although he starred on radio in 1950 and 1951 as Rex Stout's eccentric detective in The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe. Greenstreet's other suspense and crime films include Background to Danger (1943), The Verdict (1946), Ruthless (1948), and The Velvet Touch (1948).

GREER, JANE (1924–2001). Although Jane Greer's film career was not extensive, her performance as Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past (1947) secured her place in the pantheon of femmes fatales. She was born Bettejane Greer in Washington, D.C., and during her childhood, she suffered from Bell's Palsy, which paralyzed the left side of her face. Although she overcame this affliction, it had the effect of leaving her with a slightly crooked smile. Appearing on the front cover of Life magazine in 1942, she attracted the attention of Howard Hughes. After a short-lived marriage to singer Rudy Vallee, Hughes's RKO cast Greer in a number of supporting roles, including a small role in Two o'Clock Courage (1945), Dick Tracy (1945), and The Falcon's Alibi (1946), followed by a more substantial role as one of Robert Young's mistresses in They Won't Believe Me (1947).

At the age of 22, Greer got her big chance when she was cast as Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past. Director Jacques Tourneur created an ethereal entrance for Greer in the film when Moffat, in a white dress and matching straw hat, walks out of the sunshine into a bar in Acapulco to Robert Mitchum. Despite her memorable performance in this film, and lead roles with Mitchum in Don Siegel's The Big Steal (1949) and Dick Powell in Station West (1948), her career stalled due to problems with the studio owner, Hughes. After these films, there was little of substance, except for the role of journalist Katie Connors, who is forced on the run with Richard Widmark in the South American jungle in Run for the Sun (1956), a loose remake of the 1932 film The Most Dangerous Game. In 1984, Greer emerged from retirement to rejoin Widmark, as the villain, in Against All Odds, an inferior remake of Out of the Past. This time, Greer plays the mother of Rachel Ward, the film's femme fatale. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

GUEST, VAL (1911–2006). Director, screenwriter, and producer Val Guest was born in London and worked as an actor and journalist before he established himself as a screenwriter in the 1930s. He became a writer and director in 1942 and in 1949 wrote and directed Murder at the Windmill, a murder mystery set in the Windmill Theatre, which was famous for its nude showgirls. His prodigious output in the 1950s included such crime films as They Can't Hang Me (1954); The Weapon (1956), starring American actors Lizabeth Scott and Steve Cochran; Hell Is a City (1959), starring Stanley Baker; and Jigsaw (1962), a police procedural film with Jack Warner.

GUILLERMIN, JOHN (1925– ). British director Guillermin, after a brief period making documentaries in France, entered the British film industry in 1948 with his script for Melody in the Dark. His early films as a director were mainly low-budget comedies and crime thrillers such as Torment (1950), Four Days (1951), Double Jeopardy (1955), and Miss Robin Hood (1952), starring Margaret Rutherford. In 1957, Guillermin directed Town on Trial, involving a police investigation of a murder in a small town. Never Let Go in 1959 was a more unusual crime film, with Richard Todd as a salesman determined to track down the thieves who stole his new car. Guillermin followed with The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (1960), a carefully constructed caper film involving the attempt by the Irish Republican Army to rob the Bank of England. After the French-based drama Rapture (1965), Guillermin moved to Hollywood, where he directed George Peppard in two films for Universal: P.J. (1968) and House of Cards (1968). In the former, Peppard plays a private detective embroiled in a devious murder plot, while in the latter he is a writer and former boxer who tries to stop a group of fascists from setting up a fascist empire in Europe.

GUN CRAZY (1950). Gun Crazy is arguably the finest B movie ever produced in Hollywood. The film was initially released in July 1949 by United Artists under the title Deadly Is the Female and was rereleased in August 1950 as Gun Crazy. However, it received little attention from the critics, mainly due to the fact that it was an independent production with little-known stars. The film was produced by the King Brothers, who did not have a good reputation in Hollywood. For the lead roles, the producers could secure only a British actress, Peggy Cummins, who had failed to make her mark on Hollywood in the mid- and late 1940s, and a minor male star, John Dall. Cummins, who was about to leave Hollywood in 1949 after 20th Century-Fox failed to renew her contract, was offered the part of Annie Laurie Starr in Gun Crazy. Her performance was so good that it should have reignited her Hollywood career, but after completing the film, she returned to London and spent the next decade, with a few exceptions such as Hell Drivers (1957), in thankless roles. In Gun Crazy, on the other hand, Cummins gives the performance of a lifetime as the psychotic carnival sharpshooter turned robber who cannot control her fetish for guns and her desire to kill. Dall, who had costarred as a gay thrill killer in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope in 1948, plays Bart Tare, an ex-veteran, and his understated style complements the outgoing femme fatale.

After a period in reform school and the army, Bart returns to his hometown, where one evening he visits a traveling circus and accepts a challenge from sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr to compete on stage in a shooting contest. This sequence, replete with director Joseph H. Lewis's customary skill involving composition, managed to bypass censorship problems with the Production Code Administration. Without any literal reference to sex, Lewis skillfully establishes the raw animal attraction between Annie and Bart. This sequence provides the motivation for the destructive actions that follow.

Bart and Annie leave the circus and marry. However, after their money runs out, she makes it quite clear that if he wants her to remain, he will have to participate in her criminal activities. Despite Bart's superiority with the gun, it is Annie who is dominant in the relationship ("I want action," she tells Bart). Bart, however, is a tormented figure, disgusted by her behavior during a major robbery that results in two deaths: "Two people dead! Just so we can live without working. Why? Why do you have to murder people? Why can't you let them live?" However, he cannot abandon her, even after she is unapologetic about her sadistic tendencies: "I told you I was no good, and I didn't kid you."

When it came to filming the robbery of a small-town bank, Lewis abandoned the script and filmed the entire sequence in one four-minute take, without any cuts, on a street in Montrose, California. He prepared the action by staging it with two extras and recording it with his own 16-mm camera. He then repeated this approach with Dall and Cummins in a renovated stretch limousine. He removed everything behind the front seats so as to make room for the crew. Cinematographer Russell Harlan sat on a jockey's saddle as the crew struggled to allow him to complete a dolly shot by pushing the cinematographer and his camera along a plank inside the car. The dialogue, which was improvised by Dall and Cummins to fit the circumstances, was recorded on tiny microphones under the sunshades while two technicians, strapped to the roof of the car, captured sounds outside the vehicle. In three hours, Lewis shot what had been scheduled for four days in the studio.

Bart and Annie finally run out of luck when they rob the payroll at the Armour meatpacking plant. After Annie shoots the office manager, they are forced to flee from the police and return to Bart's hometown in California. However, after seeking refuge with his family, Annie destroys the possibility of hiding from the police by threatening Bart's sister Ruby and her small child. They are chased into the mountains and, in a scene reminiscent of the climax in High Sierra (1941), the police corner Bart and Annie. Hiding out in a foggy marshland, Annie panics when Bart's childhood friends, Sheriff Clyde Boston and journalist Dave Allister, approach them. She loses control and tells them, "Come any closer and I'll kill you! I'll kill you all!" To stop Annie from killing Boston and Allister, Bart shoots Annie, an ironic moment as the only person Bart kills is the person he loves most. See also FILM NOIR; WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

GYNT, GRETA (1916–2000). Born Margarethe Woxholt in Oslo, Norway, Greta Gynt was notable for her portrayal of sexually and physically assertive women in British films in the late 1930s and 1940s. Gynt, who took her name from the Peer Gynt Suite by Edvard Grieg, arrived in London when she was 19. After appearances in low-budget comedies and crime thrillers such as Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror (1938), Gynt costarred in Thorold Dickinson's murder mystery The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1939) as the sexually permissive model Gwen Lee.

The period immediately after World War II enabled Gynt to consolidate her position in the British film industry with a series of strong roles. In Take My Life (1947), she was Phillipa Shelley, an opera singer forced to investigate the circumstances leading to the death of her husband's former girlfriend. When he is convicted of murder, Shelley's inquiries lead her to a remote public school in Scotland and the real killer. In Dear Murder (1947), Gynt was the femme fatale Vivien Warren, an adulterous woman who betrays and murders her husband, played by Eric Portman. The following year, Gynt was the vivacious school nurse who attracts Marius Goring and David Farrar in Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (1948).

In 1950, Gynt went to Italy for two films, the crime film I'll Get You for This (1951) with George Raft and a period melodrama, La rivale dell'imperatrice (Shadow of the Eagle, 1951), with Richard Greene. She then went to MGM in Hollywood for Soldiers Three (1951) with Stewart Granger and Robert Newton. After returning to Great Britain in 1951, she spent the rest of her career in low-budget films, including Whispering Smith Hits London (1951); The Ringer (1952); Three Steps in the Dark (1953); The Last Moment (1954); Forbidden Cargo (1954); Devil's Point (1954); Morning Call (1957), with Gynt as woman trying to find her husband who has disappeared; Fortune Is a Woman (1957); The Witness (1959); and Bluebeard's Ten Honeymoons (1960).
H

HACKMAN, GENE (1930– ). A talented, versatile actor proficient in a range of genres, Gene Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California. After serving in the Marines, Hackman moved to New York, where he worked in a number of low-paid jobs, before returning to enroll at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. He made his television debut in 1961 and his Broadway debut in 1964, the same year as his film debut in Lilith. His career breakthrough came with Bonnie and Clyde (1967) as Clyde's older brother Buck, for which he received an Academy Award nomination.

His craggy face and disconcerting mannerisms meant that Hackman rarely played conventional or romantic leads. However, he was perfect for the volatile, aggressive cop Popeye Doyle, obsessed with capturing the drug baron Charnier (Fernando Rey), in The French Connection (1971). He returned to this character in the less popular and more disturbing sequel French Connection II (1975), in which Doyle is captured in Marseilles and injected with drugs by Charnier's gang. Here Hackman excels as a cop in a foreign country suffering from a drug addiction. Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation gave Hackman an opportunity to play a totally different character. In this film as Harry Caul, a paranoid electronic surveillance expert who believes he is being constantly monitored, he had to internalize his performance, in stark contrast to the extroverted Doyle. While he won a Best Actor Academy Award for his performance in The French Connection, his performance in The Conversation was equally good.

The mid-1970s was a rich period for Hackman. He starred as private detective Harry Moseby in Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975), a complex detective film with a bitter climax as Harry discovers that he is out of his depth. It shares the same theme as Chinatown (1974), where the detective finally realizes that his investigation only produces more pain and death. He was equally effective playing villains, such as the vicious contemporary cattle rancher Mary Ann who treats women as sex slaves on his ranch in Michael Ritchie's Prime Cut (1972) as well as the duplicitous Defense Secretary David Brice in No Way Out (1987), a remake of the 1948 film noir The Big Clock. Hackman also starred as an assistant district attorney who accompanies a female witness threatened by gangsters on a train trip through the Canadian Rockies in Narrow Margin, a large-budget remake of the 1952 film. Hackman costarred with Paul Newman in the thriller Twilight (1998) and the leader of a gang of thieves and con artists in David Mamet's convoluted caper film Heist (2001). Besides his performance in The French Connection, Hackman won an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for the Clint Eastwood western Unforgiven (1992).

HAMER, ROBERT (1911–1963). Robert Hamer was one of Great Britain's preeminent directors, although his career was relatively brief. He directed his first film in 1945, and by 1954 his career was virtually over. He died in 1963 due to symptoms associated with his alcoholism.

Hamer was the son of British character actor Gerald Hamer. After an education at Cambridge University, he worked for London Films and made his directorial debut with the "Haunted Mirror" sequence in the portmanteau thriller Dead of Night (1945). His first film as sole director was Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), a period crime film that traces the tragic consequences in 1890s Brighton when Pearl Bond (Googie Withers) poisons her husband. Hamer's next film, It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), explores a similar theme involving sexual repression within a working-class family; an escaped convict is sheltered by his former lover (Withers), leading to painful consequences for all members of the family.

In 1949, Hamer directed Kind Hearts and Coronets, a masterful black comedy involving multiple murders. His first film after leaving Ealing Studios, The Spider and the Fly (1949), cleverly details the shifting power between three characters: Insp. Ferdinand Maubert (Eric Portman), the criminal Phillipe de Ledocq (Guy Rolfe), and Madelaine Saincaize (Nadia Gray), the woman they both desire. Hamer's The Long Memory (1952) is a powerful study of alienation and revenge, concerning the attempt by ex-convict Phillip Davidson (John Mills) to obtain justice after learning that a man he supposedly killed is still alive. In 1954, Hamer directed the gentle detective film Father Brown with Alec Guinness as the title character and Peter Finch as the thief, Gustave Flambeau.

HAMMER FILMS. Best known for its gothic horror films of the late 1950s and 1960s—especially The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), and The Mummy (1959)—Hammer was the most profitable film studio in British cinema history. Hammer Films was founded in 1934 by William Hinds, a jeweler and comedian who performed on stage as Will Hammer. Initially, the company was set up as a distributor and producer of low-budget quota movies. The company's first film was a comedy, The Public Life of Henry the Ninth (1935). Other early releases included The Mystery of the Marie Celeste (1935), starring Bela Lugosi, and Song of Freedom (1936), starring Paul Robeson. In 1937, Hinds formed a partnership with Enriques Carreras, who controlled the distribution company Exclusive Films. After World War II, the founders' sons, Anthony Hinds and James Carreras, joined shortly by Carreras's son Michael, resumed production of low-budget films, and the name Hammer Films was incorporated in 1949.

Their first postwar film was Crime Reporter (1947), a topical genre film concerned with London's black market. This was followed by River Patrol (1948), a tale of British nylon smugglers. A poor version of crime novelist Christianna Brand's 1941 debut novel Death in High Heels (1947) preceded the company's first controversial film, There Is No Escape (1947), starring real-life criminal Stanley Thurston. After the latter film was banned, it was rereleased as The Dark Road and Thurston was renamed Charles Stuart.

The company's fortunes were boosted when it obtained the rights to the popular radio serial Dick Barton, and Hammer released three films based on the radio character: Dick Barton—Special Agent (1948), Dick Barton Strikes Back (1949), and Dick Barton at Bay (1950). Don Stannard starred as Barton in the films prior to his death in 1949 in a car accident. While filming exteriors for Dick Barton Strikes Back, which was the last Barton to be filmed, it was decided to lease a 23-room country house, Dial Close, at Cookham Dean in Berkshire. This house became the company's studio. The first production at Dial Close was Dr. Morelle: The Case of the Missing Heiress (1948). This radio-inspired crime film involved a grotesque wheelchair-bound villain and a hypnotist detective, Dr. Morelle (Valentine Dyall). It was followed by a more conventional crime film, The Adventures of P.C. 49 (1949).

The company was forced to leave Dial Close when it failed to acquire a land development license for the property. After a series of temporary accommodations, the company finally settled on a large old manor at Down Place on the banks of the Thames River near the village of Bray. This remained its studio throughout its productive period in the 1950s and 1960s.

During the 1950s, Hammer embarked on a prolific production schedule, releasing many low- and medium-budget crime films between 1950 and 1955. Most of these featured Hollywood actors in the lead roles. Some were prominent supporting actors, such as Dan Duryea, John Ireland, Richard Carlson, Dane Clark, Cesar Romero, Zachary Scott, and Alex Nicol. Others were stars past their prime like George Brent, Paul Henreid, and Paulette Goddard. Still others, such as Lizabeth Scott, Lloyd Bridges, and Barbara Payton, were actors who needed to leave Hollywood for political or personal reasons—in Bridges's case, to get away from the investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, while Scott and Payton were escaping sex scandals.

Most of the films were directed by British filmmakers, including Terence Fisher, Montgomery Tully, and Daniel Birt. Occasionally veteran Hollywood directors familiar with tight shooting schedules, such as Sam Newfield or Reginald Le Borg, were employed. Cloudburst (1951), a downbeat thriller with American actor Robert Preston, was the first film in a new policy of coproduction deals with American producers and distributors, which was profitable as it ensured that Hammer's productions, starring American actors, would receive distribution in the United States at a time when many other British companies, without a coproduction deal, were often unable to release their films there.

The longest running coproduction arrangement between Hammer and an American producer was that with Robert L. Lippert. Hammer and Lippert soon settled on a pattern whereby American actors would star in formulaic crime stories that could be filmed quickly and economically with limited location shooting. Most of the films had different titles for the American release compared with the British release title. The first film, for example, began shooting in 1951 and was released as Whispering Smith Hits London (1952) in Great Britain and Whispering Smith versus Scotland Yard in the United States. It stars Richard Carlson as an American detective on vacation in London who is persuaded by Rona Anderson to investigate the death of her boss's daughter. Smith's investigation leads him to Greta Gynt.

The Last Page (U.S. title Man Bait, 1952) stars two American actors, George Brent and Marguerite Chapman, in a plot involving young British siren Diana Dors, who blackmails Brent following an unwise late-night kiss. This was Terence Fisher's first film for the Lippert-Hammer series, and he would over the next few years become its most prolific director. Fisher directed the next film, Wings of Danger (1952), starring Zachary Scott as a pilot who suffers periodically from blackouts. When a colleague (Robert Beatty) disappears, Scott's investigation leads him to a smuggling ring. Although this was a predictable crime film based on Elleston Trevor's novel Dead on Course, its cast, which included Kay Kendall, Naomi Chance, and Diane Cilento, convinced many British theaters to show the film as a major feature.

Paul Henreid and Lizabeth Scott costarred in the thriller Stolen Face (1952), directed by Fisher and based on the script by Americans Martin Berkeley and Richard Landau. The plot involves the machinations of a plastic surgeon, Dr. Philip Ritter (Henreid), who changes the face of a prisoner to match that of his lover after she refuses to marry him. Scott plays both the prisoner, who reverts to her criminal past after her surgery, and Henreid's lover. Veteran American actor Cesar Romero starred in the Lady in the Fog (1952), a tepid thriller directed by Sam Newfield. The story involves an American newspaperman, Philip O'Dell (Romero), who assists a young woman (Bernadette O'Farrell) in finding the man who killed her brother. The American release title was Scotland Yard Inspector, inspired by the BBC serial of the same name. Newfield returned to Hammer to codirect, with British director Pat Jackson, The Gambler and the Lady (1952). The story concerns an ambitious gambler, played by Dane Clark, who fails to enter British high society and then loses his life to a jealous lover, played by a splendidly vindictive Kathleen Byron.

The high point of Hammer's cycle of crime films occurred in 1953 and 1954, beginning with the 1953 release of The Flanagan Boy (the American title was the more appropriate Bad Blonde), starring the controversial Hollywood actress Barbara Payton who, at this time, was embroiled in her own real-life scandal involving her husband Franchot Tone and lover Tom Neal. Payton signed on with Hammer for two films, the science-fiction film Four Sided Triangle (1953) and The Flanagan Boy. In the latter, she played the unfaithful wife of a boxing promoter (Frederick Valk) who encourages her gullible lover, a young boxer played by Tony Wright, to kill her husband. The film, based on Max Catto's novel, was directed by Reginald Le Borg. A similar film in a different setting was The House across the Lake (U.S. title Heatwave, 1954) directed by Ken Hughes. It was based on Hughes's novel High Wray and starred Alex Nicol as a morally weak writer seduced by a wealthy married woman, played by American Hilary Brooke, into assisting in the murder of her husband (Sidney James) on board their luxury yacht.

Other Lippert-Hammer coproductions included Face the Music (U.S. title The Black Glove, 1954) involving an American jazz trumpeter, played by Nicol, who becomes the prime suspect when a woman is murdered soon after he leaves her apartment late at night. The film was directed by Fisher and included two excellently staged musical performances within a concert hall. Dane Clark starred in Five Days (U.S. title Paid to Kill, 1954) as the businessman who, after a seemingly failed business deal, hires an old acquaintance (Paul Carpenter) to kill him so that his wife will have money after his death. The predictable twist in this neat crime thriller is that Clark's business deal finally comes good, but he is unable to contact the killer. Clark returned to Hammer to star in Fisher's Murder by Proxy (U.S. title Blackout, 1954) as the chief suspect following the murder of a young woman who picks him up in a nightclub. Less predictable was Fisher's mystery The Stranger Came Home (U.S. title The Unholy Four, 1954), which begins with a man (William Sylvester) returning home to Britain suffering from amnesia following an attack on his life by a friend in Portugal four years earlier. The film costars Paulette Goddard in her last screen appearance, as the man's wife.

Dan Duryea was excellent in a rare heroic role in Montgomery Tully's 36 Hours (U.S. title Terror Street, 1954) as an American airman who, on a 36-hour pass, tries to locate his wife only to discover she has been murdered. Lloyd Bridges starred in the poorest film in this series, Third Party Risk (U.S. title The Deadly Game, 1955), directed by Daniel Birt. The film's Spanish setting, in a cramped studio, failed to compensate for the film's rudimentary plot involving murder and industrial intrigue. The final film in the Lippert-Hammer association was the bizarre thriller The Glass Cage (U.S. title The Glass Tomb, 1955), directed by Tully. It stars John Ireland as a circus promoter who devises a scheme to attract customers by sealing performer Sapolio (Eric Pohlmann) in a glass cage without food and water in an attempt to break the record for fasting. When Sapolio is murdered and the promoter's wife, played by Honor Blackman, is threatened, he sets out to find the killer.

While these crime films were mostly formulaic and rarely stretched the boundaries of the genre, they were solid productions that benefited from the expert photography of veteran cinematographer Walter Harvey. Harvey, working on low budgets and short shooting schedules, provided evocative low-key lighting and atmospheric location filming for such thrillers as The House across the Lake. These films were superior to many higher budgeted British films during this period. They were also profitable for Hammer, as the company received substantial subsidies from the Eady Scheme, a government program designed to support British film production during this period. Following the worldwide success of The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957, Hammer took a different direction, and the studio focused on gothic horror films in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s.

HAMMETT, DASHIELL (1894–1961). Dashiell Hammett was not the first hard-boiled-film writer—Carroll John Daly preceded him by a few months—but he was arguably the most important. Although he published only five crime novels in his lifetime, his influence on the detective story and film noir was profound—even if Hollywood shied away from the full impact of Hammett's nihilistic view of the world in the film adaptations of his novels The Maltese Falcon (1930, filmed three times) and The Glass Key (1931, filmed twice).

Born Samuel Dashiell Hammett in Maryland, he qualified for the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute but was forced to leave school as his family was extremely poor. Hammett worked a variety of jobs until, at the age of 20, he joined the Pinkerton National Detective Service. His years with the Pinkertons included trailing suspects, finding husbands, and assisting strikebreakers. While on military service during World War I, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a disease that affected him for the rest of his life. After the war, he returned to the Pinkertons until ill health forced him out of active detective work, and he then began writing for magazines. However, his early noncrime stories for magazines such as Smart Set made little impact. It was not until the publication of "Arson Plus" in the October 1923 issue of Black Mask that Hammett finally found his niche. His early stories were narrated by a short, fat, unnamed operative for the Continental Detective Agency known as the Continental Op.

Hammett reworked "The Cleansing of Poisonville," which was serialized in Black Mask in 1927, for his first novel, Red Harvest, published in 1929. The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key soon followed. Paramount purchased the screen rights to Red Harvest, although its 1930 film version, Roadhouse Nights, owed little to Hammett's novel. Nevertheless, Hammett was hired by Paramount, and his first original screenplay was the 1931 gangster film City Streets, starring Gary Cooper. After MGM purchased the rights to The Thin Man, Hammett was able to live off the royalties for many years, as the studio produced five sequels. He worked on the scripts for the second and third films, After the Thin Man (1936) and Another Thin Man (1939). In the 1940s, he received royalties for a radio adaptation of his detective, Sam Spade. The Glass Key was filmed by Paramount in 1935 with George Raft and again in 1942 with Alan Ladd.

Hammett stopped writing novels after the publication of The Thin Man in 1934. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, his political beliefs resulted in his inclusion on a blacklist, and he was imprisoned for six months in 1951. When he emerged from jail, he discovered that his novels were not being reprinted, his books had been removed from libraries, and the Sam Spade radio program had been canceled. Devoid of income and with tax problems and poor health, he was dependent on Lillian Hellman for the rest of his life. He failed to complete a semiautobiographical novel, titled Tulip, before his death.

HARD-BOILED FILMS. The definition, or at least the best description, of the shift brought about by hard-boiled fiction and films was provided by Raymond Chandler in his essay in the Saturday Review of Literature on 15 April 1950 when he wrote that in this kind of story "it was the smell of fear . . . [where] characters lived in a world gone wrong. . . . The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night." "Hard-boiled" refers to films and fiction that perpetuate a tough, unsentimental view of the world where relationships are flawed and institutional and personal corruption is widespread.

Writers such as Chandler, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, and Dashiell Hammett perfected a tough, terse style of writing, locating their protagonists within an urban nightmare where alienation, lust, greed, and corruption, institutional and personal, prevailed. In the 1940s, stories from these writers replaced the puzzle-centered detective films that featured gentleman detectives like Philo Vance and the Falcon and amateur sleuths such as Stuart Palmer's schoolteacher-turned-detective Hildegarde Withers.

This shift can be discerned by briefly comparing two film adaptations of Chandler's 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely by RKO: The Falcon Takes Over (1942) and Murder, My Sweet (1944). RKO purchased the screen rights to Chandler's novel soon after publication and reworked it for the Falcon series starring George Sanders as Gay Lawrence. Lawrence, a debonair example of the gentleman detective tradition, is affluent and moves with ease in high society. He is attractive to women and is always in command of the situation. When RKO remade The Falcon Takes Over two years later as Murder, My Sweet, it restored Chandler's conception of Philip Marlowe as an alienated detective who operates in the underbelly of society. He is shown to be vulnerable, and the cops are, unlike those in The Falcon Takes Over, shown to be as much a threat as the criminals. Marlowe feels alienated from society, a quality missing from the 1942 film. For example, an early scene in Murder, My Sweet, taken from Chandler's novel, is not included in The Falcon Takes Over. It begins with Marlowe sitting in his dark, shabby office at night watching the traffic below his window. His narration begins: "I'm a homing pigeon. I always come back to the stinking coop no matter how late it is [the camera moves beyond Marlowe to the city lights]. . . . There's something about the dead silence of an office at night. Not quite real. The traffic below was something that didn't have anything to do with me." His sense of alienation is visually reinforced by an intermittent neon light flashing over his body.

The Hollywood film studios in the 1930s, with the exception of the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon and the 1935 version of The Glass Key, basically ignored hard-boiled fiction. This was partly a result of censorship problems imposed by the Production Code Administration (PCA). When MGM purchased the rights to Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1934, the PCA informed the studio that a screen version of that novel would not be sanctioned, so it was not filmed until 1945. Similarly, when Paramount showed an interest in acquiring Cain's Double Indemnity, published in 1936, the film was opposed by the PCA and did not reach the screen until Billy Wilder's 1944 film.

Beginning in 1941–42, however, the studios began adapting hard-boiled fiction on a regular basis. On 4 January 1941, Warner Bros. released High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart, based on W. R. Burnett's 1940 novel. The same studio also released The Maltese Falcon on 3 October 1941, also starring Bogart. Paramount released This Gun for Hire, based on Graham Greene's 1936 novel A Gun for Sale, on 13 May 1942 and followed with its remake of Hammett's The Glass Key, starring Alan Ladd, released on 15 October 1942 and Street of Chance on 18 November 1942.

The early years of World War II delayed more adaptations until the major studios sensed that audiences wanted more than just patriotic war films and musicals. In late 1942 and early 1943, they began planning the production of medium- and large-budget detective films and suspense thrillers. They hired crime writers such as Chandler, Steve Fisher, and Frank Gruber. Paramount began filming Cain's Double Indemnity in September 1943 after Universal had completed preproduction of Phantom Lady, based on Woolrich's 1942 novel. Chandler's third novel, The High Window, was brought to the screen by 20th Century-Fox twice, first for its Michael Shayne series (Time to Kill, 1942) and again as The Brasher Doubloon (1947), starring George Montgomery as Marlowe.

In 1944, Warner Bros. cast Bogart as Marlowe in Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep. With Howard Hawks directing, production began in December 1944, and filming was completed in spring 1945. However, after the success of the teaming of Bogart with Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not and the publicity concerning their off-screen romance, the studio decided to recut The Big Sleep, delete certain scenes, and film additional scenes between Bogart and Bacall. It was finally released in August 1946.

The writer who enjoyed the most film adaptations was Woolrich. His short stories and novels were adapted for such hard-boiled films as Convicted (1938), starring Rita Hayworth; Street of Chance (1942); The Leopard Man (1943); Phantom Lady (1944), starring Ella Raines; The Mark of the Whistler (1944); Deadline at Dawn (1946); Black Angel (1946), starring Dan Duryea; The Chase (1946), with Steve Cochran; Fall Guy (1947); The Guilty (1947); Fear in the Night (1947) and its remake Nightmare (1956), starring Edward G. Robinson; Return of the Whistler (1948); I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (1948); Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), adapted for the screen by Jonathan Latimer and directed by John Farrow; and The Window (1949). No Man of Her Own (1950), starring Barbara Stanwyck, was remade in France in 1982 as J'ai épousé une ombre and reworked again in 1996 in the Hollywood production Mrs. Winterbourne. Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) was also based on a short story by Woolrich. In 1968, François Truffaut directed Jeanne Moreau in La mariée était en noir, and he followed that with La sirène du Mississippi (Mississippi Mermaid, 1969), which was remade as an American-French coproduction in 2001 as Original Sin, starring Angelina Jolie. See also BIG CLOCK, THE; CLASSICAL DETECTIVE FILMS; GOODIS, DAVID; McCOY, HORACE; SPILLANE, MICKEY; THOMPSON, JIM.

HAWKINS, JACK (1910–1973). Jack Hawkins specialized in portraying military leaders, policemen, and gentlemen. He was born in London and made his film debut at the age of 11 in Four Just Men (1921). With the support of Hungarian-born film mogul Alexander Korda after World War II, Hawkins became a star in the British film industry, often playing police officers in such films as Home at Seven (1952), The Long Arm of the Law (1956), and John Ford's Gideon's Day (1958) with Hawkins as Inspector Gideon. He was also the Communist interrogator in The Prisoner (1955). In 1959, Hawkins starred in the caper film The League of Gentlemen as the retired army lieutenant colonel Norman Hyde, who, soured by enforced retirement after 25 years of military service, leads a gang of disgraced army men in robbing a bank.

In 1966, an operation to his larynx due to throat cancer destroyed Hawkins's voice, although he continued to act in films with his voice dubbed in postproduction by other actors, usually Charles Gray or Robert Rietty. In his penultimate film, Theatre of Blood (1973), Hawkins was not required to speak in his brief role as a husband forced into killing his wife by a demented Shakespearian actor.

HAYDEN, STERLING (1916–1986). Born John Hamilton in New Jersey, Hayden left school when he was 16 to work on schooners, and his love of the sea never waned. Hollywood director Edward H. Griffith, impressed by Hayden's six-foot-five physique, assisted him in developing a film career. After military service during World War II, where he assisted Communist partisans in Yugoslavia, Hayden returned to Hollywood and joined the Communist Party. Although he resigned after a few months, this action had significant ramifications on his career. In 1951, he was summoned to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and, to salvage his career and avoid the blacklist, he cooperated with the committee. This action intensified Hayden's loathing of Hollywood, and he had little respect for acting as a profession.

Hayden's hard living, which was reflected in his appearance, encouraged producers to cast him as embittered cops or tough crooks throughout the 1950s. John Huston gave him the starring role as tormented thief Dix Handley in his caper film The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and similar roles soon followed—a surly detective sergeant in Crime Wave (1954), the obsessive police chief Joe Conroy in Naked Alibi (1954), and the gang leader in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956), a character similar to The Asphalt Jungle's Handley. A rare exception to these tough, alienated characters was his role as Det. Bill Doyle in Crime of Passion (1957), a man forced to arrest his wife (Barbara Stanwyck) after she kills his superior officer. Hayden also appeared in the crime films Manhandled (1949), Suddenly (1954), and The Come-On (1956).

In 1959, Hayden defied a court order following a bitter divorce from second wife Betty DeNoon and sailed for Tahiti with his four children. He did not act again until 1964, when he appeared in a succession of supporting roles in prestigious films, including the corrupt police captain Mark McCluskey in The Godfather (1972) and the alcoholic, jaded writer in Robert Altman's screen version of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye (1973).

HAYWORTH, RITA (1918–1987). Born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn, Rita Hayworth was on stage from an early age as part of her father's dancing act. She was offered a film contract by Fox when she was only 16, although the studio cast her only in supporting roles. After more films for small studios such as Republic, Columbia offered her a contract, changed her name from Cansino to Hayworth, and cast her in a series of low-budget, mostly crime, films. In 1937–38, she costarred with Charles Quigley in five films, including Convicted (1938), one of 12 pictures produced by Columbia at the Willows Park Studio at Victoria, British Columbia. Convicted was the first film adaptation of the Cornell Woolrich suspense story "Face Work," first published in the pulp magazine Black Mask in October 1937. Her other low-budget crime films during this period included Who Killed Gail Preston? (1938), Juvenile Court (1938), Homicide Bureau (1939), The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt (1939), and Special Inspector (1939).

Hayworth's breakthrough from low-budget films occurred when Howard Hawks cast her in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), which was followed by the Warner Bros. film The Strawberry Blonde (1941) and Columbia's You'll Never Get Rich (1941), where she costarred and danced with Fred Astaire. Gilda (1946) elevated Hayworth to superstardom as the enigmatic woman trapped in Buenos Aires in a bizarre love triangle between her sadistic husband (George Macready) and disturbed ex-lover (Glenn Ford). Husband Orson Welles cast Hayworth against type as the exotic, duplicitous femme fatale Elsa Bannister in the film noir The Lady from Shanghai (1948).

Thereafter, a series of failed marriages disrupted her career, although Columbia tried to reignite the on-screen chemistry between Hayworth and Ford in Affair in Trinidad (1952), but the film failed to make an impact. The last appearance of Ford and Hayworth together was in the noir film The Money Trap (1966). The last two decades, until her death in 1987, were difficult for Hayworth as she suffered from Alzheimer's disease, although this was not diagnosed until late in her life. See also VAN UPP, VIRGINIA; WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

HEAT (1995). In 1989, Michael Mann scripted and directed the made-for-television film L.A. Takedown. Six years later, he adapted and extended many scenes from L.A. Takedown for Heat and transformed it into a multilayered gangster film. Although the film contains two spectacular robberies, including a prolonged gun battle in the streets of Los Angeles between professional thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and his gang and Lt. Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and his Los Angeles cops, the film is essentially the story of two men. As a consequence, Mann dilutes the conventional moral dichotomy between the cop (Hanna) and the gangster (McCauley)—a fact that nearly prevented actress Amy Brenneman from accepting the role of McCauley's girlfriend Eady, because she objected to the film's moral vacuum.

The film alternates between the points of view of the two men. In the one scene where Hanna and McCauley appear together (in a restaurant), Mann spells out how similar they are: Hanna tells McCauley, "I don't know anything else," and the gangster replies, "Neither do I." Both men reject normal life and find it difficult to sustain long-term relationships. Hanna is on the downward slope of his third marriage, this time with Justine (Diane Venora), and only the attempted suicide of Justine's daughter (Natalie Portman) temporarily reunites them. McCauley, on the other hand, lives by a strict creed that forbids long-term relationships, as he explains to Chris Shields (Val Kilmer): "A guy told me one time: 'Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.' Now, if you're on me and you gotta move, how do you expect to keep a . . . marriage?" When eventually McCauley breaks this rule, his life is placed in jeopardy. This mistake ends a prolonged game of cat-and-mouse between McCauley and Hanna.

HECHT, BEN (1883–1964). American novelist, playwright, short story writer, and screenwriter Ben Hecht was born in New York and later moved to Chicago, where he became a prominent crime reporter and columnist. He was associated with the "Chicago school" of journalism with its punchy, florid style of writing—a style well suited to Hollywood screenwriting. In Chicago, Hecht knew the gangsters he wrote about. He was the author of the original story for Josef von Sternberg's 1928 gangster film Underworld. He also collaborated with Howard Hawks on the 1932 gangster film Scarface, which was loosely modeled on Al Capone. In this script, Hecht developed a parallel between the gangster and the Borgias. His newspaper background was also evident in his award-winning play The Front Page, which he cowrote with Charles MacArthur. They successfully adapted it for the screen in 1931, and it became the basis for the classic 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday.

It is part of Hollywood folklore that Hecht was in New York in 1926 when he received a telegram from friend Herman J. Mankiewicz (screenwriter for Citizen Kane), who had recently arrived in Hollywood. The telegram read: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Hecht went to Hollywood, but he had little respect for the film industry, only for the money they paid him. Aside from his own scripts, he was paid large sums to work, often uncredited, as a "script doctor" to repair scripts from other writers. Occasionally, he was a producer and, on seven occasions, a director, including on the film Crime without Passion (1934). After winning an Academy Award for his first screenplay for Underworld, he used the statue as a doorstop.

Although Hecht worked on few crime films in the 1930s, he wrote (sometimes uncredited) many major crime films in the 1940s, including Gilda, Kiss of Death, Ride the Pink Horse, and Cry of the City. He distrusted the influence of Hollywood on American society, considering its films a "gaudier version of religion" where "parables of right living" were delivered to mass audiences. He especially despised sentimental dramas of good and evil where virtue was triumphant. Hence, many of his scripts focus more on conflict within his characters than on the conflict between characters. Despite this low opinion of Hollywood, his career was long and financially profitable, and he described Hollywood as a "double lure," where he was paid large sums of money for relatively little effort. Most of his scripts were written in two weeks or less, for which he often received between $50,000 and $150,000. See also CENSORSHIP.

HEFLIN, VAN (1910–1971). Van Heflin was a versatile actor who was not normally cast as romantic leading men. He was born Emmett Evan Heflin Jr. in Oklahoma, and after his parents separated he moved to Los Angeles with his mother. He worked as a merchant seaman prior to stage appearances in the 1930s, followed by a Hollywood contract with RKO and then MGM. His film debut was in A Woman Rebels (1936). Thereafter, Heflin alternated between lead roles in low-budget films at MGM, such as Kid Glove Killer (1942) and Grand Central Murder (1942), and supporting roles in major films such as Johnny Eager (1941), for which Heflin received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as the alcoholic friend of gangster Robert Taylor.

Heflin served in World War II as a combat photographer. After the war, he starred in two of his best films, as the morally ambiguous drifter resisting Barbara Stanwyck's advances and machinations in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) and as Joan Crawford's ill-fated lover in Possessed (1947). In Act of Violence (1949), Heflin was the seemingly respectable man with secrets that are exposed by an embittered fellow ex-serviceman (Robert Ryan). He followed this with one of his most challenging roles as the corrupt cop, Webb Garwood, in The Prowler (1951); Garwood shoots the husband of an attractive woman (Evelyn Keyes) and then embarks on a doomed dream to make it rich in Las Vegas. Strong noncrime roles continued in the 1950s, including impoverished ranchers in Shane (1953) and 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and a self-appointed preacher in Count Three and Pray (1955).

HELL DRIVERS (1957). Hell Drivers was an unusually energetic and action-oriented British crime film, due largely to Cy Endfield's robust direction. It stars Stanley Baker as an ex-convict trying to go straight in the trucking industry. It also consolidated Baker's status within the film industry and enabled American-born director Enfield to finally emerge from the blacklist. Endfield received a film credit for Hell Drivers after working under various pseudonyms in British films since immigrating to the country in the early 1950s. He had been forced to leave Hollywood following the investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the late 1940s.

In the film, Tom Yately (Baker), newly released from prison, takes a job with a shady company that hires only men who are prepared to break the speed limit while delivering gravel on narrow rural roads. He alienates his workmates during a fight at the local dance when he refuses to participate in their crooked arrangements. The leader of the men, Red (Patrick McGoohan), tries to remove him from the company. After his friend Gino (Herbert Lom) is killed by Red, Yately exposes the crooked collusion between Red and Cartley (William Hartnell), the manager of the company. Both men are involved in a scam whereby they claim five extra salaries for nonexistent drivers while forcing the remaining drivers to work at breakneck speeds to compensate.

Hell Drivers is characterized by its action and pace, not only on the roads with its series of superbly edited action scenes of drivers racing to meet impossible schedules but also in the local boardinghouse and the café where the men congregate in their off-duty hours. These scenes include the sexual tension between Yately and Lucy (Peggy Cummins), which is exacerbated by Yately's sense of loyalty to Gino, who also loves Lucy. There is a notable lack of sentimentality in these scenes, and the drivers are not romanticized in any way. They are presented as a group of social misfits working only for their bonus money. Hell Drivers offered a supporting role to Sean Connery as Tom, a reckless driver, prior to his major film break as James Bond in Dr. No in 1962. Hell Drivers is one of the best British crime films of the 1950s.

HELLINGER, MARK (1903–1947). Born in New York, Mark Hellinger was expelled from school after organizing a strike. He established a successful career as a tabloid columnist, and by 1937 he was syndicated in 174 newspapers. In the 1930s, he began writing scripts, and his story "The World Moves On" provided the basis for Warner Bros.' gangster film The Roaring Twenties (1939). Hellinger was offered a contract with Warner, and as associate producer he worked with John Huston on High Sierra (1941). This followed earlier crime films such as Manpower (1941) and They Drive by Night (1941). Although he was not a crime journalist, Hellinger associated with criminals such as Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, and Dutch Shultz. His films were characterized by their focus on marginal characters—especially criminals—their strong narrative drive, and an absence of sentimentality.

Hellinger clashed with producer Hal Wallis and Jack Warner and left Warner Bros. After a period at 20th Century-Fox and a brief return to Warner Bros., he established his own production company and arranged to release his films with Universal-International. He cast Burt Lancaster in his first film role as the doomed boxer in Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946). This was followed by the hard-edged prison film Brute Force in 1947, also starring Lancaster. His third and last film for his production company was The Naked City (1948), a police procedural filmed entirely in New York. After screening a reedited print of the film at home on a Saturday night after its preview in December 1947, Hellinger had a heart attack and died the next day, 44 years of age. See also DASSIN, JULES.

HELL IS A CITY (1959). This tough British police film was filmed in Manchester. Based on the novel by former Manchester policeman Maurice Proctor, it was directed and scripted by Val Guest. The film was produced by Hammer Films at a time when the company was moving away from low-budget to medium-budget crime and horror films. The film, like many Hammer films, challenged the censors with its presentation of nudity, sex, and violence. It demonstrated the change in the British crime genre from comforting, sanitized films such as The Blue Lamp (1950) and the P.C. Dixon prototype found at the beginning of the decade to a more disturbing view of the police and society.

Insp. Harry Martineau (Stanley Baker) is in a loveless marriage with Julia (Maxine Audley) and uses his job as a pretext to stay away from home. When he learns that escaped convict Don Starling (John Crawford) is heading for Manchester, Martineau has an additional excuse to stay on the job for long hours. His pursuit of Starling intensifies after a young female courier is killed during a smash-and-grab robbery.

The cinematography of Arthur Grant, along with Stanley Black's score, serves to reinforce the downbeat tone of the film that focuses on the city of Manchester and its inhabitants. A lengthy scene showing men gambling on the moors reinforces the film's attempt to capture the daily life of a working-class city. The film presents a constant parade of sad characters and failed relationships. For instance, Donald Pleasance plays bookie Gus Hawkins, whose unfaithful wife Chloe (Billie Whitelaw) is attracted to Starling, the escaped convict. Similarly, barmaid Lucretia ("Lucky") Luske (Vanda Godsell) desires Martineau, who is unable to commit to anyone.

HIGH SIERRA (1941). High Sierra is an early film noir and a key gangster film. It signaled a profound change in the genre in the 1940s. The gangster films of the late 1920s and early 1930s focused on the rise of the gangster; his demise at the end was usually brief. High Sierra reverses this pattern and shows only his fall. Warner Bros. purchased W. R. Burnett's novel High Sierra in March 1940, two weeks after its publication. John Huston, eager to transform the novel to screen, persuaded Burnett to work on the script with him. Humphrey Bogart desperately wanted the part of Roy Earle after five years of playing second fiddle to James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and George Raft. Initially, producer Hal Wallis wanted Paul Muni for the role, but when the studio refused to produce a film version of Ludwig van Beethoven's life, Muni tore up his contract and left the studio. Wallis then cast Raft as Earle. However, Bogart worked on Raft and convinced him that it was just another run-of-the-mill gangster film and beneath his status as a major star at the studio. Finally Bogart was cast as Earle opposite Ida Lupino as Marie, the tough woman who falls in love with the gangster. Fifteen-year-old Joan Leslie was cast as the disabled Velma, the selfish young girl who attracts, and then refuses, Earle's romantic desire.

The film begins with Earle, after eight years in prison, being paroled, thanks to the intervention of Big Mac—on the condition that Earle take charge of the robbery of Tropico Springs, a California mountain resort. While traveling to a cabin near the resort, Earle encounters a rural family, the Goodhues, and falls in love with their young granddaughter Velma. Later at the cabin, Earle is angered by the fact that Babe and Red, the two gangsters sent by Mac to assist Earle in the robbery, have taken in a dance hall girl, Marie. Velma, after allowing Roy to finance an operation on her deformed leg, rejects him. Earle's pain is compounded by the fact that the robbery goes wrong and Babe and Red are killed. Roy gradually realizes that he loves Marie, and they are forced to flee the police. Trapped on Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada mountains, Roy dies when a sniper shoots him. The film concludes with Marie's realization that death offers the only possible relief for men like Earle. They are anachronisms.

High Sierra begins where most 1930s gangster films end. At the start of the film, Earle is shown to be a man unable to comprehend society after eight years in prison. As he tells Big Mac soon after his release, "You know, Mac, sometimes I feel that I don't know what it's all about anymore." This theme, visually reinforced by the first image of Bogart as pale, graying, and aged, dominates the film. Nightmares and a lonely death on a barren mountain peak follow.

HIGHSMITH, PATRICIA (1921–1995). A highly regarded novelist, especially in Great Britain, France, Germany, and Spain, although her reputation has never been quite as strong in the United States. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, as Mary Patricia Plangman, she took the name of her stepfather, a crime novelist, and lived most of her life in Britain and France. Although Highsmith wrote many crime novels, she was not a conventional crime novelist and certainly was not interested in the puzzle format found in classical detective fiction. She once said that she found the public fascination for justice boring and quite unrealistic. Her fictional world is an arbitrary place where fate is cruel and unforgiving and the divide between moral and immoral behavior and law and justice is difficult to discern. There are no heroes in her fiction, as she refuses to condone or condemn the behavior of her protagonists. Her series character, Tom Ripley, is a killer, a con man, and a sociopath who expresses no remorse, or pleasure, in killing.

Highsmith's first novel, Strangers on a Train, was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The story was reworked in 1969 for Once You Kiss a Stranger in 1969, although the villain was female, not male as in Highsmith's story. Her first Ripley novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, was filmed by French director Réne Clément as Plein soleil in 1960 with Alain Delon as Ripley. A big-budget American version of this novel, starring Matt Damon as Ripley, was directed by Anthony Minghella in 1999 as The Talented Mr. Ripley. Highsmith's Ripley's Game was adapted by Wim Wenders for Der Amerikanische Freund in 1977 with Dennis Hopper as Ripley. Ripley's Game was also filmed as an Italian-British coproduction in 2003 by director Liliana Cavani with John Malkovich as Ripley. Highsmith's 1954 novel The Blunderer was adapted for the French film Le meurtrier in 1966 by director Claude Autant-Lara. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, A (2005). Directed by David Cronenberg, this film is a complex discourse on the simultaneous appeal and repulsion of violence—in the cinema and in society. Working with a larger-than-usual budget of $32 million and stars such as Viggo Mortensen, William Hurt, and Maria Bello, Cronenberg uses a simplistic storyline—a revenge story—to examine aspects of American mythology and the Hollywood crime film. He questions the contradictory response by filmmakers and audiences to the ready deployment of graphic violence by setting up a series of contrived scenarios that seemingly demand a violent response. However, he refuses to provide easy answers or simple solutions and steadfastly refutes the notion that violence is cathartic. The film can be enjoyed on a number of levels—as a conventional crime film involving character regeneration and personal revenge, as well as a treatise on a complex moral issue.

The film's setting is Millbrook, Indiana (although much of the film was shot in the Canadian town of Millbrook, Ontario), a mythic Americana involving a serene countryside, a friendly small town, and the ideal family man, Tom Stall (Mortensen), with his perfect family. Yet this tranquil setting is quickly violated as the film repeatedly exposes the violence residing just beneath the surface of everyday life. This duality permeates the entire film. After a violent incident in Stall's diner, his dark past, in the form of mobster Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), comes back to haunt him, and Stall is forced to revisit his former violent life as a hit man in Philadelphia. The film's ambiguous ending denies Stall redemption, and his integration back into his family is left unresolved. Similarly, it also refuses to condemn him for the appalling violence he has inflicted on those who confront him. See also GANGSTER FILMS.

HITCHCOCK, ALFRED (1899–1980). Of Alfred Hitchcock's 53 films, 28 were British (including four American-financed films). He also directed nine silent films before directing the first completely sound film produced in Great Britain, Blackmail (1929). Hitchcock was born in London into a lower-middle-class Catholic family. He directed sequences for the ill-fated Number 13 (1922), which was shut down when the money ran out. When Islington Studios was taken over by Gainsborough Pictures, Hitchcock worked as a scriptwriter, assistant director, and art director on three films before directing his first film, The Pleasure Garden (1925). He made four more films for Gainsborough, including The Lodger (1926), a suspense story involving an innocent man who is thought to be Jack the Ripper. He also began his practice of making a brief cameo appearance with this film.

After marrying Alma Reville, who worked with him on many films, Hitchcock joined British International Pictures at Elstree Studios. The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934 prefigured a rich period for the director, as The Thirty-nine Steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937), and The Lady Vanishes (1938) followed. By the late 1930s, Hitchcock was closely associated with the suspense thriller. He used the genre to probe themes involving sexual repression and various anxieties and neuroses.

Having completed his contract with Gaumont-British, Hitchcock accepted an offer from David O. Selznick to work in Hollywood. His first American film was the gothic mystery Rebecca (1940), based on the Daphne du Maurier novel. For the rest of the 1940s, he alternated between Selznick productions and loan-outs to other studios. Key films include Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which involves the repercussions on a family when a serial killer visits his sister in a small California town, and Spellbound (1945), a psychological thriller with psychiatrist Ingrid Bergman assisting a psychologically damaged Gregory Peck. His most perverse film during this period was Notorious (1946), ostensibly an espionage film set in Brazil, but in reality a cruel romantic triangle involving Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains. The Paradine Case in 1947, concerning the murder trial of a woman accused of poisoning her husband, was the last film Hitchcock made for Selznick.

Rope (1948), inspired by the real-life Leopold and Loeb murder case, involves two young men who kill an acquaintance for the thrill of it and then invite friends and family to their apartment, where they have hidden the body. This was Hitchcock's first color film, and he shot it in 10-minute takes to simulate the effect of a seamless, nonedited film. Strangers on a Train (1951), his screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel, was based on a familiar Hitchcock motif involving the transference of guilt.

The decade from 1954 to 1964, ending with Marnie in 1964, was a rich period for Hitchcock. Rear Window (1954), based on Cornell Woolrich's short story "It Had to Be Murder," stars James Stewart as a man with a broken leg who spies on his neighbors from his balcony. Grace Kelly costarred, and the next year she appeared opposite Cary Grant as a reformed cat burglar in To Catch a Thief (1955). The Man Who Knew Too Much stars Stewart again in a remake of Hitchcock's 1934 British film, while The Trouble with Harry (1956) involves a group of people and a corpse in a small New England community. The Wrong Man (1956) is a bleak film based on a real-life incident involving a New York musician accused of a robbery he did not commit; the film focuses on the effect this miscarriage of justice has on the man's wife, played by Vera Miles.

Hitchcock ended the 1950s with two thrillers. The first was Vertigo (1958), starring James Stewart as the retired policeman in a perverse relationship with a "dead woman." This is one of Hitchcock's most disturbing films, and the downbeat tone that prevails throughout the film is unrelieved by the tragedy at the end. He followed with one of his best-loved films, the lighthearted suspense thriller North by Northwest (1959), with Cary Grant as a bemused advertising executive pursued across the Midwest by villains (headed by James Mason) and the police. The setting for the famous climax was Mount Rushmore. A seminal, highly influential horror film, Psycho (1960), ended the decade, with Anthony Perkins as the mother-dominated murderer.

Hitchcock returned to Britain for Frenzy (1972), a characteristic Hitchcock film where an innocent man is forced to flee from the police following the actions of a serial killer. He was knighted in 1980, four months before his death.

HIT MAN. The strict censorship requirement imposed by the Production Code Administration insisted that criminal behavior must not be glorified, that it be depicted in a negative manner, and that all criminal actions be punished. This played a significant role in the presentation of criminals, especially professional killers, prior to the 1960s. While the 1930s gangster films often included professional murderers, they were secondary characters who were always killed or captured. One of the first films to feature a professional hit man was This Gun for Hire (1942), starring Alan Ladd as the psychologically disturbed assassin Phillip Raven. After Raven's first killing, the murder of a police informant, there is a gradual shift in the presentation of the killer from a disturbed, cold-blooded figure to a patriot, largely due to the demands of a film produced during World War II. This shift takes place after Raven learns that his employer is working on behalf of pro-Nazi interests. He finally achieves redemption when he sacrifices himself on behalf of his country.

This transformation in the hit man from a cool, alienated, amoral killer to a more sympathetic figure characterized other films in the post-1950 period—for example, Vince Edwards in Murder by Contract (1958), Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le samouraï (1967), Alex Cord in Stiletto (1969), James Coburn in Hard Contract (1969), Dennis Hopper in Catchfire (1989), Chow Yun-Fat in The Killer (1989), and Jean Reno in Léon (1994). One of the best examples of this pattern is found in Martin McDonagh's In Bruges (2008), a tale of two hit men filling in time in a preserved medieval city in Belgium.

Films featuring professional killers intensified following the revelations in the 1940s "Murder Incorporated" trials that exposed a broad network of real-life contract killers—often referred to as "torpedoes"—in the United States. The Enforcer (1951) stars Humphrey Bogart as Brooklyn district attorney Martin Ferguson, who goes after Murder, Inc., a nationwide organization of hired killers. This organization was also featured in Murder, Inc. (1960), starring Peter Falk as Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, followed in 1975 by Lepke, a biography of Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, one of the founders of the group.

The first presentation of the hit man as a professional who kills without any sense of remorse appears in Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946). The opening section of the film shows professional killers William Conrad and Charles McGraw taking over a small diner late at night and brutalizing its employees in their search for Burt Lancaster. After they find him, they fire multiple bullets into his body without any sign of compassion. Director Don Siegel toughened this plot even further in The Killers (1964) by eliminating the insurance agent from the 1946 film and focusing on the hit men, played by Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager. This film was also notable as the last film to feature the future president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, playing a ruthless gang boss. Frank Sinatra starred as a brutal hit man in Suddenly (1954), as did Eli Wallach in The Lineup (1958). More recent examples of the professional hit man can be found in Mike Hodges's Get Carter (1971), starring Michael Caine; F/X (1986); In the Line of Fire (1993); Tom Cruise's seemingly charming, but ultimately deadly, hit man in Michael Mann's Collateral (2004); and Javier Bardem as a psychologically disturbed but very efficient hit man in No Country for Old Men (2007).

The political or paranoid thriller contains many examples of hit men, including the anonymous assassin who kills Warren Beatty in The Parallax View (1974), one of a number of films (such as The Domino Principle, 1977) concerned directly or indirectly with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The high point in this cycle of political thrillers was Fred Zinnemann's British film The Day of the Jackal (1973), featuring Edward Fox as the Jackal, an assassin who attempts the murder of French President Charles de Gaulle. In 1997, an inferior remake, The Jackal, featured Bruce Willis as the killer. Less factual but equally entertaining were the two versions of The Manchurian Candidate (1962 and 2004) and the Jason Bourne trilogy (The Bourne Identity, 2002; The Bourne Supremacy, 2004; and The Bourne Ultimatum, 2007), starring Matt Damon as a former CIA agent suffering from amnesia.

A variation on this formula is the female assassin. The first such protagonist was Anne Parrilaud in La femme Nikita (1990), a film remade as Black Cat (1991) in Hong Kong and in Hollywood as Point of No Return (1993), with Bridget Fonda as the former punk recruited by the U.S. government. More recently, Angelina Jolie starred as a highly efficient member of a secret society of assassins in Wanted (2008).

HODGES, MIKE (1932– ). Born in Bristol, England, director Mike Hodges spent 10 years working in British television before his film debut with one of the best British gangster films: Get Carter (1971), starring Michael Caine as the gangster out to revenge both the murder of his brother and the sexual exploitation of his niece. Thereafter, Hodges's career has been uneven, with Hollywood misfires such as Flash Gordon (1980) and Pulp (1972) interspersed with more acceptable fare such as The Terminal Man (1974) and Black Rainbow (1989).

Hodges returned to his best work with the existential film noir Croupier (1998), based on Paul Mayersberg's nihilistic screenplay. The film stars Clive Owen as an author with writer's block who moonlights as a croupier. While impassively watching the gamblers lose their money, he becomes involved with three women and a failed robbery. Ironically, his detachment from those around him produces material for his next best-seller.

Hodges followed with an equally nihilistic I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2003), again starring Owen as Will Graham, a hard man who pursues the people responsible for the death of his young brother. Their deaths, however, do not bring relief, only a sense of emptiness and futility.

HOLMES, SHERLOCK. The most famous detective in crime fiction was created in 1886 by Arthur Conan Doyle, a doctor who filled in his hours in an unsuccessful medical practice in Southsea, Hampshire, England, by making notes for the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet. In this story, Sherlock Holmes—who in an early draft was called Sherrinford Holmes—meets Dr. John Watson (who was initially known as Ormond Sacker), when both men are seeking a roommate. The story was published in the 1887 edition of Beeton's Christmas Annual. Conan Doyle dedicated his first collection of short stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), to his medical mentor Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell influenced Conan Doyle in developing a "scientific" approach to crime fiction. Conan Doyle even dedicated a chapter in his first story to the "The Science of Deduction," in which he emphasized the scientific and objective basis of Holmes's approach. Crimes are solved, he argued, through the detective's extraordinary powers of detailed observation.

The second Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four, was published in the English and American editions of Lippincott's Magazine in February 1890. This was quickly followed by "A Scandal in Bohemia" in the Strand magazine in July 1891. Quality magazines like the Strand were important in promoting the detective, and Holmes soon became a publishing sensation—even if he was presented as having a drug habit, as in the opening pages of The Sign of the Four, where he is taking injections of cocaine. His eccentricities also included an indifference to romantic attachments, except for his fascination with Irene Adler, the woman who outwits him in "A Scandal in Bohemia."

Conan Doyle eventually became jaded with Holmes and killed off his creation in "The Final Problem," in his second collection of short stories, titled The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. This volume was published in 1893. In "The Final Problem," Holmes seemingly dies during an epic battle with his nemesis, the master criminal Prof. James Moriarty, when both men fall onto the rocks of the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. However, Conan Doyle did not anticipate the reaction from his readers, including the spectacle of fans wearing black armbands outside the publisher's office. In 1902, Conan Doyle, tempted by money, responded with a clever "posthumous" memoir, The Hound of the Baskervilles, the most famous Holmes adventure. In 1903 he resurrected Holmes and the detective reappears, traveling in the East before returning to Watson and his lodgings at 221B Baker Street.

The first actor to play Holmes was John Webb in 1894 in Glasgow in Sherlock Holmes, Private Detective. Webb, however, was soon replaced by William Gillette, the stage actor most commonly associated with Holmes. Gillette began this association in 1899 in Buffalo, New York, in Sherlock Holmes, a stage adaptation from three stories: "A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Final Problem," and A Study in Scarlet.

On screen, Biograph produced a 30-second trick film entitled Sherlock Holmes Baffled in April 1900. More substantial was Maurice Costello as Holmes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1903). A series of films made in Denmark, beginning in 1908, starring Viggo Larsen as Holmes, increased the detective's popularity on the screen. Twelve French-British coproductions with Georges Treville as Holmes, beginning with The Speckled Band, followed in 1912. An even more substantial series of nearly 50 films with Eille Norwood as Holmes was produced between 1921 and 1923 by Stoll Pictures; it included The Hound of the Baskervilles (1921). At the same time, the American production company Goldwyn came to London to film Sherlock Holmes with John Barrymore as Holmes in 1922. The last Holmes film made during the silent era features Carlyle Blackwell as Holmes in the German production Der Hund von Baskervilles (1929).

Clive Brook starred in a 1929 Paramount production, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, in which Holmes and Watson (H. Reeves-Smith) confront Moriaty (Harry T. Morey) on an ocean liner after the evil professor kidnaps the fiancé of Watson's daughter. This inept film, directed by theater director Basil Dean, was superseded by a much better British series starring Arthur Wontner as Holmes and Ian Fleming as Watson, beginning with the 1930 film The Sleeping Cardinal (released as Sherlock Holmes's Fatal Hour in the United States). Both Wontner and Fleming returned in The Missing Rembrandt (1932) and The Sign of the Four (1932). Raymond Massey was Holmes in The Speckled Band (1931), and another British remake of The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1932 stars Robert Rendel as Holmes. Brook returned to the role in Sherlock Holmes (1932) in an updated Hollywood film where Moriarty imports Chicago gangsters to bolster his criminal empire. Reginald Gardiner played the detective in a lackluster Hollywood production of A Study in Scarlet (1933), while Wontner, the best Holmes of the 1930s, returned for The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935), an adaptation of The Valley of Fear, and Silver Blaze (U.S. title Murder at the Baskervilles, 1937), which was based on the 1893 short story of the same name. Lyn Harding was Moriarty in both films, a character he first played on screen in 1931's The Speckled Band.

In 1939, the head of production at 20th Century-Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck, cast Basil Rathbone in a large-budget remake of The Hound of the Baskervilles. This superior film, with Nigel Bruce as Watson, returns Holmes to a Victorian setting. It was followed by an even better film, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), with Rathbone and Bruce reprising their roles from the first film. Here they foil Moriarty's (George Zucco) intricate plot to steal the Crown Jewels.

Unfortunately, Zanuck decided not to continue with more films based on Conan Doyle's detective, and Holmes disappeared from the screen until 1942, when Universal reunited Rathbone and Bruce for a series of 12 moderately budgeted films. This popular series, which established Rathbone as the screen actor most closely associated with Holmes, updated the stories to contemporary settings so that the films, especially the early ones, would function as propaganda vehicles during World War II. In these films, Holmes and Watson battle Nazi spies and saboteurs. The series begins with Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), loosely based on the short story "His Last Bow." In the second film, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942), Holmes investigates Moriarty's kidnapping of a Swiss scientist in this loose adaptation of "The Adventure of the Dancing Men." Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943) was based on an adaptation of "The Musgrave Ritual," and Gale Sondergaard appeared as a femme fatale in Spider Woman (1944). The best film in the series, The Scarlet Claw (1944), however, was based on an original story by Paul Gangelin and Brenda Weisberg, with a screenplay by Edmund L. Hartman and Roy William Neill. Neill, who also directed every film in the series after the first three, developed an atmospheric mystery with Holmes and Watson exposing a murderer in a rural Canadian village. Rathbone, after appearing in Dressed to Kill (1946), refused to play Holmes again, as he was clearly bored with the role and feared that the series would typecast him—which it already had.

It was 13 years before the next Sherlock Holmes film: the 1959 Hammer production of The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Peter Cushing as Holmes, André Morell as Watson, and Christopher Lee as the corrupt aristocrat Sir Henry Baskerville. Both Cushing and Morell were excellent, as the film jettisoned much of the comedy that weakened the Rathbone-Watson series. Nevertheless, Hammer decided not to continue with a series of films, although Lee went to Germany in 1962 to star as Holmes in the low-budget production Sherlock Holmes und das Halsband des Todes (Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace), based on story elements from The Sign of the Four and The Valley of Fear.

Much better was the blending of Holmes with Jack the Ripper in the British film A Study in Terror (1965) with young stage actor John Neville as Holmes. Even more ambitious was Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) with Robert Stephens as a troubled detective and Colin Blakely as Watson. This touching film, which contains a pervasive sense of melancholy, has the detective involved with a midget submarine, the Loch Ness Monster, Trappist monks, and a devious female spy. This attempt to humanize the detective was followed by a number of parodies in the 1970s, including Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-per-Cent Solution (1979) with Nicol Williamson as Holmes. Here the detective is treated by Sigmund Freud because of his delusion that his former mathematics teacher is a criminal genius. Bob Clark's British-Canadian coproduction Murder by Decree (1979), a reworking of A Study in Terror, returns Holmes to the late Victorian period. The detective was played by Christopher Plummer and Watson by James Mason.

After a 30-year absence from the big screen, Holmes returned in Guy Ritchie's idiosyncratic interpretation in Sherlock Holmes (2009). The film contained many of Conan Doyle's characters, including Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.), Watson (Jude Law), Irene Adler (Rachel Adams), Inspector Lestrade (Eddie Marsan), and Mrs. Hudson (Geraldine James) plus Victorian settings and their lodgings in Baker Street. However, Ritchie's film is a comedy adventure where Holmes battles the master villain Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong). It is not a mystery or suspense film. It was followed in 2011 by Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows with Downey, Law, and McAdams reprising their roles and Ritchie directing. Jared Harris costarred as Professor Moriaty and Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes.

Holmes has been a perennial favorite on radio since 1930 and moved into television in the 1950s, where he has continued to thrive. Television versions have included cartoons for children and the juvenile adventure series Young Sherlock Holmes (1985).

A superior made-for-television film was Roy Ward Baker's The Masks of Death (1984), with Peter Cushing as Holmes, based on a story by Anthony Hinds (as John Elder) who coproduced The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959. The Masks of Death was Cushing's third appearance as the detective, having also appeared in the 16-episode television series produced by the BBC in 1968 titled Sherlock Holmes. Elder and screenwriter N. J. Crisp in The Masks of Death remained faithful to the style, atmosphere, and characterizations found in Conan Doyle's stories. The film begins in 1926 with Holmes and Watson (John Mills) in retirement at Baker Street, where Watson tells a young woman how Holmes prevented a great catastrophe just prior to the Great War. This provides the motivation for a flashback to 1914 and the discovery of a mutilated body. Holmes investigates and eventually discovers a German plot to propel poison gas into the homes of London. During the investigation, he visits Purbridge Manor in Buckinghamshire, where he encounters Irene Adler (Anne Baxter), the woman he once loved. Holmes foils the German plot in this elegiac celebration of the great detective. See also CLASSICAL DETECTIVE FILMS.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) directed by Alfred Werker with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson.

HOLT, PATRICK (1912–1993). A stolid leading man in low-budget films and reliable character actor in larger-budget British films, Patrick Holt began his film career just prior to World War II. After military service, he was offered a contract by Rank and appeared with Joan Greenwood as a protective brother who is worried about his sister's relationship with a troubled man (John Mills) in Roy Ward Baker's The October Man (1947). Holt was also the caring parent of an adopted baby in Lawrence Huntington's When the Bough Breaks (1947). Throughout the 1950s, he appeared in many low-budget crime films, among them his role as a married journalist involved in an affair that leads to murder in Suspended Alibi (1957), the weak businessman who inadvertently kills a colleague in Terence Fisher's The Stranger Came Home (U.S. title The Unholy Four, 1954), and the chief villain in The Gelignite Gang (1956). Holt also costarred opposite Tom Conway in the murder mystery set in a hospital in Operation Murder (1956). In the 1960s, these medium-budget supporting features disappeared, and Holt continued his career as a character actor until the mid-1980s, specializing in dignified authority figures.

HONG KONG CRIME FILMS. Hong Kong is the capital of heishehui, otherwise known as "black societies," where Triad gangs have established control over virtually every form of criminal activity since 1945. They also have a close association with the local film industry, which often depicts Triad gangsters in a positive manner. Prior to the mid-1980s, the Hong Kong film industry was better known for its kung fu films. There were, however, some crime films, including Dian zhi bing big (1979), Hang gui (1979), Feng jie (1979), and Sheng gang qi bing (1984).

The crime genre came to life in Hong Kong with Yingxione bense (A Better Tomorrow, 1986). Directed by John Woo and produced by Tsui Hark, the film stars Leslie Cheung, Ti Lung, and Chow Yun-Fat. Woo had to fight hard to cast Chow, as some doubted his ability to transfer his popularity from television to feature films. Woo's intuition was right, though, and the film made Chow a major star. With his long black coat, his Ray-Bans, and a matchstick in his mouth, he steals the film with his cool demeanor during the action scenes, most notably when he enters a nightclub firing his guns until they are empty, only to retrieve more guns hidden in a pot plant. The plot concerns three Triad members: Sung Tse-Ho (Ti), Mark (Chow), and a new boy Shing (Waise Lee). Complications arise because Ho's younger brother Kit (Cheung) is a cop. When Ho is released from prison, he tries to go straight, but his old partner (Chow) lures him back to a world of crime. With its stylish violence, shifting identities, and flexible moral boundaries, Yingxione bense set the pattern for subsequent crime films, and the film was a massive success, breaking box-office records in Hong Kong and throughout Asia. It was loosely based on the Cantonese thriller Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967), which, in turn, was a remake of the French-American crime film Once a Thief starring Alain Delon. Two sequels followed: Ying hung boon sik II (A Better Tomorrow II, 1987), also directed by Woo, and Ying hung boon sik III jik yeung ji (A Better Tomorrow III, 1989), directed by the producer of A Better Tomorrow, Tsui Hark. The former, which is set in New York, contrasts Mafia corruption with the honor of the Triads.

Woo and Tsui reunited for Shuang diang (The Killer, 1989) and then fell out over who should take the credit for the story. This film extends the central motif of A Better Tomorrow involving a cop bonding with a hit man. Chow plays the hit man and Danny Lee the cop. The film shares similarities with Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 film Le samouraï with Delon as a hit man. It includes plot elements familiar in this cycle of films involving Triad killings, betrayal, and corrupt cops. The seemingly endless gun battles culminate in a final battle in a church where the cop and the hit man join forces against superior odds.

Chow also worked with director Ringo Lam in the On Fire series, beginning with Longhu fengyun (City on Fire, 1987). In this film, he is an undercover cop assigned to expose a gang of jewel thieves. The film also employs the familiar motif of a cop (Chow) bonding with a criminal (Danny Lee). Their relationship proves stronger than loyalty to the group. American director Quentin Tarantino reworked portions of the story into his debut film Reservoir Dogs (1991). Four films starring Chow and directed by Lam followed: Gam yuk fung wan (Prison on Fire, 1987), Ban wo chuang tian ya (Wild Search, 1989), Jain yu feng yun II: Tai fan (Prison on Fire II, 1991), and Xia dao gao fei (Full Contact, 1992).

Yingxione bense and Longhu fengyun were key films in the development of a subgenre known as "heroic bloodshed." Its basic characteristics include violent, stylized action sequences built into stories that celebrate loyalty, duty, honor, and redemption. Triad members, especially hit men with multiple weapons (including submachine guns) move from one action set piece to another in a series of carefully choreographed, visually spectacular sequences played out amid a blaze of primary colors. In Xia dao gao fei, for example, the camera follows successive bullets from gun to target, including one that seemingly penetrates a man's head.

Wong Kai Wai's debut film Wangjiao kamen (As Tears Go By, 1988) featurs Andy Lau as a gang member who tries to extricate himself from the life of a criminal only to have the impulsive actions of his younger brother (Jacky Cheung) threaten his decision. Wong's film, however, differs from the stylish violence favored by Woo as he situates his film amid a gritty backstreet milieu in this reworking of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973). He followed with less conventional films such as Chung Hing sam lam (Chungking Express, 1994).

This positive, romanticized depiction of the Triads culminated in a series of films directed by Andrew (Wai-keung) Lau. Beginning with Gu huo zi: Zhi ren zai jiang hu (Young and Dangerous) in 1996, Lau promoted Triad members as pop stars, complete with rock music soundtracks, rapid editing, and flamboyant camera work. The series was based on a popular comic book titled Teddy Bear. Lau directed seven sequels and one prequel in this popular series.

In 2002, Lau joined with codirector Alan Mak for the highly influential crime film Mou gaan dou (Infernal Affairs); the film almost single-handedly lifted the Hong Kong film industry out of its financial recession. Its parallel story of a cop who infiltrates a gang while a gangster is planted within the police force reminded audiences of the close association between Triad and police organizations. It was followed by a prequel and a sequel and was also remade in Hollywood by Scorsese as The Departed (2006).

Mou gaan dou was followed by an equally effective crime film, Sun taam (2007), directed by Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai. The film's main protagonist, Inspector Bun, seemingly possesses the ability to see "hidden ghosts" and "inner personalities." His unorthodox methods, however, lead to his dismissal—until five years later when he emerges from retirement to assist a young inspector investigate a series of unexplained killings.

HOPKINS, ANTHONY (1937– ). Anthony Hopkins was born in Margam, Port Talbot, Wales, and trained at the Welsh College of Music and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1965, he auditioned for the National Theatre before Laurence Olivier, who was to become his mentor. Hopkins was critically acclaimed for his stage work after making his debut in The Quare Fellow in 1960. His first film appearance came six years later in The White Bus. While his stage career in the 1970s and 1980s was prestigious, Hopkins languished in mediocre films during this period, including Michael Cimino's 1990 remake of the 1956 crime film The Desperate Hours. He finally achieved film stardom with his role as serial killer Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (1991). This success changed his status within the industry, enabling Hopkins to accept a wide range of film roles. One of these was in the outdoor thriller The Edge (1997), scripted by David Mamet, which has Hopkins as a man trapped in the Alaskan wilderness with his wife's lover (Alec Baldwin) and a large Kodiak bear. Hopkins reprised his Hannibal Lecter role in Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon, a remake of Michael Mann's 1986 film Manhunter. In 2007, he starred in the clever murder film Fracture as the devious husband who devises a near-foolproof plan to escape punishment after cold-bloodedly killing his unfaithful wife. Hopkins was knighted in 1993 and became a U.S. citizen in 2000.

HOUSE ACROSS THE LAKE, THE (1954). American actors Alex Nicol and Hilary Brooke were imported by Hammer for one of the best British film noirs of the 1950s, The House across the Lake. Based on writer-director Ken Hughes's novel High Wray, the film was released in the United States as Heat Wave. In the film, Hughes cleverly reworks many of the archetypal elements developed by James M. Cain in his 1930s novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity—most notably the sexually charged triangle between a calculating woman, her vulnerable husband, and an outsider unable to resist the wife. There are, however, notable differences between Cain's formula and this film. These are largely cultural, as the British film reduces the melodramatic basis of Cain's stories and presents a more morally complex trio of characters. Hughes also eliminates the sentimental basis of Billy Wilder's 1944 film Double Indemnity, especially at the end, where the British film favors a more low-key ending.

There are, nevertheless, clear similarities, beginning with the film's opening moments when Mark Kendrick (Nicol) begins his confession to Inspector MacLennan (Alan Wheatley). As in Double Indemnity, this confession leads to a prolonged flashback accompanied by Kendrick's voice-over throughout the film. Here he details the events leading up to the murder and how he became involved with a wealthy couple, Beverly (Sid James) and Carol Forest (Brooke). The Forests live in the mansion High Wray on Lake Windemere across from Kendrick's rented bungalow. Carol, who is having an affair with pianist Vincent Gordon (Paul Carpenter), wants her husband dead, and during a boat trip on the lake, she murders him after Kendrick refuses to assist her. However, believing that she loves him, Kendrick becomes complicit in her crime by helping her dispose of the evidence. After Carol double-crosses Kendrick by marrying Gordon, Kendrick contacts Inspector MacLennan, which returns the film to the opening scene and Kendrick's confession.

This low-budget film is visually enhanced by cinematographer Walter Harvey's expert compositions, both indoor and outdoor on nearby locations. The film captures the cold, glacial qualities of Brooke as Carol Forest, the pathos of James as her long-suffering husband, and the torment of failed novelist Kendrick. Hughes also derives a complex performance from Nicol, who is able to convey Kendrick's morally conflicted personality—a trait rarely evident in Nicol's American films, which largely consist of neurotic villains and tough heroes. In The House across the Lake, Kendrick is both tormented and disgusted by his inability to resist the calculating femme fatale, a woman he both desires and despises.

HOUSE BY THE RIVER (1950). After the failure of Secret beyond the Door (1948), director Fritz Lang moved to the low-budget studio Republic for House by the River. The studio gave Lang the freedom he needed to make one of his most personal films. After its initial release in 1950, the film disappeared for more than 50 years; when Lang attended a retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française before his death in 1976, there was no available print to show, although he was able to give the audience a shot-by-shot account of the first 10 minutes.

Based on a novel by A. P. Herbert, the film was scripted by Mel Dinelli, who also provided the screenplay for the suspense thriller The Spiral Staircase (1945). Failed author Stephen Byrne (Louis Hayward) lives in a large Victorian mansion by a river in a southern suburb during the late 19th century. Left at home alone when his wife, Marjorie (Jane Wyatt), visits friends, Stephen makes a clumsy pass at their attractive maid Emily Gaunt (Dorothy Patrick). When she objects, he accidentally strangles the young woman in an attempt to silence her screams. Stephen's brother John (Lee Bowman) arrives soon after the killing and reluctantly agrees to help his brother after Stephen tells him that Marjorie is pregnant. They place Emily's body in a large sack and dump her in the river. This action has a profound effect on both men. John, who is attracted to Marjorie, regrets dumping Emily in the river and becomes depressed. Stephen, on the other hand, relishes the publicity surrounding Emily's disappearance, as it lifts his profile as an author and sales of his book increase. He also relishes the fact that suspicion is directed toward John. Emboldened by his new status, Stephen reworks Emily's killing into a new book. As his cruelty toward Marjorie escalates, she seeks comfort from John, and Stephen decides to kill both of them.

This dark psychological thriller contains many of Lang's recurring themes involving repressed sexuality and guilt, together with the destructive role of fate—as seen, for example, in The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). However, House by the River is Lang's most excessive exposition of these motifs. Stephen's nature, and his lust for Emily, is exposed early in the film, as Lang cuts between Emily using Marjorie's bathroom and Stephen, sitting in the garden, listening to the water from the bath running down a pipe. Guilt and punishment necessarily follow. The setting, a Victorian mansion, is beautifully photographed by Edward Cronjager, and it becomes a repository of moral decay and personal corruption. The mansion is counterbalanced by the ceaseless movement of the flooded river that contains dead animals as well as Emily's body in a sack. One of the best scenes shows Stephen desperately trying to recover the sack as the river teasingly pushes it just out of his reach. These elements of nature, the wind and water, are not benign, but become agents of Stephen's doom.

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES (HUAC). A cycle of liberal and socially progressive films such as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Wild Boys of the Road (1933), Black Legion (1936), and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) were released during the 1930s. A similar cycle appeared after World War II, including Crossfire (1947), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Body and Soul (1947), and Force of Evil (1948). In the 1930s and 1940s, many liberal and left-wing actors, screenwriters, producers, and directors joined like-minded organizations such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the Motion Picture Democratic Committee, and the Motion Picture Artists' Committee. This was a major problem for filmmakers when the political climate changed after World War II. During this period, many of them were treated as subversives and accused of disloyalty, especially those associated with the brief cycle of pro-Russian films produced in 1943, such as Mission to Moscow, Song of Russia, and North Star.

In 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities began its investigation into the purported Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. This investigation resulted in the jailing of the "Hollywood Ten," including director Edward Dmytryk, and the subsequent establishment of a blacklist that forced more than 200 people out of the Hollywood film industry in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Some, including directors Jules Dassin, Joseph Losey, and Cy Endfield, left the United States for Europe and Great Britain. There was also an insidious "graylist" of so-called fellow travelers—filmmakers not formally cited in the blacklist but condemned through gossip and innuendo. These people were expelled from the industry, many of them not knowing why their careers had been terminated.

These events were indicative of a profound change in the political climate, a change that also shaped the crime genre. The production of socially progressive crime films like Brute Force (1946), Thieves' Highway (1949), and Force of Evil quickly disappeared, to be supplanted by police procedural films and other movies that celebrated the investigative process of the FBI and other government, and nongovernment, agencies. Examples include T-Men (1948), Port of New York (1949), Panic in the Streets (1949), He Walked by Night (1949), Post Office Inspector (1949), Southside 1-1000 (1949), Undercover Man (1949), Trapped (1949), Borderline (1950), Customs Agent (1950), Federal Man (1950), Mystery Street (1950), Union Station (1950), The Enforcer (1951), FBI Girl (1951), Insurance Investigator (1951), and The Mob (1951).

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the major Hollywood studios tried to appease HUAC with anticommunist crime films such as I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), the story of Matt Cvetic (Frank Lovejoy), an FBI agent who poses as a Pittsburgh steelworker to infiltrate the Communist Party. This film also inspired a television series starring Richard Carlson. Similar films include the Howard Hughes's production of I Married a Communist (1949), which was retitled The Woman on Pier 13. It starred Robert Ryan as a shipping executive who, in his younger days, was involved with radical politics. As a successful executive, he finds his past coming back to haunt him when Communists Thomas Gomez and William Talman attempt to blackmail him into sabotaging shipping on the San Francisco waterfront.

John Wayne formed his own production company for Big Jim McLain (1952), with Wayne as a HUAC investigator who successfully eradicates Communist infiltration in Honolulu following the murder of a fellow HUAC agent (James Arness). Former MGM production designer William Cameron Menzies left the studio to direct Whip Hand (1951), a bizarre crime melodrama concerning Communist control of a small provincial American community. The Communists establish a prison in the community to test biological weapons on the inmates. Walk East on Beacon! (1952), another anticommunist film, was based on a book by the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Trial, an MGM production in 1955 starring Glenn Ford as a law professor protecting a young Mexican boy on trial, was a more sophisticated entry in this cycle.

Resistance within Hollywood to these right-wing films came from the caper film, beginning in 1950 with John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle. These films, along with westerns such as High Noon (1950), challenged the conservative emphasis on law and order and the simplicity of clear moral dichotomies between good and evil. After Sen. Joe McCarthy was publicly discredited in 1954 by lawyer Joseph Welch, the overtly anticommunist stance adopted by the Hollywood studios began to dissipate. By 1960, with the election of a Democrat (John F. Kennedy) to the presidency, the anticommunist cycle of crime films had stopped. See also DUFF, HOWARD; HAMMETT, DASHIELL; HAYDEN, STERLING; GARFIELD, JOHN.

HOWARD, TREVOR (1916–1988). Trevor Howard spent 10 years on the stage before his film debut in The Way Ahead in 1944. The following year, he achieved stardom as the gentle Dr. Alec Harvey in love with a married woman in Brief Encounter. He starred opposite Deborah Kerr in the thriller I See a Dark Stranger (1946) and as Clem Morgan, a recently discharged Royal Air Force man framed for murder, in They Made Me a Fugitive (1947). Howard was also the no-nonsense Major Calloway who shows the naïve Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) that his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is a ruthless racketeer in Carol Reed's postwar thriller The Third Man (1949). In his next film, The Golden Salamander (1950), Howard starred as an innocent man caught up in a gun-smuggling racket in Tunisia.

In 1952, Howard gave one of his great performances in Reed's Outcast of the Islands as a man who brings death and disgrace to those around him in a colonial outpost due to his love for a native woman. He was the villain who pursues Richard Widmark and Jane Greer through the South American jungle in Run for the Sun (1956). Howard costarred opposite Sean Connery in Sidney Lumet's downbeat police drama The Offence (1972), and he supported Charles Grodin and James Mason in the comedic caper film 11 Harrowhouse (1974). Military figures, judges, and kings occupied the remainder of his film career.

HUGHES, DOROTHY B. (1904–1993). Three novels by Dorothy Hughes—The Fallen Sparrow (published in 1942 and released as a film in 1943), Ride the Pink Horse (published in 1946 and released as a film in 1947), and In a Lonely Place (published in 1947 and released as a film in 1950)—secured the status of this crime writer within the genre. Each novel depicts a protagonist fighting to survive in a difficult world, ideal material for film noir. Ride the Pink Horse, the story of a Chicago gangster seeking revenge on a crooked politician during the fiesta period in a New Mexican town, is an unsettling novel that benefited from the fact that Hughes lived in Sante Fe, New Mexico, for most of her life.

She was born Dorothy Belle Flanagan in Kansas City and attended the University of Missouri, Columbia University, and the University of New Mexico. Hughes wrote reviews of crime literature for many years, and in 1950 the Mystery Writers of America awarded her an Edgar Award for her reviews. She was named a grand master in 1978, the year in which she published Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason, a biography of her friend and fellow mystery writer. See also HARD-BOILED FILMS; WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

HUGHES, KEN (1922–2001). While the latter part of his film career was dominated by big-budget films such as Of Human Bondage (1964) and Cromwell (1970), Ken Hughes scripted and directed a number of better-than-average crime films in the early and mid-1950s. After working on documentaries for the War Office in the 1940s, his first feature film was the "spiv," or con man, crime film Wide Boy (1952). At Merton Park Studio, Hughes wrote and directed many of the Scotland Yard series before embarking on a creative period of low-budget crime films such as Black 13 (1954) and The Brain Machine (1955). In 1954, he wrote and directed his best crime film, The House across the Lake, for Hammer. This film, based on Hughes's novel High Wray, resembled Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) in terms of characterization and plot. The film stars American actor Alex Nicol as Mark Kendrick, who becomes sexually involved with a married woman, Carol Forest (Hilary Brooke), who wants Kendrick to murder her husband.

Hughes gradually acquired larger budgets for films such as Wicked as They Come (1956), starring American actress Arlene Dahl, and the crime film The Long Haul (1957), starring Victor Mature as Harry Miller. An ex-GI who takes on work as a trucker, Miller becomes involved in the smuggling of contraband, and after he forms a relationship with the mistress (Diana Dors) of a major criminal, his life begins to deteriorate. This morally problematic film is one of the better crime films produced in Great Britain in the 1950s. Thereafter, Hughes moved on to more prestigious, if less challenging and inventive, film projects. See also FILM NOIR; JOE MACBETH.

HUNTINGTON, LAWRENCE (1900–1968). Lawrence Huntington was born in London and began his film career in the silent period. While he directed a number of crime films in the 1930s, such as The Bank Messenger Mystery (1936) and Dial 999 (1938), he peaked in the 1940s with a strong body of challenging, often disturbing, British crime films. These films were often characterized by Huntington's interest in psychologically fragile characters, and they were notable for their dramatic black-and-white lighting and carefully composed images. They included the spy thriller Night Boat to Dublin (1946), starring Robert Newton as Capt. David Grant, who infiltrates an espionage ring. Huntington followed with one of the best British crime films of the 1940s: Wanted for Murder (1946), starring Eric Portman as a serial killer haunted by the memories of his father, who was an executioner. Loosely based on the real-life killings by Neville Smith, Portman excels as a sociopath leading a double life. Emeric Pressburger cowrote the suspenseful, and morally complex, script. A similar, if more melancholy, film followed, with James Mason as a surgeon who murders the woman who killed his mistress in The Upturned Glass (1947). Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (1948) was another tale of desperate obsession, this time involving two schoolteachers (David Farrar and Marius Goring) who both desire the school matron, Greta Gynt, with disastrous consequences.

Huntington's career faltered in the 1950s. In 1951, he directed a mystery, The Franchise Affair, based on a story by Josephine Tey, but he was soon working on more formulaic low-budget crime films such as Deadly Record (1959), starring Lee Patterson, and The Fur Collar (1962), with John Bentley. In 1963, Huntington traveled to South Africa for an updated remake of Sanders of the River, retitled Death Drums along the River, starring Richard Todd.

HURT, JOHN (1940– ). After training as a painter, John Hurt made his London stage debut in 1962 and his film debut the same year in The Wild and the Willing. He played the innocent Timothy Evans, a man hanged for crimes committed by John Reginald Christie (Richard Attenborough), in 10 Rillington Place (1971). Hurt costarred in Midnight Express (1978) and was Braddock, the hit man sent to Spain to bring back informer Terence Stamp, in Stephen Frears' gangster film The Hit (1984).

HUSTON, JOHN (1906–1987). Born in Missouri, Huston was the son of actor Walter Huston. His first stint as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1930–31 was largely unremarkable, and it was followed by a brief career on the stage before he returned to Hollywood in the late 1930s to work as a writer on some of Warner Bros.'s more prestigious films. Huston was a larger-than-life figure responsible for initiating key shifts in the crime genre in the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1941, Huston's screenplay for High Sierra (1941), based on W. R. Burnett's novel, altered the tone and direction of the gangster film. His first film as director was the most important version of The Maltese Falcon (1941), a key film in the development of film noir. Huston was pleased when George Raft refused the role of Sam Spade, because that allowed him to cast Humphrey Bogart, and this film was important in elevating Bogart from supporting actor to a major star. Huston's next film, Across the Pacific (1942), was interrupted when he was called up for military service, and Vincent Sherman had to complete the film.

After World War II, Huston worked on the script for Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946), but he left the project after falling out with the film's producer, Mark Hellinger. He moved on to direct The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), a study of human greed and corruption; the film stars Bogart as a greedy prospector who strikes it rich with his two colleagues. It was followed by the gangster film Key Largo (1948) with Bogart and Edward G. Robinson.

In 1949, Huston began work on MGM's biblical epic Quo Vadis? but when filming was delayed, he left the project to adapt Burnett's novel The Asphalt Jungle. He also directed the film, the first fully developed caper film. Following postproduction difficulties with The Red Badge of Courage (1951) and his disenchantment with Hollywood, Huston left the United States to live in Ireland. For the next 36 years, he directed films all over the world, including Beat the Devil (1953), a parody of The Maltese Falcon, with Bogart and Peter Lorre in Italy. As an actor, he also made a significant contribution to the crime genre as Noah Cross, the morally corrupt capitalist and murderer in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974).
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IN BRUGES (2008). Playwright Martin McDonagh's debut film follows the experiences of two Dublin hit men, Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson), in the beautifully preserved medieval city of Bruges, Belgium. While Ken is determined to explore and enjoy the historic and artistic treasures of the city, Ray hates the place—until he encounters a young blonde resident, Chloe (Clémence Poésy), and a dwarf, Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), who is employed by a film company shooting on location in Bruges. Ken and Ray have been dispatched to Bruges by Dublin crime boss Harry Waters (Ralph Fiennes) after a young boy was accidentally killed by Ray during the murder of a priest. The first two-thirds of the film is dominated by the witty exchanges between the two men and showcases McDonagh's skillful use of (profane) dialogue. After Waters orders Ken to kill Ray, the tone of the film darkens. Ken refuses to carry out the hit, so Waters travels to Bruges to kill Ray. Thereafter the film becomes a more conventional thriller, without ever jettisoning its black humor. The ending is both clever and sad with two deaths motivated by a perverse moral code. McDonagh uses the crime genre to explore a moral paradox involving ethical boundaries. What happens when two men, who make their living by killing people, refuse to carry out a hit on someone they know (and like)? They die. He does this without sentimentalizing the two men. In the right circumstances, even a hit man is capable of caring.

INDIAN CRIME FILMS. Melodrama, as an all-encompassing dramatic form, embraces much of the Indian cinema with its mixture of dramatic excess, comedy, and music. Consequently, there are relatively few "pure" Indian gangster or detective films in the western, or Hollywood, tradition. There are also notable cultural differences that lead to a differing presentation of specific criminal activities, such as rape, resulting in a different moral context—as, for example, Chandulal Shah's Miss 1933 (1933), in which a woman is arrested for attempting to kill her attacker. There is also a dearth of psychologically complex criminals, or even heroes, in Indian films, because most crime films focus on the conflict between psychologically "whole" characters, as opposed to the "divided" characters that populate film noir.

Traditionally, the characters in Indian crime films represent different moral or ideological positions, with the drama emanating from the conflict between these positions. Hence, the disruption to social codes involving caste, family lineage, and marital disharmony often provides material for the drama. Ardeshir Irani and Naval Gandhi's crime film Paap no fej (1924), involving a dangerous woman and her cousin who blackmail the woman's aged husband, is an exception to this pattern. Occasionally, real events can provide the motivation; for example, the Champsi-Heridas murder case in Mumbai (Bombay) provided the basis for Sadguni Sushila (1924). Other notable crime films include Samaj ki bhool (1934), Jawani ki hawa (1935), Andaz (1949), and Parasakhiti (1952). Australian-born actor Fearless Nadia also starred in a long series of serials in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s and 1960s, Jaal (1952), CID (1956), and Jewel Thief (1967) starred Dev Anand, an actor closely associated with the crime genre during this period. Satyajit Ray also directed two detective films for children: Sonar Kelli (1974) and Joi Baba Felunath (1978).

In the late 1950s and 1960s, there was a shift in the location of the crime film from the village to the city. For example, Gunga Jumna (1961) reworks a conventional formula involving a man forced into crime when he is ejected from his village. This shift was reinforced in 1975 during the period of emergency rule, especially with the popularity of actor Amitabh Bachchan, who starred in Yash Copra's Deewar (1975). The familiar plot concerns two brothers exiled from their village. One becomes a policeman, the other a criminal. This film consolidated Bachchan's vigilante persona that had emerged in Zanjeer in 1973. Bachchan also had a double role in Don (1978) as both a criminal, the leader of a smuggling ring, and his double. He starred in Agneepath (1990) as a Mafia leader, as well. The recurrence of the Mafia don in the 1980s and 1990s followed the popularity in India of the Hollywood film The Godfather (1971). This influence was also evident in Nayakan (1987), starring Kamalahasan as a Mumbai gangster, and Parinda (1981).

Vaastav (1999), directed by Manesh Manjrekar, stars Sanjay Butt as a man who kills the brother of a criminal and is then forced to seek protection from a rival in a typical Indian film that blends violence and music in ways that often jar Western crime conventions. Similarly, Satya (1998) assimilates brutality and musical interludes. However, the Indian crime film that attracted most Western attention in the 1990s was Shekar Kapur's Bandit Queen (1994), starring Seema Biswar as the dacoit, the rural outlaw Phoolan Devi. This film encountered serious censorship problems in India because of its depiction of rape.

Black Friday (2004) is concerned with the real-life bomb blast that rocked Mumbai in March 1993, and Footpath (2003) shares some narrative aspects of the 1990 Hollywood film State of Grace as it traces the fate of four friends growing up Mumbai, while Billa (2007), an excellent remake of the 1980 film, concerns the pursuit of an international don in Malaysia by a police officer and a woman wanting to avenge the death of her brother.

INFERNAL AFFAIRS (2002). See MOU GAAN DOU (2002).

INFORMERS. The "squealer," "canary," "stoolie," "snitch," "rat," and other derogatory terms indicate the absolute hatred for informants within criminal groups such as the Mafia. This contempt from criminals is usually matched by the police. An exception to this representation is the informant in Edgar Wallace's The Squeaker, filmed in 1930, 1937, and 1965, who is celebrated for assisting the police. At the opposite end of this moral spectrum is Victor McLaglen's self-loathing Irish informer who betrays an Irish Republican Army colleague to the British in John Ford's The Informer (1935), or Captain Munsey's informer who is forced into a huge punch press after betraying his fellow prisoners in Jules Dassin's Brute Force (1947).

Film noir in the 1940s and 1950s often provided more complex presentations of informers. Indecision and guilt replace moral rectitude. For example, Nick Bianco (Victor Mature), a convicted criminal, in Kiss of Death (1947, remade in 1995) gains his parole on the understanding that he will become a police informer against gangster Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark). Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) continues this presentation of the informant seen as more of a victim. Hitchcock depicts the federal agent Devlin (Cary Grant) in a less-than-favorable manner after forcing party girl Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) to marry Nazi Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) so that he can gather information on a Nazi spy ring. The moral twist in this perverse romantic triangle is that Sebastian genuinely loves Alicia, while she loves the morally rigid agent.

Less morally problematic is the gangster's widow who undertakes a perilous train journey under police escort to testify before a federal grand jury in The Narrow Margin (1952, remade in 1990). A similar plot was used in Sleepers West (1942), part of 20th Century-Fox's Michael Shayne series. Warner Bros.' hard-hitting crime film Marked Woman (1937), based on the successful prosecution of real-life gangster Lucky Luciano on charges of "compulsory prostitution" in 1936, celebrates the courage of a group of nightclub women (thinly veiled prostitutes) in bringing a vicious gangster to justice. Testimony from Luciano's trial was used in the film, although the setting was changed from a brothel to a sleazy nightclub, the Club Intime. Mary (Bette Davis) works in a clip joint, and when her young sister is murdered by the club owner, she persuades the other girls to testify against him.

The investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the late 1940s and early 1950s resulted in a number of prominent Hollywood filmmakers informing on their colleagues. One of these was Elia Kazan, who directed On the Waterfront (1954), and although the film's overt subject matter was the link between corrupt unions and organized crime, its thematic basis concerned guilt and betrayal, two emotions that dominated the Hollywood community during this turbulent period. The film sets up a parallel situation to the HUAC investigations when Marlon Brando testifies to the Waterfront Crime Commission, thereby implicating his brother, a lawyer (Rod Steiger), who works for a union controlled by gangster Lee J. Cobb. While this film is concerned with moral questions involving guilt and betrayal, no such issues are evident in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990) when Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) informs on his criminal colleagues to the FBI and then enters the federal Witness Protection Program. Survival, not guilt, dominates Hills's actions.

IRELAND, JOHN (1914–1992). Born in Vancouver, John Ireland's film career started promisingly with his debut film as Windy, the letter-writing soldier in Lewis Milestone's elegiac war film A Walk in the Sun (1945). He followed with supporting roles in big-budget films such as John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and All the King's Men (1949), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. In between these large-budget films, Ireland established his credentials as tough gangsters in low-budget crime films such as Anthony Mann's Railroaded (1947), Raw Deal (1948), and The Gangster (1947). This pattern continued for most of his career. He had supporting roles in major productions, such as Spartacus (1960), interspersed by gangster and fugitive roles in low-budget crime films—including an escapee from an insane asylum in The Scarf (1951), a man on the run who kidnaps a female racing driver (Dorothy Malone) in The Fast and the Furious (1955), and a jaded cop in Farewell, My Lovely (1975), a remake of Murder, My Sweet (1944). Ireland also went to Great Britain for crime films such as The Good Die Young (1954) and The Glass Cage (U.S. title The Glass Tomb, 1955). See also HAMMER.

ITALIAN MAFIA. In Italy, the major crime families are centered in different parts of the country: the Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples, the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, and the Sacra Corona Unità in Apulia. Unlike the yakuza in Japan, the Mafia is rarely mentioned in Italian films. One of the first Italian films to establish an association between the Mafia and corrupt politicians was A ciascuno il suo (1967), directed by Elio Petri. Set in Sicily, the film features Gian Maria Volonte as a professor investigating the assassination of two friends. He uncovers extensive corruption involving both the Church and the government, leading to a downbeat ending. In Colpo in canna (1975), Ursula Andress is an airline hostess who outsmarts two warring Camorra families in Naples. Eventually she is exposed as a gang leader herself in control of the drug trade. Napoli spara (1977) features American actor Henry Silva as a Camorra boss who confronts a cop (Leonard Mann) in a violent, action-based film. More ambitious was La scorta (1993), directed by former actor Ricky Tognazzi. A Sicilian judge replaces his predecessor, who has been assassinated, and tackles government corruption and its relationship with the Mafia. The film was based on the 1992 assassination of Judge Giovanni Falcone. Carlo Cecchi played Judge Michele de Francesco.

Director and producer Franseco Rosi has for more than 25 years addressed the issue of the criminal association between the government and the Mafia. His debut film La sfida (1958) was a major box-office and critical success. Its focus was the Camorra, and it developed from a real-life incident in Naples in 1955 when a woman killed the gang boss responsible for ordering the execution of her husband. Although the script was set in Sicily, the producers, fearing for their lives, changed the location to Naples. The film starred José Suárez as Vita Polara, an ambitious gang leader who challenges the local Camorra boss for control. It won the Special Prize of the jury at the Venice Film Festival.

Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano (1962) won the Silver Bear Award for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival. This quasi-documentary traces the career of legendary outlaw Salvatore Guiliano, although he is rarely seen in the film. Le mani sulla città (1963) details the tragic consequences of land speculation by a corrupt local official, played by Rod Steiger. In Lucky Luciano (1973), Rosi focuses on Luciano after his deportation from the United States in 1936 as an undesirable. Rosi, however, is less interested in presenting a conventional biography and more in documenting government corruption in both countries. Cadaveri eccellenti (1976), a powerful political drama based on Leonardo Sciascia's novel Il contesto, exposes the systematic murder of magistrates assigned to cases involving the Mafia. The film ends with the death of the central character, Insp. Amerigo Rogas (Lino Ventura), who is investigating the killings, and another government cover-up. Matteo Garrone's 2008 film Gomorrah, based on a book by Roberto Saviano, rivals Rosi's films. The film shows a city where crime is endemic and there are no good guys and no hope.
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JOE MACBETH (1955). Although this bizarre gangster film was an attempt to update William Shakespeare's play to contemporary America, it was filmed entirely in England. The innovative script by prolific Hollywood scriptwriter Philip Yordan contains many less-than-subtle alterations to the play with name changes such as Duffy (Nicholas Stuart) for Macduff, Joe MacBeth (Paul Douglas), and Lily MacBeth (Ruth Roman). The film also reworks the play into a classic rise-and-fall gangster story, with Joe MacBeth elevated to the position of right-hand man in a Chicago gang controlled by Duca (Grégoire Aslan). Lily, Joe's wife, reminds him that he is the third number one in the gang and both of his predecessors were eliminated by Duca. Hence, Lily urges, Joe should get him first. Initially, Joe resists his wife by telling her, "We have the house, we've got money, and we're sitting pretty. Isn't that enough?" Lily replies, "No, Joe, it isn't."

Lily forces Joe to invite Duca to their country house, where he is murdered in the lake. When Joe cannot retrieve the knife from Duca's body, his wife completes the task. Joe, having reached the top, now begins to suspect everybody of plotting against him. He kills his closest friend Banky (Sidney James), and then murders Banky's son and Lennie's (Bonar Colleano) wife and daughter. When Joe reacts adversely to the vision of Banky's ghost at a gang banquet, Lennie avenges his family by killing Joe, after Joe has accidentally killed Lily.

Joe MacBeth is a triumph of style over content as director Ken Hughes demonstrates his skill with film noir–based crime films—he wrote and directed The House across the Lake (1954) the year before. Both Joe Macbeth and The House across the Lake were part of the last phase of low-budget crime films distributed as cofeatures (equal billing of both films) in British theaters.
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KARLSON, PHIL (1908–1985). Phil Karlson was a Hollywood director of tough crime films in the 1950s. His films were characterized by their sudden bursts of violence and a recurring thematic concern for individuals victimized by the state or criminal organizations. Karlson was born in Chicago and studied law at Loyola University in Los Angeles. His early films as a director were for small studios such as Monogram and Eagle-Lion. In the early 1950s, he graduated to medium-budget crime films such as Scandal Sheet (1952), based on Sam Fuller's novel The Dark Page. In this film, set in the newspaper industry, a ruthless editor (Broderick Crawford) and an ambitious reporter (John Derek) attempt to boost circulation—which leads to betrayal and murder. Kansas City Confidential (1952) and 99 River Street (1953) both star John Payne as a man pursued by the police for crimes he did not commit.

The Brothers Rico (1957), based on the novel Les frères Rico by Georges Simenon, was a more ambitious crime film in which Karlson utilizes a tragic dramatic structure through his main protagonist, ex-mobster Eddie Rico (Richard Conte). Rico tries to go straight, but he unwittingly causes his younger brother's death when he leads the mob to him. The focus in this film is less on the conventional conflict between the criminals and more on Rico's guilt and pain.

Karlson remained a prolific director throughout the 1960s and early 1970s with crime films such as Key Witness (1960) and Walking Tall (1973). The latter was a simple revenge story involving a southern sheriff, Buford Pusser (Joe Don Baker). It was Karlson's most financially successful film. His last film, Framed (1975), was a similar revenge story, also starring Baker.

Karlson's other crime films include The Shanghai Cobra (1945), Dark Alibi (1946), Behind the Mask (1946), The Missing Lady (1946), Tight Spot (1955), Hell's Island (1955), Five against the House (1955), and The Phenix City Story (1955). See also FILM NOIR; GANGSTER FILMS.

KING BROTHERS (FRANK, 1913–1989; MAURICE, 1914–1977; HERMAN, 1916–1992). The Kozinski brothers were raised in Boyle Heights, a traditional Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles, and made sufficient money renting jukeboxes, slot machines, and pinball machines from their home to begin producing low-budget crime films at Monogram in 1941, as King Brothers Productions. Frank was the undisputed leader of the group and the one with creative control. Maurice looked after the money, and Herman was often relegated to the status of "technical advisor" on their films.

Their first film, the gangster film Paper Bullets (also known as Gangs, Inc., 1941), stars Joan Woodbury as a woman who, after a failed romance, becomes the leader of a group of gangsters. The film also stars veteran crime actor Jack La Rue, with Alan Ladd in a minor role. It was made for $20,000. In 1946, after Ladd achieved major stardom at Paramount, King Brothers rereleased the film and moved Ladd's billing from sixth place to the top.

They continued to churn out low-budget crime films for Monogram, starring either former leading actors (such as Ricardo Cortez) on their way down or supporting players, such as Victor Jory, elevated to lead roles. Sometimes they used young actors just starting out—one of these was Robert Mitchum. Their films included I Killed That Man (1941) and Rubber Racketeer (1942), both starring Cortez, and The Unknown Guest (1943), starring Jory and ex-MGM supporting player Pamela Blake. The Unknown Guest was also screenwriter Philip Yordan's second screenplay and his first for King Brothers. This was the brothers' first film to be screened at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles (albeit on the bottom half of a double bill). Yordan also wrote an excellent early film noir for King Brothers: When Strangers Marry (1944), starring Mitchum as a murderer; it was reissued as Betrayed.

The breakthrough film for both the brothers and Yordan was Dillinger (1945), starring Lawrence Tierney. For this film, the normally tight-fisted brothers raised the budget substantially, to a six-figure sum. The film became a surprise hit by grossing $4 million in its first year. Dillinger was important in resurrecting the genre, as the major studios had largely abandoned the classic gangster film following pressure from the Production Code Administration not to glorify gangsters. Dillinger largely ignored this policy and found a large audience. It was cowritten by Yordan, William Castle, and Robert Tasker, although only Yordan received screen credit and, hence, the Oscar nomination for the screenplay. Yordan also wrote Monogram's first million-dollar film, Suspense (1946), starring Barry Sullivan in a bizarre mixture of murder, infidelity, and ice-skating. This film was the most expensive production by the brothers up to that date. Less successful at the box office was The Gangster (1947), also starring Sullivan as Shubunka, a gangster on the way down after falling for a beautiful woman. The film was scripted by Daniel Fuchs from his own novel.

The best film produced by the King brothers was Joseph H. Lewis's stylish film noir Gun Crazy (1950). The brothers gave Lewis a generous budget and complete freedom. The film was scripted by Dalton Trumbo, who was on the blacklist at the time, forcing him to use the pseudonym Millard Kaufman on the film's credits. King Brothers also produced Trumbo's script (which won an Oscar) for The Brave One (1957)—for which he used another pseudonym, Robert Rich. In between these two films, the brothers produced Southside 1-1000, a semidocumentary crime film directed by Boris Ingster; a boxing melodrama, The Ring (1952), with Gerald Mohr; and Carnival Story (1954), starring Anne Baxter and Steve Cochran, which the King Brothers filmed in Berlin.

KISS OR KILL (1997). This low-budget Australian crime film provides a clever reworking of the conventions associated with the couple-on-the-run thriller. The film begins with Nikki Davies (Frances O'Connor) explaining that she does not trust people, especially men. The reason for this is established during a flashback when, as a child, she witnessed the brutal murder of her mother. This flashback also provides a possible motivation for the killings that take place during the film. Nikki and her accomplice Al Fletcher (Matt Day) operate a scam whereby Davies drugs married men, who are then robbed by her and Fletcher while they are sleeping. However, on one occasion, the drug kills a man, and Al and Nikki flee with his wallet and business case. They discover that the case contains an incriminating videotape showing an ex-football hero, Zipper Doyle (Barry Langrishe), in bed with a young boy. Nikki responds by leaving an angry message on Zipper's phone.

The couple decide to drive from Adelaide across Australia's isolated Nullarbor Plain to Perth. Killings accompany them along the way, as a drunken motel owner, Stan (Max Cullen), and a married couple who live on an abandoned nuclear test site, Adler (Barry Otto) and Bel (Jennifer Cluff) Jones, are murdered in the same manner—their throats slashed while both Nikki and Al are nearby. Nikki begins to suspect Al, and he becomes worried after finding her sleepwalking during the night of the first murder. Meanwhile, they are also pursued across the Nullarbor by Zipper, who wants the incriminating tape back, as well as two police officers, detectives Hummer (Chris Haywood) and Crean (Andrew S. Gilbert).

Director Bill Bennett, who also wrote the story outline, revitalized the familiar storyline in a number of ways. The actors were required to improvise, as Bennett did not provide a shot list, script, or storyboard. Instead, he gave them a short outline of less than 20 pages. Also, there is no music in the film, and Bennett uses small jump cuts, with a few seconds frequently disappearing, to keep the viewer intrigued. Bennett was also able to intensify the suspense and keep the audience guessing as to the identity of the killer because the murders take place off-screen. This also allowed the director to explore his central premise: the question of how well you really know people close to you. While the film provides a neat explanation for the killings, Bennett extends the hint of distrust between Al and Nikki to the final scene in the film.

Kiss or Kill won the Best Film, Best Director (Bennett), Best Supporting Actor (Gilbert), Best Editing, and Best Sound trophies at the 1997 Australian Film Institute Awards, as well as nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Original Screenplay (Bennett), Best Actor (Day), Best Actress (O'Connor), and Best Supporting Actor (Haywood).

KITANO, TAKESHI (1947– ). With the exception of his work as a director, Takeshi Kitano is known by the name Beat Takeshi. Born in Umejima, Tokyo, he dropped out of Meiji University, eventually becoming a comedian. His first major screen role was in Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), playing a tough POW camp sergeant during World War II.

In 1989, he was cast as a violent cop in Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki. He took directorial control when the original director, Kinji Fukasuka, left the film due to illness. In the next 20 years, Kitano redefined the yakuza film almost single-handedly and transformed it from a predictable, formulaic genre into the realm of the art cinema. Kitano, who had been brought up among the gangsters of South Tokyo, achieved success with this film, which was released overseas as Violent Cop, by ramping up the violence. It marked the birth of a major new director who, increasingly, transformed the genre into a playful, stylized, minimalist, and very violent genre. The film was initially designed as a comedy, and Kitano rewrote it after he saw the potential for a violent police film. Like Kinji Fukasaku in the 1970s, Kitano was not interested in reviving the romanticism of the 1950s and 1960s yakuza films. In Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki, he has the lead role as a cop out to wreak violence on everyone around him. He is angered by a colleague involved with drug dealers and the rape of his sister by yakuza gangsters.

Kitano followed with 3–4 x jˆugatsu (1990), his first official credit as a screenwriter. This was the story of a baseball fanatic (Ono Masahito) who assaults a local yakuza member after his baseball coach is threatened. When he travels to Okinawa to purchase a gun for revenge, he befriends a psychotic gangster (played by Kitano) plotting his own revenge against the gangsters. This film, like Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki, is violent and bleak, punctuated by black humor.

Kitano's Sonatine (1993) attracted attention overseas from festivals and critics. He plays the lead character Murakawa, a yakuza sent to Okinawa to assist in the elimination of a rival gang. When he discovers that the assignment is a ruse, he takes his men to the seaside and organizes games among the gang. These games, including Russian roulette, become increasingly dangerous. The film ends with Murakawa killing the yakuza before committing suicide on the beach.

After a serious motorcycle accident in 1994, Kitano made Kids Return (1996) and Hana-bi (1997). The first is a part-boxing and part-yakuza film. Hana-bi is a more substantial film and shows the quiet despair of Nishi (Kitano), a police officer who resigns after his partner suffers an accident. In his retirement, Nishi cares for his terminally ill wife. After borrowing money from the yakuza to pay his wife's medical expenses, he encounters difficulties in paying the money back. This leads to tragedy. This was Kitano's most assured film, as he is able to assimilate his characteristic use of violence into a serious study of alienation in modern society.

After Battle Royale (2000), a large budget film set in a dystopian future where teenagers are selected to kill each other on a deserted island, Kitano went to Los Angeles to film the gangster film Brothers (2000). The plot concerns a gangster, Yamamoto (Kitano), following a gang war in Japan moving to Los Angeles where he meets up with his half-brother Ken (Claude Maki), a criminal involved in the drug business with Denny (Omar Epps). While Yamamoto's ruthless approach brings him success in America, it leads to a confrontation with the local Mafia, ending in violence and death. The film was not a financial or critical success.

Kitano restored his status at the box office with Zatôichi in 2003, based on a character from a long-running television series. After a number of noncrime films, such as the farce Akiresu to kame (2008), he returned to the genre in 2010 with Autoreiji, released overseas as Outrage. In this film, Kitano retains the highly formal style of his earlier films, where violence is sudden and brutal. The plot concerns a struggle for control among Tokyo's yakuza clans. Sekiuchi (Kitamura Sôichirô), the criminal boss of a large syndicate, incites an incident between two subordinate families under his control, the Murase (headed by Renji Ishibashi), whose chief (Jun Kunimura) delegates the job to Ôtomo (Kitano, credited as Beat Takeshi). Ôtomo carries out the job with violent precision with a dental drill, guns, and an X-acto knife. In this film, Kitano treats yakuza codes with disdain, as there is no honor among thieves and the crime syndicate is just another manifestation of corporate culture. Betrayal is the film's dominant motif.
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L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997). Scriptwriters Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson, with Hanson directing, successfully adapted James Ellroy's long, convoluted novel that forms part of his "L.A. Quartet" of novels (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A Confidential, and White Jazz). In this quartet, Ellroy dramatizes, via sordid crime stories set in the 1940s and 1950s, his personal demons, which included the gruesome murder of his mother when he was 10 years old. Helgeland and Hanson jettison many of Ellroy's characters and eliminate some of his plot strands to produce a coherent film. For example, the film concludes with a sequence that is not found in Ellroy's novel—a conventional Hollywood shoot-out in a derelict motel followed by a lengthy epilogue where the scriptwriters struggle to bring together the various plot elements.

The film concentrates on two violent crimes from the novel—the massacre of patrons, including police officers, at the Nite Owl Diner, and the kidnapping and rape of a Latino girl. This brings together three policemen: the quick-tempered Bud White (Russell Crowe), the ambitious, calculating, and rigidly moral Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), and the smooth, cynical Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), who moonlights as an advisor to a police television drama. They are commanded in the Los Angeles Police Department by Capt. Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), a corrupt officer who attempts to gain control of the distribution of drugs throughout the city. However, this plotline often serves as a pretext to explore the dark underbelly of the city and the sad, sometimes dangerous, characters who exist in this moral twilight zone. Hence, both novel and film present a dual reality, an element captured in the humorous and darkly cynical narration by Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito). Hudgens is a muckraking tabloid journalist who works in league with corrupt cops such as Vincennes, and they exploit and expose the human frailties of the rich and famous. This dual reality is immediately established at the beginning of the film, where Hudgens's commentary is combined with a montage of newsreel and documentary images of postwar Los Angeles to establish not only the time and setting of the film but also its dominant motif involving a desire to penetrate the city's superficial glamour to expose an ugly reality.

LADD, ALAN (1913–1964). A diminutive (he stood five feet, five inches) leading man in the 1940s and 1950s, Alan Ladd's acting style was underplayed, even minimalist. This style was well suited to film noir, as he was able to convey a sense of inner torment when required. Born in Arkansas, Ladd made his first film appearance in 1932 and went unnoticed throughout the 1930s in uncredited or minor film roles, including a cadet pilot in the serial The Green Hornet (1940) and an undercover cop in Paper Bullets (1941). His major breakthrough role was the hired killer Phillip Raven in This Gun for Hire, Paramount's 1942 screen version of Graham Greene's novel A Gun for Sale, costarring Veronica Lake. The success of this film prompted Paramount to cast Ladd and Lake in the second screen version of Dashiell Hammett's novel The Glass Key (1942), with Ladd as the amoral Ed Beaumont. Ladd's third pairing with Lake occurred in 1946 in The Blue Dahlia, which was scripted by Raymond Chandler. One of Ladd's last films for Paramount was as the mysterious young millionaire in the second screen version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1949).

Ladd worked steadily throughout the 1950s, but except for Shane (1953), he failed to match his peak years in the 1940s. Ladd's other crime films include Gangs of Chicago (1940), Lucky Jordan (1942), Chicago Deadline (1949), Hell on Frisco Bay (1955), and The Man in the Net (1959). His last starring role was in the tough crime film 13 West Street (1962). Ladd starred as a decent man who is beaten and then harassed by a group of teenage thugs, until he becomes obsessed by his need for revenge. This excellent film was based on Leigh Brackett's 1957 novel The Tiger among Us, and it would have been a fitting end to his career. However, he followed with his final film, the large-budget exploitation melodrama The Carpetbaggers (1964), based on the best-selling novel by Harold Robbins. Ladd appeared in a supporting role. This had not happened to him since he gained stardom in 1942. He attempted suicide in 1962 and died of a combination of sedatives and alcohol in 1964.

LAKE, VERONICA (1919–1973). Born Constance Frances Marie Ockleman in Brooklyn, Veronica Lake, with her distinctive hairstyle that brought her long locks over her left eye, was a major star for a period in the 1940s, although her career waned just as quickly. Lake was billed as Constance Keane for her first few films following her debut in 1939. Paramount changed her name to Veronica Lake in 1941 for the melodrama I Wanted Wings. She quickly achieved fame opposite Alan Ladd in three crime films: This Gun for Hire (1942), The Glass Key (1942), and The Blue Dahlia (1946). In each of these, Lake was the cool blonde, assured, tough, and resolute, who exchanges quips and hard-boiled dialogue with Ladd.

In This Gun for Hire, Lake is the fiancée of a detective who encounters hit man Ladd on a train and assists him in exposing an American industrialist working for the Nazis. In The Glass Key, she tries to bring down a political fixer (Brian Donlevy), whom she believes killed her brother. In her final film with Ladd, The Blue Dahlia, Lake is the wife of a man involved with Ladd's adulterous wife; Lake and Ladd work together to expose the person responsible for killing Ladd's wife.

Lake also starred in the noir western Ramrod (1947) for Enterprise Studio as an ambitious, duplicitous ranch owner who brings death to a small community. Joel McCrea costarred with Lake in this unusual western. Earlier in 1941, both actors achieved great success in the Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan's Travels. She also costarred in the wartime melodrama So Proudly We Hail (1943). Her career declined rapidly after Slattery's Hurricane (1949), opposite Richard Widmark, and, except for a few television appearances, she disappeared from the screen. See also FILM NOIR; WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

LANCASTER, BURT (1913–1994). Burt Lancaster's film career went through various phases, from archetypal examples of violated masculinity in many 1940s film noirs, through his romantic, dashing, leading-man status of the 1950s, to prestigious, critically celebrated American and European films in the post-1960 period. His crime films belong mainly to the first phase, beginning with his first screen role as the doomed boxer Ole "the Swede" Anderson in Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946). He followed with Jules Dassin's prison film Brute Force (1947) as a convict brutalized by Hume Cronyn, a captain in the prison. In Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), Lancaster was the morally weak husband who hires a hit man to kill his wife (Barbara Stanwyck). In Kiss the Blood off My Hands (1948), he was an embittered war veteran, Bill Saunders, who kills a man in a British pub and is subsequently forced to hide from the police. Siodmak's Criss Cross (1949) continued this pattern, with Lancaster as Steve Thompson, an armored car guard unable to extricate himself from the sexual attraction of his ex-wife Anna (Yvonne de Carlo); as a result, both are killed by Dan Duryea. Rope of Sand in 1949 represented a transitional role, giving Lancaster the opportunity to portray a more resilient character. Three decades later, in Louis Malle's Atlantic City (1980), Lancaster returned to his cycle of damaged characters as a sad, aging gangster devoid of power. His other crime films include Desert Fury (1947), I Walk Alone (1948), The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), The Midnight Man (1974), and Tough Guys (1986).

LANG, FRITZ (1890–1976). Born in Vienna, Fritz Lang enjoyed a privileged upbringing and studied architecture and painting. His first major production was Die Spinnen (1919). His first sound film, M (1931), provoked controversy because of its subject matter—a child murderer—with Peter Lorre as the disturbed yet vulnerable killer. Lang's status in the German film industry was so influential in the early 1930s that he was invited to take charge of the production of Nazi films. Instead, Lang, who was half Jewish, fled—first to France and then, in 1934, to the United States, where he was offered a contract by MGM.

Fury in 1936 stars Spencer Tracy as the victim of mob violence. It was followed in 1937 with an early example of the doomed-couple-on-the-run crime film, You Only Live Once, with Henry Fonda as the man who tries to go straight but ends up committing a murder, forcing him to take to the road with his girl (Sylvia Sidney).

Lang brought this fatalistic universe to Hollywood where entrapment, debasement, murder, and the cruel operation of fate recurred throughout his films—especially his two mid-1940s crime films costarring Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea: The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). In 1949, Lang directed one of his most personal films, House by the River (1950), a florid crime melodrama involving repressed sexual desire, guilt, murder, and madness in a Victorian mansion by a flooded river in the late 19th century. In the 1950s, Glenn Ford starred in Lang's revenge film The Big Heat (1953) as a cop determined to avenge his wife's death. Lang's final Hollywood films were While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), both starring Dana Andrews.

Lang returned to Germany in 1958, where he directed his final film Die Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse (1960), a low-budget expressionist thriller. His other crime films include Secret beyond the Door (1948), Clash by Night (1952), The Blue Gardenia (1953), and Human Desire (1954). See also FILM NOIR; GERMAN CRIME FILMS.

LA RAGAZZA DEL LAGO (2007). This critically celebrated Italian police procedural film won 10 awards at the 2008 David di Donatello Awards, including Best Film, Best Actor for Toni Servillo as Commissario Sanzio, Best New Director for Andrea Molaioli, Best Cinematography for Ramiro Civita, and Best Screenplay for Sandro Petraglia and Molaioli. Based on the novel Don't Look Back by Norwegian crime writer Karin Fossum—part of her Insp. Conrad Sejer's series—La ragazza del lago transfers the setting from Norway to a small township in the Italian Alps near Udine in Fruili.

The film begins with a six-year-old girl, Marta (Nicole Perrone), who has spent the night with her aunt, walking home through her small township. After she fails to arrive, her family alerts a local policeman, who contacts Insp. Giovanni Sanzio in the nearby provincial capital. This sinister opening, with its suggestion of child molestation, proves—like many other twists in the film—to be misleading, as Marta eventually turns up quite safe. However, the police investigation into her disappearance leads them to a nearby lake, where they discover the body of Anna Nadal (Alessio Piovan). Even here, Anna's death, despite her naked condition, is not what it seems: The young woman did not struggle against her attacker, who arranged her body to suggest a peaceful demise. Also, despite her nudity, no sexual activity took place, and Anna died a virgin. Sanzio's subsequent investigation uncovers a wide range of suspects, including the mentally retarded Mario (Franco Ravera), who invited Marta into his car; Anna's boyfriend, Roberto (Denis Fasolo); Anna's father, Davide Nadal (Marco Baliani), who displays an unhealthy interest in his daughter through his video recordings; and a married couple, Coronado Canali (Fabrizio Gifuni) and wife, Chiara (Valeria Golino), who separated after the accidental death of their three-year-old autistic son—Anna was their babysitter.

While the basic plot may appear to be merely an updated Italian version of the crime formula as developed by writers such as Agatha Christie, director Molaioli and screenwriter Petraglia use the conventions of this formula to present a troubled community. To visually convey the subterranean anxieties of the small township, Argentinean Civita's cinematography exploits the cold light of this seemingly tranquil alpine setting.

While Sanzio's investigation exposes many personal problems within the local community, the film reveals that the inspector himself is not immune from grief and personal tragedy. Sanzio's wife (Anna Bonaiuto) is suffering from advanced Alzheimer's disease in a mountain institution and no longer recognizes Sanzio or their troubled daughter Francesca (Giuli Michelini). The low-key revelation of the killer's identity only reinforces the film's overriding, and pervasive, sense of melancholy and despair.

LA SCONOSCIUTA (2006). Written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso, 1991), La Sconosciuta won Best Film, Best Actress (Ksenia Rappoport), Best Director, Best Cinematography (Fabio Zamarion), and Best Music (Ennio Morricone) at Italy's Donatello Awards in 2006. It was released overseas as The Unknown Woman. The film epitomizes the best qualities of the suspense thriller, the genre that Alfred Hitchcock made famous. Like Hitchcock, Tornatore uses the motifs and techniques of melodrama to draw viewers into a bizarre, somewhat unreal world by convincing them that it is real. He also works hard to establish empathy for a woman, Irena, who commits a series of immoral and illegal acts. He does this by providing a context—sexual slavery—that explains, if not condones, her actions.

Irena (Rappoport), a Ukrainian prostitute, arrives in Trieste determined to find work with the Adacher family. They are wealthy jewelers who live in an elegant apartment within a large building. Money does not seem to be the issue for Irena—only her obsession in gaining employment with this family. As her desperation intensifies, so does her behavior become more extreme. To move from general cleaning duties within the apartment complex to the position of nanny, Irena needs to remove the existing nanny, Gina (Piera Degli Esposti). She does this in a brutal manner by tripping Gina on the high steps inside the apartment building, rendering her permanently crippled. Once Irena is employed by the Adachers, she fixates on their young daughter Tea (Clara Dossena). She does not care about anyone or anything else—including herself. As her obsession unfolds, the film frequently refers back to the opening sequence when Irena is hired, and works, as a prostitute for a brutal pimp, Mold (Michele Placido). Gradually we learn that Mold has not only raped Irena but also forced her to give birth to nine children—which he sells for adoption. The father of Irena's last child, however, is her lover (Nicola Di Pinto), who is murdered by Mold. Convinced that Tea is her daughter, Irena appears happy—until Mold appears. He wants the money she stole from him and applies pressure by having her savagely beaten. Finally, he murders Tea's mother. The last act in this tense film involves Mold, the police, and Tea in an expertly orchestrated climax.

This award-winning film was not universally praised by the critics, as some resented Tornatore's excessive style. This is a matter of taste, however, as the film maintains the tension throughout via the expert direction, effective settings (representing a kind of delirious gothic atmosphere), lush cinematography from Zamarion, and Morricone's ominous music, which comes close to matching Bernard Herrmann's best work for Hitchcock (Vertigo, 1958; Psycho, 1960). These elements make La Sconosciuta a superior example of this form of crime film.

LATIMER, JONATHAN (1906–1983). As a writer of hard-boiled fiction, Jonathan Latimer is best known for five novels in the 1930s based on the exploits of hard-drinking detective Bill Crane. Born in Chicago, Latimer went to school in Arizona and graduated from Knox College in Illinois. He worked as a crime reporter for the Chicago Herald-Examiner and the Chicago Tribune in the 1930s. This brought him into contact with criminals such as Al Capone. His first novel, Murder in the Madhouse, was published in 1935 and mixed comedy and murder.

Three of his Bill Crane stories were adapted to the screen by Universal and star Preston Foster as Crane: in 1937, The Westland Case was based on Latimer's Headed for a Hearse; in 1938, The Lady in the Morgue was released; and in 1939, the final film was The Last Warning, based on Latimer's The Dead Don't Care.

In 1941, Latimer's most controversial crime novel, Solomon's Vineyard, was published in Great Britain. It follows the investigation of Det. Karl Craven inside a bizarre religious cult. It was inspired by real events experienced by Latimer when he was a crime reporter for the Herald-Examiner. He was sent to Benton Harbor, Michigan, to cover a trial involving a religious colony. The novel, which combines murder with aberrant sexual practices and political corruption, could not find an American publisher for many years, although a censored version was eventually published in Mystery Book Magazine under a different title, The Fifth Grave. A complete version was not published in the United States until 2004.

In the late 1930s, Latimer began writing screenplays, beginning with The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt in 1939, the first film in the low-budget Lone Wolf series to star Warren William. He followed this in 1940 with Phantom Raiders, part of MGM's short-lived Nick Carter series starring Walter Pidgeon. Latimer soon graduated to big-budget crime films, including Paramount's remake of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key in 1942. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he resumed his screenwriting career with crime films such as Nocturne (1946), starring George Raft; They Won't Believe Me (1947), with Robert Young, Susan Hayward, and Jane Greer; The Big Clock (1948), starring Ray Milland; The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), based on Cornell Woolrich's 1945 novel and starring Edward G. Robinson; and Alias Nick Beal (1949), again featuring Milland. In the 1950s and 1960s, Latimer scripted many television series, including Perry Mason, and the occasional crime film, such as The Unholy Wife (1957).

LAWYERS. The lawyer turned sleuth is a popular character in American and British fiction and films. The first appearance of such a figure was in 1896 when Melville Davisson Post published The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason, a collection of stories concerning rogue lawyer Randolph Mason. Mason is more of a heroic figure in the third volume, Randolph Mason, the Corrector of Destinies (1908). Post continued to publish similar stories, including The Silent Witness (1930), involving lawyer-sleuth Colonel Braxton.

The most famous lawyer-sleuth was Perry Mason. His first appearance was in 1933 in Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Velvet Claws; a film version was released by Warner Bros. in 1936, with Warren William as Mason. Between 1933 and 1973, Gardner wrote 143 novels, with more than 80 of them based on Perry Mason, including The Case of the Postponed Murder, which was published after Gardner's death in 1970.

In gangster films, lawyers are generally presented as "mouthpieces" for gangsters. This stereotype was reinforced by the activities of actual lawyers such as the celebrated real-life New York City Attorney William J. Fallon, who was called the "attorney of the damned" by the press because of his association with Arnold Rothstein and other gangsters. He provided the inspiration for The Mouthpiece (1932) with Warren William (which was remade in 1940 as The Man Who Talked Too Much and in 1955 as Illegal, starring Edward G. Robinson) and Lawyer Man (1932), starring William Powell. In both films, the lawyer is characterized by his amoral win-at-all-costs attitude that includes bribery. State's Attorney, also in 1932, stars John Barrymore as a gifted lawyer with criminal connections; it was remade as Criminal Lawyer in 1937 and 1938. Humphrey Bogart was a crooked lawyer who betrays James Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938).

In the 1940s, lawyers, like film noir characters, lost much of their vitality and optimism, while retaining the morally problematic qualities from the earlier films. This shift is evident in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947) and Robert Siodmak's The File on Thelma Jordan (1950). In the latter, Assistant District Attorney Cleve Marshall deliberately subverts the criminal trial of a woman (Barbara Stanwyck) involved in robbery and murder. Body Heat in 1981 resurrected the morally corrupt lawyer, played by William Hurt, who falls for femme fatale Kathleen Turner.

In The Asphalt Jungle (1950), the film's cynical moral ethos is articulated by corrupt lawyer Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern) when he tells his wife that "crime is only the left-handed form of human endeavor." Emmerich endorses this view of the world by betraying the thieves who carried out a robbery and by maintaining a childlike mistress (Marilyn Monroe). A similar view is presented in Force of Evil (1949), with John Garfield as a mob lawyer. Robert Duvall as the lawyer Tom Hagan in The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974) treats the law as a business. For him, morality is irrelevant.

Female lawyers, on the other hand, retain some semblance of morality, although this is often jeopardized by romance. District Attorney Ellen Barkin falls in love with a cop (Dennis Quaid) facing corruption charges in The Big Easy (1987), while lawyer Glenn Close nearly loses her life when she falls in love with a man accused of killing his wife in Jagged Edge (1985). On the contrary, Cher fights for the truth in Suspect (1987). The 1990 film adaptation of Scott Turow's best-selling novel Presumed Innocent assimilates many of these strands via Harrison Ford as a married deputy prosecutor who finds his life threatened after his lover (Greta Scacchi) is murdered.

There are, of course, lawyers who fight for justice following more traditional savior figures in the cinema—including law professor Glenn Ford who fights for justice for a Mexican boy in Trial (1955); Spencer Tracy as James P. Curtayne in The People against O'Hara (1951); Robert Donat as the lawyer who defends a naval cadet in The Winslow Boy (1950), remade in 1999 by David Mamet; and most famously, Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Others include Dean Martin in Mr. Ricco (1975); Kelly McGillis, who defends rape victim Jodie Foster in The Accused (1988); James Woods in True Believer (1989); Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men (1992); and Paul Newman in The Verdict (1982).

The success of John Grisham's novels resulted in a series of legal thrillers in the 1990s: The Firm (1993); The Pelican Brief (1993), with Julia Roberts as a law student investigating the assassination of two Supreme Court justices; The Client (1994), featuring Susan Sarandon as a lawyer who protects a young boy from the Mob; and A Time to Kill (1996), starring Matthew McConaughey as the young attorney defending a black man charged with murdering the two men who raped his daughter in Mississippi. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

LEE, CHRISTOPHER (1922– ). Born in London, the son of Lt. Col. Jeffrey Lee of the King's Royal Rifle Corps and an Italian contessa, Christopher Lee lived in Switzerland after the divorce of his parents. When his mother married a banker, the uncle of author Ian Fleming, he moved back to London. After military service during World War II, Lee's cousin Count Niccolo Carandini, the Italian ambassador in Great Britain, suggested that Lee consider acting as a profession. Although the head of Denham Studios told Lee that he was too tall, his cousin arranged a meeting with Filippo Del Guidice at Two Cities, a division of Rank, and he was offered a standard seven-year contract beginning with one line of dialogue in the elegant film noir Corridor of Mirrors (1948), starring Eric Portman.

Lee appeared in 11 films in the next 18 months—mostly small roles, although he had a featured role in Penny and the Pownall Case (1948). His last picture under his Rank contract was Valley of the Eagles (1951). For the next six years, he struggled for roles. At one point, he was Burt Lancaster's stand-in in The Crimson Pirate (1952).

His 35th film was The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), and his performance as the mute creature proved to be his breakthrough role, because Hammer then cast Lee as Count Dracula in its next film, Terence Fisher's Dracula (1958). It was a major financial success, and Lee was a star. In 1959, Hammer, in an attempt to capitalize on the casting of both Lee and Peter Cushing following their success in The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula, cast both actors in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Cushing was an imperious Sherlock Holmes and Lee was Sir Henry Baskerville. Lee later portrayed Holmes in the German production Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962) and, nearly 30 years later, returned as Holmes in the made-for-television film Incident at Victoria Falls (1991). Lee also played Sherlock's brother Mycroft in Billy Wilder's melancholy presentation of the famous sleuth in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970).

After The Mummy (1959), Lee refused further horror films, and his career languished in French, German, and Italian films, with an occasional British entry such as the crime thriller Taste of Fear (1961). Then, in 1965, he accepted the role of Fu Manchu in a series of films based on the character created by Sax Rohmer: The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), followed by The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), The Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1967), The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968), and The Castle of Fu Manchu (1970). Also in 1965, Lee returned to the role that made him famous, in Fisher's Dracula, Prince of Darkness. He played the aristocratic Duc de Richleau in Hammer's screen adaptation of the Denis Wheatley story, The Devil Rides Out (1968), followed the next year by another Wheatley story, The Lost Continent.

Although Lee continued to make one Dracula film a year until Dracula A.D. in 1972, he desperately wanted to break away from this typecasting, which he achieved with his first western, Hannie Caulder in 1971, followed by roles as Rochefort in The Three Musketeers (1973) and the chief villain, Francisco Scaramanga, opposite Roger Moore as James Bond, in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). In 1973, Lee was Lord Summerisle, the urbane Gaelic aristocrat dedicated to the worship of pagan gods, in The Wicker Man (1973). Later in his career, he returned to big-budget fantasy films such as Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow (1999) and, as Saruman the White, Peter Jackson's adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).

LES RIVIÈRES POURPRES (2000). This action-based police procedural based on the best-selling novel by the film's cowriter Jean-Christophe Grangé was released overseas as The Crimson Rivers. Det. Sup. Pierre Niemans (Jean Reno) is sent from Paris to the small university town of Guernon in the French Alps to investigate the sadistic murder of a librarian. In a parallel investigation, Det. Insp. Max Kerkerian (Vincent Cassel) in the nearby town of Sarzac investigates the desecration of the grave of a girl who supposedly died in 1982. Eventually, the two men come together as each investigation leads to the same source. They are assisted by a local glaciologist Fanny Ferreira (Nadia Farès), who figures prominently in the film's climax involving twin girls and a fascist plot by senior members of the university to improve the poor bloodlines among the elite university staff by swapping babies at the local hospital.

Cassel admitted after the film was completed that director Mathieu Kassovitz eliminated much of the explanatory material in the script of the story, thereby rendering it difficult to follow. Kassovitz was more interested in the visual, action-based set pieces, such as the spectacular attempt to kill Niemans and Kerkerian by the dean's son when his car pushes the policeman's car toward a large obstacle on a high bridge. The pounding score from Bruno Coulais (played by the Paris Philharmonic Orchestra), spectacular scenery, and engaging performances from Reno and Cassel—who make their characters seem human and not formulaic (Niemans, for example, is terrified of dogs, which is used as an element in the plot)—bolster the film.

The film was nominated for five awards, including Best Director, at the 2001 César awards in France. Its success at the box office resulted in a sequel, Les rivières pourpres II—Les anges de l'apocalypse (Crimson Rivers 2: Angels of the Apocalypse, 2004), costarring Reno and Christopher Lee.

LEWIS, JOSEPH H. (1907–2000). Joseph Lewis, a prolific director of genre films, produced a number of tense, visually inventive crime films on low and medium budgets in the 1940s and 1950s. The pinnacle of his ability to produce superior films with limited resources was his 1946 film So Dark the Night. Set in the French village of St. Margot, the film studio (Columbia) allowed him 12 days—which he extended to 18—and gave him no sets, no stars, and virtually no money to construct a French village. Lewis proceeded to dress a standing set, a bombed-out wartime village, on the Columbia back lot. He then cut out a road in the studio paddock with a bulldozer and, with a few walls and thatched roofs, plus the clever use of camera angles, created the village. This, combined with a clever script by Martin Berkeley and Dwight V. Babcock, produced an innovative tale of an overworked detective from the Paris Surété who vacations in the village only to discover his inner murderous nature.

Lewis, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was born in New York and came to Los Angeles in 1925. After a short stint at MGM and the position of supervising editor at Mascot Pictures, Lewis started directing low-budget films until he entered military service during World War II. After the war, he directed The Falcon in San Francisco (1945), the toughest Falcon film, as it assumed some of the characteristics of film noir, a mode that suited the iconoclastic Lewis.

His break came with his next film, the gothic murder mystery My Name Is Julia Ross (1945), starring Nina Foch as a young woman imprisoned in an isolated house on the coast of Cornwall by a woman (Dame May Whitty) and her psychotic son (George Macready). Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Studios, was so impressed with the rushes that he gave Lewis additional time and resources to finish the film, which became a "sleeper" success for the studio. Lewis's last film for Columbia was The Undercover Man, starring Glenn Ford as a federal agent trying to build a case against an Al Capone figure, referred to as the "big fellow" in the film. Gun Crazy, Lewis's most celebrated film, is one of the best American crime films. Here Lewis filmed a bank robbery on the streets of Montrose, California, in a single take over several minutes, saving many days of production for the producers. Lewis's last significant crime film, The Big Combo (1955), focuses on the neurotic battle between an obsessive cop (Cornel Wilde) and his alter ego, the gangster Mr. Brown (Richard Conte). His other crime films include The Spy Ring (1937), Criminals Within (1941), A Lady without Passport (1950), and Cry of the Hunted (1953). See also CUMMINS, PEGGY; KING BROTHERS.

LOCKED-ROOM MYSTERIES. The "locked-room mystery" refers to crimes, generally murders, that are committed under seemingly impossible circumstances. It is a subgenre of classical detective fiction. The first locked-room mystery, aside from the numerous gothic tales involving haunted rooms and secret passages, was Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess," published in the Dublin University Magazine in December 1838. The first locked-room mystery involving a detective was Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," published in Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine in April 1841. Its premise, a murderer who leaves his victim in a room with the key still inside, became a staple motif in many locked-room stories.

Other mid-Victorian examples followed, but two stories published in 1892 gave this subgenre a major boost. The first was Israel Zangwill's only murder story, The Big Bow Mystery, which was serialized in the London evening newspaper the Star. The popularity of Zangwill's story was enhanced by a newspaper stunt that invited readers to suggest their own solution. Zangwill's story was filmed by Warner Bros. as The Verdict in 1946. It was director Don Siegel's debut feature film and stars Sydney Greenstreet as former superintendent George Grodman and Peter Lorre as his friend Victor Emmric. The mystery concerns the murder of Arthur Kendall (Morton Lowry) in a locked room. Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," featuring Sherlock Holmes, published in the Strand magazine in February 1892 was also influential.

Edgar Wallace's The Four Just Men, published in 1905, left the ending open so that readers could suggest how a man could be murdered in a locked room surrounded by policemen. In 1908, Gaston Leroux published The Mystery of the Yellow Room, which was filmed in 1919 and then, as Le mystère de la chambre jaune, in 1930, 1949, and 2003. In 1911, British author G. K. Chesterton drew upon this motif in The Innocence of Father Brown, part of his popular series concerning his sleuth-priest.

In the United States, S. S. Van Dine devised a clever locked-room murder for his 1927 novel The Canary Murder Case, featuring his gentleman detective Philo Vance. Van Dine's story was filmed by Paramount in 1929 starring William Powell. This film, the first to feature Vance, began production as a silent but was changed into a part-talkie during production. Van Dine also returned to the locked-room mystery for his 1933 novel The Kennel Murder Case, which Warner Bros. filmed the same year with Powell as Vance.

Agatha Christie published a number of locked-room and impossible mysteries, including "The Blue Geranium," featuring her spinster sleuth Miss Jane Marple. It was published in 1929 in The Storyteller.

The master practitioner of this subgenre was John Dickson Carr, who also wrote under the pseudonyms Carter Dickson and Carr Dickson. His first locked-room mystery, "The Shadow of the Goat," was published in 1926, and over the next 40 years he wrote 50 novels, many of them locked-room or impossible mysteries. A classic was The Hollow Man (1935). He also used the impossible-crime formula as the basis for many of his radio scripts, including the celebrated impossible mystery "Cabin B-13," which was first broadcast on the CBS radio anthology series Suspense in March 1943. It was filmed by 20th Century-Fox as Dangerous Crossing in 1953 starring Jeanne Crain and Michael Rennie.

British author Ethel Lina White's 1936 novel The Wheel Spins was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1938 as The Lady Vanishes. The story concerns a young woman, Iris Carr, who suffers a blackout just before boarding a train about to cross Europe. On the train, she befriends Mrs. Froy, a fellow Englishwoman, who disappears while Iris is sleeping. When Iris makes inquiries about Froy, everybody denies the old woman's existence, leading Iris to doubt her sanity.

Two skilled practitioners of this subgenre were cousins Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee, who wrote under the joint pseudonym Ellery Queen. The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934), a typical Queen story, concerns a man who is found murdered in a room with his clothes on backwards, all the furniture turned upside down, and the pictures turned toward the wall. This novel was filmed by Republic Studios in 1937 as The Mandarin Mystery, starring Eddie Quinlan as Ellery Queen, although the studio took considerable liberties with the novel's plot and replaced much of the mystery with broad comedy.

The long-running Charlie Chan series produced by 20th Century-Fox between 1931 and 1942 often utilized variations of the locked-room formula to demonstrate Chan's expertise. For instance, in Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935), Chan exposes a murderer by showing that a death was caused by deadly vapors triggered by a violin when it was played. Similarly, Charlie Chan at the Circus (1936), a standard locked-room mystery, involved the murder of a circus manager in his caravan with the doors locked from the inside. After Fox lost interest in the series and it was switched to Monogram, the final Monogram film Sky Dragon (1949) involves the murder of a passenger and the theft of a large sum of money on a plane where everybody, including the pilots and crew, are rendered unconscious by drugged coffee.

The plot of Flightplan (2005), a variation on Carr's "Cabin B-13," involves a grieving mother (Jodie Foster), accompanying the coffin of her husband on its flight home, waking up to find her daughter missing and everybody claiming that the child had never boarded the plane. This is similar to the 1950 British film So Long at the Fair, starring Jean Simmons as Vicky Barton, a young woman who accompanies her brother Johnny (David Tomlinson) to the 1896 Paris Exposition. After checking into their hotel, Vicky wakes up the next morning to find not only that her brother is missing but that there is no evidence that he ever arrived at the hotel—and the room she left him in the night before has seemingly disappeared.

LODGER, THE (1926). Alfred Hitchcock claimed that the success of The Lodger rescued his career after his three previous films failed at the box office. The Lodger was an expressionistic example of Hitchcock's cinema and a legacy of his experiences working in Germany. Many of the visual and stylistic touches used in this film were reworked in his subsequent films.

After a stranger, Jonathan Drew (Ivor Novello), arrives at the Bunting household, he attracts suspicion following a series of murders in the local neighborhood. Drew's position is further threatened by the jealous behavior of Joe Betts (Malcolm Keen), a local police detective who resents Drew's interest in Daisy Bunting (Jane Tripp). While most of the film suggests that Drew is the serial killer, mainly due to his habit of leaving the house each night, he is ultimately shown to be innocent. He tells Daisy that he came to her neighborhood to catch the serial killer and avenge the death of his sister.

The Lodger contains a number of visually inventive sequences, including an image of Drew pacing in his room as seen through a floor of transparent glass. This is matched by the thrilling climax. After his escape from police custody, Drew is rendered immobile when his handcuffs are caught in the spokes of an iron fence. A vengeful mob, believing Drew is the serial killer, proceeds to attack him. Betts rescues Drew after he learns of the arrest of the real killer. The film was remade in 1932, with Novello again in the lead role, and again in 1944, 1954, and 2008.

LOLA RENNT (1998). Lola Rennt won seven awards at the 1999 German Film Awards, including Outstanding Film of the Year, Cinematography (Frank Griebe), Direction (Tom Tykwer), and Editing (Mathilde Bonnefoy). Tykwer was also nominated for the Golden Lion Award at the 1998 Venice Film Festival. Overall, the film was nominated for more than 40 awards throughout the world.

Lola Rennt, which was released overseas as Run, Lola, Run, is a high-concept film that examines the role of fate and destiny. It continually asks, What are the consequences if this happens? Or, if we change one or two details, will there be a different result? The basic premise is simple. Lola (Franka Potente), an orange-haired punk, is in love with Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), a money courier for drug dealers. When Lola's car is stolen, she fails to meet him at an appointed place to help him deliver 100,000 Deutschmarks of drug money. Manni is then forced to take a train. When he is distracted by trouble on the train, he unwittingly leaves the money behind, and it is appropriated by a homeless man. Manni, desperate at the loss of the money, phones Lola (in an apartment some distance away) and tells her that he has 20 minutes to raise 100,000 marks or he will be killed. Lola decides the only way to obtain the money is to contact her father, a banker. She then has to rush the money to Manni, who is waiting near a supermarket—which he plans to rob if she fails to make it on time.

The bulk of the film picks up at this point and develops three scenarios—each beginning with Lola running from her apartment in Albrechtstrasse, through the suburban streets in Berlin where she encounters the same people each time, to her father's bank. The film crosscuts between Lola's frenetic dash and her father (Herbert Knaup) with his female assistant (Nini Petri), who is telling him she is pregnant with his child. The first run climaxes with Manni and Lola surrounded by the police after robbing the supermarket. The segment ends with Lola killed by a policeman. During the second run, she robs her father's bank and obtains the money, only to watch Manni be killed by an ambulance. The third run is more optimistic. Lola wins a large sum of money in a nearby casino and then saves her father's life after he is involved in a car crash, while Manni retrieves the drug money from the homeless man. Although each run includes the same characters, situation, and settings, Tykwer, who also scripted the film, merely changes one or two details to produce three different endings. The smallest change, the film shows, can have the most profound consequences.

LONE WOLF, THE. A direct descendant of the gentleman thief Raffles, the Lone Wolf was a popular crime figure on screen from 1917 to 1949. The character, a wealthy gentleman by day and a thief by night, was developed by Louis Joseph Vance in his 1914 novel The Lone Wolf. In the novel, the protagonist, Michael Troyon, is mentored by a professional thief who changes Troyon's name to Lanyard. But he abandons his criminal ways after falling in love, and his reformation takes place in the first novel where he battles the Pack, an international crime syndicate associated with Imperial Germany. In Vance's next novel, The False Faces (1918), Lanyard gathers information for the Allies after the Germans kill his wife. Vance continued the character in a series of novels, including Red Masquerade (1921), where Lanyard battles Communists, through The Lone Wolf's Last Prowl (1934), published a year after Vance's death.

Vance's first novel was purchased by Lewis J. Selznick and filmed in 1917 with Bert Lytell. Paramount cast Henry B. Walthall as Lanyard in The False Faces in 1919, while Jack Holt starred in The Lone Wolf, a 1924 remake of the 1917 film. In 1926, Columbia Pictures purchased the screen rights, and it released films based on Vance's character over the next 23 years, beginning with The Lone Wolf Returns with Lytell returning as Lanyard. This was followed by Alias the Lone Wolf the next year. The Lone Wolf's Daughter in 1929 included sound effects in the first reel in what was otherwise a silent film. Lytell's final appearance was in the sound film Last of the Lone Wolf (1930). In 1932, Fox released a sentimental melodrama, Cheaters at Play, starring Thomas Meighan as Lanyard. This was followed by the best of the Lone Wolf films, The Lone Wolf Returns, released by Columbia in 1936 with Melvyn Douglas as the debonair jewel thief who romances Gail Patrick after planning to steal her aunt's emerald collection. When he is framed for the robbery, Lanyard goes after the real thieves in this sophisticated mystery/romance. Columbia followed two years later with The Lone Wolf in Paris starring European actor Francis Lederer as Lanyard.

Columbia then embarked on a series of low-budget films featuring Warren William as the Lone Wolf, beginning with The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt (1939), directed by Peter Godfrey with a screenplay by Jonathan Latimer. The film costars Ida Lupino as the feisty daughter of a senator and Rita Hayworth as the femme fatale. Although the studio employed talented directors, including Edward Dmytryk (Secrets of the Lone Wolf, 1946), Michael Gordon (One Dangerous Night, 1943), and André De Toth (Passport to Suez, 1943), the series soon settled into a predictable formula with Lanyard battling society blackmailers and Nazi spies. The casting of Eric Blore in The Lone Wolf Strikes (1940) enlivened the next 10 films with his expert delivery and comic timing as Lanyard's valet. After eight films as Lanyard, William, bored with the role and plagued by ill health, left the series, and Columbia cast Gerald Mohr—the villain opposite William in One Dangerous Night—as Lanyard for three films, The Notorious Lone Wolf (1946), The Lone Wolf in London (1947), and The Lone Wolf in Mexico (1947). Australian actor Ron Randell was cast as Lanyard in The Lone Wolf and His Lady (1949), the last film in the Columbia series.

LONG GOOD FRIDAY, THE (1979). This British mixture of classic gangster film and social commentary was developed by the British company ACC/ITC in 1979 as a television film. However, company chairman Sir Lew Grade and other executives disliked the film for its seemingly unpatriotic view of British life, its violence, and its references to the Irish Republican Army. (Grade was scared the IRA would blow up theaters showing the film—which did not happen.) After refusing to cut the film, producer Barry Hanson screened it to preview audiences, and George Harrison's production company Handmade Films purchased the rights for $900,000, releasing it in 1981 to good reviews and a strong box office. The two-year delay helped the film's acceptance.

The plot involves the complications of a proposed deal between British gangster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) and the American Mafia, represented by Charlie (Eddie Constantine). The British-American criminal alliance is based on the multimillion-pound development of London's Canary Wharf. However, just as Charlie is about to enter Britain to sign the deal, key members of Shand's gang are eliminated. Initially, Shand suspects rival gangs until he discovers the real culprit is the IRA. However, the film's ideological target is not the IRA but Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's England, represented in the film by Shand, a self-made patriot, entrepreneur, and pugnacious, sadistic, and bigoted man whose dream of a British revival is shattered by the actions of the IRA. Shand not only loses his empire but also any chance of gaining legitimacy in British society, a desire shared by his wife (Helen Mirren). The film traces his fall from his high point early in the film, standing on his yacht with the Tower Bridge in the background where he tells of his plans to return Britain to its former glory. From that point on, it is all downhill. Rattled by the IRA attacks, the Mafia repudiates the deal, and a furious Shand berates Charlie by telling him that the "days when you Yanks can come over and save us are over."

LORRE, PETER (1904–1964). Born László Löwenstein in Rosenberg, Hungary, Peter Lorre made his film debut as the child killer in Fritz Lang's M (1931). This startling debut role, combined with Lorre's physical mannerisms, huge eyes, small body, and soft, sinister voice, consigned him to a career as misfits, fall guys, and assorted underworld figures—with the exception of his two years (1937–39) and eight films as John P. Marquand's Japanese detective Mr. Moto. As the Nazis took over Germany in the early 1930s, Lorre left for Paris and then London, where Alfred Hitchcock cast him as a terrorist in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) despite the fact that Lorre had only a very limited grasp of the English language. Lorre then moved to Hollywood, where Columbia gave him the lead role as Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (1935). He was top billed as "the Stranger" in the early film noir Stranger on the Third Floor (1940).

His screen persona was consolidated by his decadent, effeminate, yet dangerous Joel Cairo in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Lorre's first pairing with Sydney Greenstreet. Lorre and Greenstreet went on to costar in nine films, including Background to Danger (1943), The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), Three Strangers (1946), and The Verdict (1946). In 1946, he starred in two film adaptations of novels by Cornell Woolrich. In Universal's Black Angel, he was a sadistic nightclub owner suspected of murder, and in The Chase, United Artists' adaptation of Woolrich's novel The Black Path of Fear, Lorre was Steve Cochrae's sadistic henchman. Lorre was Toady, a buyer of illegal diamonds in Rope of Sand (1949).

Although he was not a direct victim of the blacklist, Lorre, like many others, was "graylisted" in the early 1950s due to guilt by association—in this case, his friendship with Bertolt Brecht, one of the 11 men cited by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the late 1940s. He suffered financially and was declared bankrupt in 1949. After a brief return to Germany, Huston helped restore Lorre's career with a role, opposite Humphrey Bogart, in Beat the Devil (1954), Huston's offbeat satire of The Maltese Falcon. Television and low-budget films gave Lorre steady employment in the 1950s and early 1960s, although his career never regained the status he enjoyed in the 1940s.

LOSEY, JOSEPH (1909–1984). Joseph Losey was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and after he left medical studies, he entered the entertainment industry with live productions at Radio City Music Hall before moving on to New Deal theater projects and film classes with S. M. Eisenstein in Moscow. His first films were industrial shorts, followed by the MGM "Crime Does Not Pay" series. After service during World War II, Losey directed stage productions in Hollywood until his first feature film for RKO, the controversial The Boy with Green Hair (1947). This film, with Dean Stockwell as the boy who is persecuted because of the color of his hair, attracted the attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) for its pacifist sentiments. Losey followed with the socially conscious crime film The Lawless (1949), which focuses on the prejudicial treatment of Mexican-American fruit pickers in Southern California. However, it was his next Hollywood film, The Prowler (1950), that served as a precursor to Losey's body of 1960s films such as The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967), which established his reputation. This is evident in the unrelenting sense of fatalism in The Prowler involving a cop (Van Heflin) unable to control his self-destructive desires.

In 1951, Losey directed Imbarco a mezzanotte, a bleak story of a man (Paul Muni) who is wanted for murder and flees the police with a young boy. While working on this film in Italy, scriptwriter Leo Townsend named Losey as a member of the Communist Party to HUAC. Two years later, when Imbarco a mezzanotte was released in the United States as Stranger on the Prowl, Losey's name was removed from the credits, and the film's screenplay and direction were credited to Andrea Forzano. Losey moved to England, and with the support of Dirk Bogarde, who was to become an integral part of his success in the 1960s, he directed the actor in The Sleeping Tiger (1954). This strong melodrama gave Bogarde one of his best roles as a disturbed young man who willfully destroys the marriage between a psychiatrist and his wife. Again, Losey's name did not appear on the credits; the direction was credited to Victor Hanbury, a British producer who fronted for the blacklisted director. In his next British film The Intimate Stranger (1956), Losey, as director, used the pseudonym Joseph Walton.

Following the disappointment of his fifth British film, The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958), after which Rank terminated his contract, Losey directed a pair of bleak, challenging crime films: Blind Date (1959) and The Criminal (1960). Both starred Stanley Baker. They were not only superior genre films but also represented a stylistic and thematic transition between his genre films of the 1940s and 1950s and his shift to the art cinema in the 1960s. This shift was complete with Eva (1962), featuring Baker in a perverse, unconventional relationship with Jeanne Moreau. Similarly, The Servant and the Harold Pinter–scripted film Accident were relentlessly downbeat with their focus on the destructive side of the British class system and middle-class values. Guilt and repression also surfaced in The Go-Between (1971). Losey directed a number of bloated, incomprehensible, and self-indulgent films, such as Modesty Blaise (1966), Boom (1968), and Secret Ceremony (1968), during this period, as well.

LUMET, SIDNEY (1924–2011). Eclectic, prolific American director Sidney Lumet has long been identified with New York rather than Hollywood. The son of a celebrated actor in the American Yiddish Theater, Lumet made his public debut at age four on radio, followed by Broadway appearances and a solo film-acting role in One Third of a Nation (1939). After military service during World War II, Lumet directed off-Broadway plays and summer stock before moving into live television in the early 1950s. Henry Fonda assisted Lumet in acquiring his first job as a film director with the celebrated courtroom drama Twelve Angry Men (1957), starring Fonda as a jury member who convinces his fellow jurors of the innocence of a young man. Lumet consolidated his credentials with adaptations of Tennessee Williams's The Fugitive Kind (1960), Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge (1962), and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (1962). Fail-Safe (1964) stars Fonda as an American president who becomes entangled in a nuclear disaster with the Soviet Union, while The Pawnbroker (1965) involves the personal traumas of a concentration camp survivor.

In the 1970s, Lumet made a number of gritty crime films, including the fast-paced caper film The Anderson Tapes (1971), starring Sean Connery; the tough British cop film The Offence, also starring Connery as a disturbed policeman who beats a suspect to death; Serpico (1973), starring Al Pacino as the undercover cop who exposes corruption among his colleagues in a fact-based story; and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), with Pacino and John Cazale in another true story of a man who holds up a bank to raise money for his partner's sex-change operation. Lumet's big-budget, all-star adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1974), with Albert Finney as Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, revived screen interest in Christie's books, while Network (1976), starring Peter Finch, was a savage critique of the television industry.

In the early 1980s, Lumet returned to the crime genre with Prince of the City (1981), starring Treat Williams as a cop in the New York special investigations unit who exposes corruption in police ranks. This was followed by The Verdict (1982), one of Lumet's very best films, with Paul Newman as a broken-down Boston lawyer who redeems himself. Less successful were Q & A (1990), with Nick Nolte as a vicious cop, and Night Falls on Manhattan (1996), featuring Andy Garcia as a district attorney who discovers that his success was based on corruption.

In 2005, Lumet received an honorary Academy Award. Fittingly, his last film, made when Lumet was 83, was the disturbing film noir Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke as brothers who rob the family jewelry store, which leads to tragedy for all concerned.

LUPINO, IDA (1918–1995). British-born actress Ida Lupino was a major star in Hollywood in the 1940s before establishing a second career as a director of thrillers in the 1950s. Lupino appeared on stage from an early age and by the age of 14 was playing mature roles in British films. Her father, Stanley Lupino, was a British comedian, and her family's theatrical heritage stretched back more than 200 years. Veteran Hollywood director Allan Dwan encouraged her to come to the United States. Her classical training in Great Britain at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts together with her attractive features, distinctive voice, determination, and talent provided the basis for her long film career as both actor and director.

In 1939, producer Mark Hellinger at Warner Bros. cast her opposite George Raft and Humphrey Bogart in They Drive by Night (1939), and in 1941 she was top-billed, above Bogart, in High Sierra. More crime films followed with Out of the Fog (1941), The Hard Way (1941), and Deep Valley (1947). She played a middle-aged murderess in Ladies in Retirement (1941) and was also the world-weary torch singer who returns home to deal with family problems, including rescuing her nephew from a murder charge, in The Man I Love (1947). The next year, she starred as the hard-boiled singer Lily caught between a psychotic man, Jefty (Richard Widmark), and his former friend Pete (Cornel Wilde) in 20th Century-Fox's Road House (1948).

Lupino set up her own independent production company, The Filmakers, with husband Collier Young and began directing feature films almost straight away. Her most notable crime film during this period was The Hitch-Hiker (1953), a taut drama concerning two men, Gil Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) and Ray Collins (Edmond O'Brien), who pick up hitchhiker, murderer Emmett Myers (William Talman), while traveling across the Baja California desert. The film follows the eight-day ordeal for the two men. Lupino also acted intermittently during this period. She was Mary, the blind girl who helps Robert Ryan regain his sanity in Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground (1952). She also starred as the war widow Mrs. Gordon who is terrorized by Howard (Ryan), her handyman, in Beware My Lovely (1952). In 1954, she was a nightclub singer opposite her second husband, Howard Duff, as a corrupt cop in Private Hell 36 (1954), produced by Lupino's former husband, Collier Young. Lupino later moved into television as both actor and director.

The Hitch-Hiker (1953) directed by Ida Lupino. Shown: Frank Lovejoy, Edmond O'Brien (front seat), William Talman (back seat).

Lupino's other crime films include The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt (1939), The Lady and the Mob (1939), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), Woman in Hiding (1950), Women's Prison (1955), The Big Knife (1955), and While the City Sleeps (1956). See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.
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MacMURRAY, FRED (1908–1991). Born in Illinois, Fred MacMurray was a multitalented performer who began as a musician and ended as a Disney-movie and television star. The son of a concert violinist, MacMurray was educated at a military academy, but it was music that appealed to him. He performed as a professional saxophonist in bands in Chicago before his Hollywood debut in 1929.

MacMurray won a film contract at Paramount in 1934 and made an impact in the 1935 romantic comedy The Gilded Lily, costarring Claudette Colbert. He then crafted a career in comedies and musicals throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. Therefore, it was a surprise when director Billy Wilder cast him against type as Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (1944). MacMurray initially resisted Wilder's overtures because he was worried that the role as a man motivated by lust and greed to murder would jeopardize his career. Although he gave a nuanced performance, he resisted similar roles and returned to comedy and romantic films, such as Practically Yours (1944) and Murder, He Says (1945). The latter was a broad comedy with MacMurray as an insurance agent who visits a family of homicidal hillbillies.

MacMurray also rejected the lead role in Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), and there were few strong dramatic roles for the rest of his career. The exceptions were his undercover agent who, with another agent (Claire Trevor), goes after drug smuggler Raymond Burr in Borderline (1950); a duplicitous naval officer in Edward Dmytryk's The Caine Mutiny (1954); and a jaded cop who falls for a gangster's girlfriend (Kim Novak) in the Pushover (1954). Wilder's The Apartment (1960) gave MacMurray a last chance for a challenging role as an adulterous husband before spending the rest of his career appearing in comforting roles in Disney films and the long-running television series My Three Sons.

MACREADY, GEORGE (1899–1973). One of Hollywood's best, and most distinctive, villains during the 1940s and 1950s, George Macready was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and made his stage debut in 1926 and his first screen appearance in 1942. Thereafter, due to his rasping voice and angular facial features, he had a prolific career in Hollywood playing villains. The Missing Juror (1944) established Macready's screen persona as a seemingly civilized man who, in actuality, is a crazed killer. He followed as the demented scientist Professor Ernst who controls a large gorilla to torment Robert Lowery and Carole Mathews for 15 chapters in the bizarre Columbia serial The Monster and the Ape (1945). Next he was the mother-dominated murderer who delights in terrorizing Nina Foch in the gothic-influenced My Name Is Julia Ross, a major hit for Columbia directed by Joseph H. Lewis in 1945.

Macready's greatest role, along with his crazed French general Paul Mireau in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957), was the bisexual German sadist Ballin Mundson who revels in humiliating Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford in Gilda (1946). Mundson's erotic explanation to his wife (Hayworth) in their bedroom that hate is the only emotion he really enjoys underpins not only this film but also his entire career. The Man Who Dared (1946) offered Macready a rare positive role as a crusading editor who pretends to be the prime suspect in a murder case; Macready had in fact worked as a journalist early in his life. For the rest of his films, and on television in the 1950s and 1960s, he was the perfect villain. In The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1946), he murders an elderly priest, and in The Big Clock (1948), he is Steve Hagen, Charles Laughton's ruthless assistant. Macready's other crime films include I Love a Mystery (1945), Knock on Any Door (1949), Johnny Allegro (1949), A Lady without Passport (1950), Detective Story (1951), The Green Glove (1952), Duffy of San Quentin (1954), A Kiss before Dying (1956), and Dead Ringer (1964).

MADIGAN (1968). Madigan, directed by Don Siegel, was a key crime film in the revival of the police procedural in the late 1960s. The screenplay by Henri Simoun (Howard Rodman) and Abraham Polonsky, based on the novel The Commissioner by Richard Dougherty, presents an uncompromising view of police life and the dangers they face. The film begins with detectives Daniel Madigan (Richard Widmark) and Rocco Bonaro (Harry Guardino) confronting hoodlum Barney Benesch (Steve Ihnat) in bed, only to be distracted by the naked girl with him. After Benesch escapes with Madigan's gun and proceeds to kill, Police Commissioner Anthony Russell (Henry Fonda) gives Madigan and Bonaro 72 hours to arrest him. Madigan's life is complicated by an unhappy marriage to Julia (Inger Stevens), who is frustrated by her husband's inability to spend time with her. At one point, at a police social function, she nearly succumbs to the advances of police captain Ben Williams (Warren Stevens). The film contrasts Madigan's troubles with Julia with the commissioner's affair with a young woman, Tricia Bentley (Susan Clark). After Madigan finally corners Benesch, the hoodlum shoots the detective before Bonaro can kill him. Although Madigan dies, the character was resurrected, with Widmark in the title role, in six made-for-television films in 1972–73.

My Name Is Julia Ross (1945) directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Shown: George Macready and Nina Foch.

MADSEN, MICHAEL (1957– ). A tall, intimidating actor who specializes in psychotic criminals and various hard men, Michael Madsen was born in Chicago, the son of Elaine Madsen (née Melson), an Emmy-winning poet, television producer, and playwright. His sister is actor Virginia Madsen.

Michael Madsen began acting at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. He made his film debut in 1982 in the lead role in the independent drama Against All Hope. For the next few years, he alternated between supporting roles in crime films, such as the 1994 remake of the Steve McQueen caper film The Getaway, and more substantial roles on television. His film roles include the deranged boyfriend of femme fatale Joanne Whalley-Kilmer in John Dahl's clever film noir Kill Me Again (1989), followed by his breakthrough role as the sadistic gangster Mr. Blonde in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992). Madsen's screen persona was reinforced by his vicious torture of a police officer tied to a chair while Mr. Blonde, dancing to the tune of "Stuck in the Middle with You," pours gasoline over the officer and slices him with a knife in rhythm with the song. Less showy, but equally effective, was Madsen's Mafia gangster Sonny Black in Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco (1997) opposite Al Pacino and Johnny Depp.

Madsen played corrupt cops in Mulholland Falls (1996), L.A.P.D.: To Protect and to Serve (2001), and Sin City (2005). He also worked for Tarantino again in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) and costarred as the vengeful Frank Miller in the television remake of High Noon (2000). Although he has carved out a niche as a tough guy, Madsen is proud of the poetry he has published in recent years.

MAFIA. The word "Mafia" was rarely heard in American gangster films prior to 1967 and the film Cosa Nostra, Arch Enemy of the FBI. It was also rarely used in Italian gangster films. The Mafia as a criminal organization was imported into the United States in the 19th century, a period that has provided the setting for a number of films including MGM's The Black Hand (1950). This film features Gene Kelly as a man returning from Italy to New York in the early 1900s to avenge the death of his father who was murdered by the Black Hand Society. Later, in 1960, Hollywood returned to the same period in Pay or Die, based on a true story (set in 1906) of an Italian-American detective (Ernest Borgnine) attempting to curtail the criminal activities of the Black Hand Society. An Italian film, La mano nera—prima della mafia, più della mafia (1973), dealt with the same material. However, the most influential films in fostering public interest in the Mafia were the first two Godfather movies, especially The Godfather: Part II (1974), which details the establishment of a Sicilian secret society in New York at the turn of the century.

Cosa Nostra, Arch Enemy of the FBI first appeared on American television under the title "The Executioners," an episode in The FBI television series. It was reedited and released to theaters in Europe as Cosa Nostra, Arch Enemy of the FBI. The plot involves an FBI agent (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) caught up in a power struggle between two Mafia dons (Walter Pidgeon and Telly Savalas). This was followed by Martin Ritt's The Brotherhood (1968), which was concerned with a power struggle between a don (Kirk Douglas) and his younger brother (Alex Cord). This film follows the traditional pattern of depicting such criminal groups as syndicates, not criminal families, and was not successful at the box office.

The Godfather (1972), on the other hand, was enormously successful, although, following pressure from Italian-Americans, the word "Mafia" is not used in the film. It was followed by the equally successful The Godfather: Part II. The characterization of two gangsters in the film, Willi Cicci (Joe Spinell) and Frank Pentangle (Michael V. Gazzo), was a composite loosely based on one real-life gangster, Joseph Valachi, an Italian-American who was also known by the aliases Charles Chanbano and Anthony Sorge. Valachi was the first member of the Mafia to publicly acknowledge its existence, while also using the term "Cosa Nostra" in reference to the Mafia. Valachi had a long criminal history, and he became a "soldier" in the family controlled by Charles "Lucky" Luciano. In October 1963, Valachi testified before Sen. John L. McClellan's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations. Valachi's testimony, broadcast on television and on radio, described the history of the Mafia and its operation in the United States. Journalist Peter Mass published a biography of Valachi, including material secured from interviews with him, in 1968 as The Valachi Papers. An Italian-French coproduction company adapted the book (as The Valachi Papers) with Charles Bronson as Valachi. It was filmed in New York and released in France in January 1972, six months before The Godfather.

It was The Godfather, however, that proved more influential. Its success at the box office created a cycle of Mafia-based films—such as Richard Fleischer's The Don Is Dead (1973), with Anthony Quinn as an aging Mafia don facing dissension and betrayal within his family. Honor Thy Father in 1973 was produced for American television and released in theaters overseas. It was based on a real-life incident involving Mafia leader Joseph Bonanno (Raf Vallone) and his plans to extend his territory. The film culminates with Bonanno's son Bill (Joseph Bologna) cooperating with the police. This was followed by Crazy Joe (1975), with Peter Boyle as Mafia don Joseph Gallo; Tony Curtis as Don Sam Giancana in Mafia Princess (1986); Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990); and Getting Gotti (1994), with Anthony John Denison as the Gambino family leader John Gotti.

The high point in the cycle was Mike Newell's factually based film Donnie Brasco (1997), with Al Pacino as a member of the Mafia who befriends a young man (Johnny Depp) not knowing that he is an FBI agent. In 1998, Jim Abrahams directed a parody of the Godfather cycle in Jane Austen's Mafia! John Huston's Prizzi's Honor did it much better in 1985.

MALONE, DOROTHY (1925– ). Born Dorothy Maloney in Chicago, former beauty contest winner Dorothy Malone changed her hair color from brunette to blonde for the romantic film Young at Heart (1954). She won an Academy Award as the promiscuous daughter of an oil baron in Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956).

Malone made her film debut in 1943, as a brunette, in Gildersleeve on Broadway, followed by one of the better Falcon films, The Falcon and the Co-eds (1943). Even better was her small but showy role as the Acme Book Shop assistant who has a romantic interlude with Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946). Malone then appeared in a number of routine roles in the late 1940s and early 1950s as the female lead in such films as Flaxy Martin (1949), opposite Zachary Scott; Convicted (1950), opposite Broderick Crawford; a nurse in The Killer That Stalked New York (1951); the supportive wife to Barry Sullivan in Loophole (1954); and a neglected wife to Howard Duff in Private Hell 36 (1954).

Malone had a more substantial role as a racing car driver kidnapped by a man on the run (John Ireland) in The Fast and the Furious (1955), codirected by Ireland and Edward Sampson. Malone followed her success in Written on the Wind with her best role, as LaVerne Shurmann, the wife of a tragic barnstorming pilot (Robert Stack) in Douglas Sirk's The Tarnished Angels (1958), based on William Faulkner's novel Pylon. After more success on television in the 1960s in the long-running series Peyton Place, Malone had supporting roles in Winter Kills (1979) and as a convicted killer in Basic Instinct (1992). See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

MALTESE FALCON, THE (1931/1941). Warner Bros.'s third production of Dashiell Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon began filming on 9 June 1941. The studio, which purchased the rights for $8,500 in 1930, just five months after the publication of the last installment of Hammett's story in Black Mask, gave the 1941 film a budget of $381,000 and a 36-day shooting schedule. This was a tight schedule for a first-time director, although John Huston's preparation was meticulous, sketching out the shooting angles for each scene weeks before the start of filming. He also shot the script in sequence. In the middle of July 1941, Huston filmed the final confrontation between Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor). On 18 July, following the burning of the ship La Paloma on the back lot, the film closed two days ahead of schedule and $54,000 under budget.

There was, however, one more scene in Huston's script to shoot: the epilogue in Spade's office where the detective tries to explain to his secretary Effie Perine (Lee Patrick) why he handed Brigid over to the police. Huston's script shows that after Spade's explanation to Effie he intended to end the film, like the novel, with Spade preparing to greet his mistress Iva Archer (Gladys George), the widow of his dead partner. This scene was never filmed, though, as Huston and producer Henry Blanke decided to end the film in Spade's apartment. Hence the film closes with the police taking Brigid away after Det. Tom Polhaus (Ward Bond) gathers up the evidence—the fake Maltese Falcon—and asks Spade, "What is it?" Spade replies, "The stuff that dreams are made of."

Warner Bros. released 51 films in 1941, and The Maltese Falcon was not regarded by the studio as a prestige production. A week before the release of the film, executive producer Hal Wallis changed the title to The Gent from Frisco, but after the first preview, Jack Warner changed the title back to The Maltese Falcon. While Huston and Warner were pleased with the film (it was one of the nominees for Best Picture in 1941), box-office receipts were only average, as the studio refused to spend very much money promoting the film.

The studio's first version of Hammett's novel was Roy Del Ruth's 1931 version. This film closely follows Hammett's novel and, due to a more liberal censorship policy in Hollywood prior to 1934, includes two key scenes not in the 1941 film: after Spade has sex with Miss Wonderly (Brigid), he leaves and searches her apartment while she is sleeping in his bed. In the second scene, Spade forces Wonderly to shed her clothes in Kaspar Gutman's hotel room so he can search her for a missing $1,000 note. Both films, however, delete the Flitcraft Parable, Spade's nihilistic warning to Brigid in the novel about the arbitrary basis of human existence.

Both films conclude with Spade's torment at having to hand the woman he loves over to the police. Huston emphasizes this aspect to a much greater extent. In the 1931 version, Ricardo Cortez's Spade is more or less resigned to handing Wonderly over to the police. Huston, on the other hand, extends this sequence by accentuating the psychological disturbance within the detective. Spade's torment is palpable, especially when he shouts into her face, "I won't [fall for you] because all of me wants to, regardless of the consequences." Unlike the novel, where survival is all that matters to the detective, Spade's torment nearly destroys him.

MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY (1993). Manhattan Murder Mystery reunites director Woody Allen with screenwriter Marshall Brickman (who worked with Allen on some of his greatest films, including Sleeper in 1973, Annie Hall in 1977, and Manhattan in 1979) and actress Diane Keaton in a role originally written for Mia Farrow. Filming took place during Allen's bitter custody battle with Farrow.

Allen and Keaton play a married couple, Larry and Carol, who worry that their marriage has become stale. They stay together by alternating their recreation interests—she goes to hockey games with him and he attends the opera with her—although Larry walks out of a performance of Wagner because "it gives me the urge to invade Poland." Nevertheless, Carol is concerned that life is passing them by. One evening, they are invited into the apartment of neighbors Paul (Jerry Adler) and Lilian House (Lynn Cohen), but when Lilian dies suddenly, Carol becomes suspicious and starts her own murder investigation.

This early section of the film shares some of the screwball antics involving married sleuths Nick and Nora Charles from the Thin Man series, although Larry is most reluctant to participate. At one point, he tells his wife to "save some craziness for menopause." The narrative in this early section is also similar to Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). Manhattan Murder Mystery even includes a scene with Carol caught in the Houses' apartment when Paul returns home unexpectedly, replicating a scene in Rear Window when Grace Kelly hides in Raymond Burr's apartment after he arrives home unexpectedly. The ending of Manhattan Murder Mystery reworks the shootout between Rita Hayworth and Everett Sloane in the famous hall-of-mirrors sequence in The Lady from Shanghai (1948). In Allen's film, the jilted lover Mrs. Dalton (Marge Redman) shoots Jerry Adler in front of a large screen showing Hayworth firing at Sloane. Allen milks this moment for a great joke as he tells Carol: "I'll never say that life doesn't imitate art again." There are also thematic and filmic references to Vertigo (1958) and Double Indemnity (1944).

There is more to Allen's film than just reworking famous scenes from classic crime films. Brickman and Allen utilize the murder-mystery format to explore many issues evident in Allen's films over the years—notably the threat of betrayal within a long-established relationship. To this end, Alan Alda is cast as Ted, who is recently divorced and, to Larry's annoyance, seriously interested in Carol. To restore the balance, Anjelica Huston costars as the sensual author Marcia Fox and provokes Carol's jealousy. Above all, it is another example of Allen's love affair with the sights, sounds, and people of Manhattan—the film opens with Bobby Short's version of "I Happen to Like New York" on the soundtrack over images of the New York skyline at night.

MANN, ANTHONY (1906–1967). Anthony Mann, born in San Diego, worked as an actor and director on the New York stage before moving back to California in 1939. His first film, the crime drama Dr. Broadway (1942), stars Macdonald Carey as a doctor wanted for murder. The Great Flamarion (1945), based on Vicki Baum's 1936 short story "The Big Shot," starred Erich von Stroheim as a sexually repressed vaudeville artist, a sharpshooter, who falls in love with his young assistant Connie Wallace (Mary Beth Hughes). After Wallace persuades Flamarion to kill her husband, Al (Dan Duryea), she abandons him.

In the second half of the 1940s, Mann directed three high-quality crime films: Desperate (1947), starring Steve Brodie; T-Men (1947); and Raw Deal (1948), with cinematographer John Alton working with him on the last two films. Raw Deal was an unusual film noir in that the voice-over narration was delivered by a female character, Pat Regan (Claire Trevor). T-Men, on the other hand, was a police procedural that combined a semidocumentary style of narration with expressive lighting and psychologically complex characters. Mann also worked, uncredited, with Alton on He Walked by Night (1949), which replicated the style of T-Men.

The visual masterpiece created by Mann and Alton during this period was The Reign of Terror (British title The Black Book, 1949). They discard the comforting imagery normally associated with period melodrama and create a terrifying film noir. This is achieved through composition, alternating between wide shots and extreme close-ups to capture a society racked by violence and persecution unleashed by the ambitions of Maximilian Robespierre during the French Revolution. The timing of this film and its emphasis on the betrayal and unjust victimization of the citizens of France provide a thinly veiled allegory of the events taking place in Hollywood at that time through the operation of the blacklist.

Next, Mann and Alton went to the San Joaquin Valley for a more conventional crime film, Border Incident (1949), in a story involving undercover government agents. After Side Street (1949), he directed The Tall Target, a historical crime film concerned with the efforts of a detective (Dick Powell) in 1861 to prevent the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln while passing through Baltimore on a train. After this film, Mann left the crime genre for the western and, in the late 1950s, historical epics.

While Mann is best remembered today for the dark, moody, sometimes neurotic, westerns he directed in the 1950s starring James Stewart, his crime films share the same characteristics with the intensity of their violence and their dark, bleak view of the world. These films, especially the ones he made with screenwriter John C. Higgins and cinematographer Alton, represent some of the most visually striking crime films of the 1940s. Each is notable for its dramatic lighting and expressive compositions.

Anthony Mann's other crime films include Strangers in the Night (1944), Two o'Clock Courage (1945), Strange Impersonation (1946), Railroaded (1947), and Follow Me Quietly (1949), directed by Richard Fleischer and based on an unpublished story by Mann and Francis Rosenwald.

MANN, MICHAEL (1943– ). One of the most influential and creative directors working in the crime genre in recent years, Michael Mann was born in Chicago. He studied film in London before working as a television screenwriter in the 1970s on series such as Starsky and Hutch. After the made-for-television prison film The Jericho Mile (1979), starring Peter Strauss, Mann's first theatrical film was the caper film Thief (1981), starring James Caan as a criminal torn between his vocation and his feelings for his family. This film, with its sympathetic depiction of a professional criminal, was the first in a number of similar films directed by Mann in the next few years.

This theme culminated in his classic crime film Heat (1985), in which the crime elements are interspersed with the personal feelings of master criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and his desire for Eady (Amy Brenneman). In this film, Mann contrasts McCauley with the obsessive cop Lt. Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), and McCauley emerges a more sympathetic character. The genesis of Heat was Mann's television film L.A. Takedown (1989).

In the 1980s, Mann developed and produced Miami Vice (1989) and Crime Story (1986–88) for television. In 2006, he directed a large-budget film version of Miami Vice with Colin Farrell as Sonny Crockett and Jamie Foxx as Ricardo Tubbs. This followed one of Mann's best films, Collateral (2004), with Tom Cruise as a hit man who takes a taxi driver (Foxx) on a wild ride during a night of violence and murder in Los Angeles. Collateral was filmed by Mann on high-definition video. His 2009 gangster film Public Enemies was a romantic interpretation of gangster John Dillinger (Johnny Depp). One of Mann's first films, Manhunter (1996), presents a more complex and less charming version of Hannibal Lecter (Brian Cox) than did subsequent films with Anthony Hopkins in the role.

MÄN SOM HATAR KVINNOR (2009) AND FLICKAN SOM LEKTE MED ELDEN (2009). Based on the first book of Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" series, the film Män som hatar kvinnor—literally translated as "Men Who Hate Women," but released overseas as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—remains faithful to the novel. This combination of investigative thriller and murder mystery begins in December 2002 when Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), publisher and part-owner of the investigative Swedish political magazine Millennium, is sentenced to three months in jail for libel. Computer hacker and surveillance agent Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) is employed to investigate Blomkvist, and she delivers her report to 82-year-old Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube). Vanger hires Blomkvist to investigate the disappearance of his grandniece Harriet, who went missing from a provincial fair in 1966. Meanwhile, Salander is being sexually abused by her legal guardian Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson). She eventually turns the tables on Bjurman by recording his rape and tattoos his stomach with the words "rapist" and "sadist."

Following clues and incidents, including dried flowers, black-and-white photographs, a diary with numbers and names that don't match, biblical references, religious rituals, Nazism, and sexual perversions, Salander and Blomkvist trace the deaths of a number of Jewish women to Harriet's brother Martin (Peter Haber). Harriet is found living in Australia and returns to Sweden, where she explains that she left the family in 1966 after killing her father, Gottfried. Gottfried, with Martin, was sexually abusing her while also murdering Jewish women.

Män som hatar kvinnor was a worldwide commercial success. Rapace as Salander gives the film a real edge as the heavily tattooed, lesbian computer hacker with body piercings and a troubled past. The title of Larsson's novel, Men Who Hate Women, accurately describes the film's main discourse, which details violence directed toward women. Harriet and Salander suffer sexual abuse, Harriet from her father and brother, and Salander from Bjurman, her state-appointed guardian. Also, as we discover in the film's sequel Flickan som lekte med elden, she was sexually abused by her father when she was a child. She is not, however, a victim, as she is extremely resourceful. Motivated by revenge and self-preservation, she is shown to be capable of inflicting pain and retribution on anyone who threatens her.

The film's plot is consistent with a recurring theme in the crime genre in the past 30 years (for example, in Abel Ferrara's Angel of Vengeance, 1981): the abused woman in a rape-revenge fantasy storyline that demands violent retribution. What elevates Män som hatar kvinnor from other exploitation films is the film's gothic atmosphere (especially in the Vanger island residence), the almost wordless relationship between the investigative journalist and the psychologically damaged but lethal punk hacker, and the film's satisfying sense of retribution.

The second film in the series, Flickan som lekte med elden (released overseas as The Girl Who Played with Fire) picks up where the previous film left off, with Salander returning to Sweden to discover that she is accused of murdering two reporters investigating sex trafficking in Sweden as well as her guardian Bjurman. Only Blomkvist believes she is innocent. The subsequent investigation, conducted independently by Blomkvist and Salander, leads to the mysterious Russian gangster "Zala" and his superhuman killer Ronald Niedermann (Micke Spreitze), who suffers from congenital analgesia, an inability to feel pain. Zala turns out to be Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov), Salander's father, who sexually abused her and her mother years ago. As a young girl, Salander retaliated by pouring fuel over him and setting fire to his face and body. She also learns that Niedermann is her half-brother. At the film's climax, Salander attacks her father with an ax, and the film ends with Salander and Zalachenko severely wounded and Niedermann escaping into the woods—thereby setting up the third film in the trilogy, Luftslottet som sprängdes (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, 2009).

Flickan som lekte med elden, directed by Daniel Alfredson, did not receive the same rapturous critical response as the first film, since the concept had lost some of its novelty with the critics. Rapace dominates the film, and when she is off-screen, the film loses momentum with its intricate plotting. In December 2011, Hollywood released its own version of Larsson's first novel as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, directed by David Fincher with Daniel Craig as Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as Salander.

MARPLE, MISS JANE. Miss Marple rivals Hercule Poirot as Agatha Christie's most popular detective. She was not the first spinster detective—that honor belongs to Anna Katherine Green's Amelia Butterworth. Nevertheless, Marple is the most famous spinster in the history of detective fiction. She first appeared in 1927 in a short story involving members of the Tuesday Club, a discussion group in the Kent village of St. Mary Mead that meets to discuss unsolved crimes. Based on Christie's grandmother, Marple's first appearance in a novel was in 1930 in Murder at the Vicarage. Miss Marple's age, somewhere between 65 and 70, and genteel demeanor (her hobbies are gardening and knitting) camouflage an agile mind. The secret of her success resides in her English village background, where years of observing village life have enabled her to understand human behavior. Often she draws upon incidents in St. Mary Mead to find the solution to a crime. While St. Mary Mead is the setting for three novels and a number of short stories, Marple often moves outside of the village.

Margaret Rutherford starred as Marple in four films for MGM that were filmed in Great Britain. The first, Murder, She Said (1962), was based on Christie's 1957 novel 4:50 from Paddington. This was followed by Murder at the Gallop (1963), based on After the Funeral (1953), which featured not Marple but Poirot. Then came Murder Most Foul (1964), based on another Poirot novel, Mrs. McGinty's Dead (1952). The final film in the series, Murder Ahoy (1964), was an original story and screenplay by David Pursall and Jack Seddon. The films were directed by George Pollock, who also directed Ten Little Indians (1965), the second film version of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers (1939). These four films added a new character, an elderly librarian played by Rutherford's real-life husband Stringer Davis, as Marple's friend. Rutherford also appeared as Marple in a cameo role in The Alphabet Murders (1965), starring Tony Randall as Poirot.

Ita Evers, an Estonian actress, played Marple in Tayna chyornykh drozdov (1983), a Russian adaptation of Christie's A Pocketful of Rye. In 1980, Angela Lansbury was Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd, a large-budget British adaptation of Christie's 1962 novel. The film costarred Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, and Kim Novak, with Edward Fox as Inspector Craddock, who assists Marple's investigation into a murder that occurs during the making of a film in St. Mary Mead. Bengali actress Rakhee Gulzar played Ranga Pishima, a Miss Marple–type character in Shubho mahurat (2003), an Indian adaptation of Christie's The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side.

In 1956, British singer and actress Gracie Fields starred in an American television adaptation of Christie's 1950 novel A Murder Is Announced for Goodyear Playhouse. Inga Langen played Marple in 1970 in Mord im Pfarrhaus, a West German television adaptation of Murder at the Vicarage. In the 1980s, Broadway star Helen Hayes starred as Marple in two made-for-television films for CBS: A Caribbean Mystery (1983) and Murder with Mirrors (1984). Beginning in 1983, the BBC produced 12 made-for-television films starring Joan Hickson as Marple. The British production company ITV resumed production of Miss Marple films for television in 2004 with Geraldine McEwan as Marple, a role that Julia McKenzie took over after three years. See also CLASSICAL DETECTIVE FILMS.

MARQUAND, JOHN P. See MR. MOTO.

MASK OF FU MANCHU, THE (1932). This MGM production was the most elaborate screen adaptation of Sax Rohmer's diabolical Oriental character Fu Manchu. It also benefited from the fact that it was released in 1932, two years before the Production Code was overhauled by Joseph Breen. Thus the film included scenes that would have been censored two years later. When the film was rereleased in the 1970s, a number of scenes involving racist comments and acts of sadism were deleted. They have now been restored.

The plot involves a race between Fu Manchu (Boris Karloff) and the head of British Security, Arthur Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone), to find the tomb of Genghis Khan and acquire his golden sword. Nayland Smith's party also includes Sheila Barton (Karen Morley), her boyfriend Terence Granville (Charles Starrett), and Von Berg (Jean Hersholt). Fu Manchu wants the sword because he believes it will allow him to rally the entire Asian world so that it will rise up against Europeans. This racist premise, based on a fear of the "Yellow Peril," is literally espoused by Fu Manchu when he urges his followers to "conquer and breed. Kill the White Man and steal his women."

The film includes a series of sadistic acts, including sexual sadism involving Fu Manchu's daughter Fah Lo See (Myrna Loy). In one scene, she becomes aroused at the sight of young Granville, stripped to the waist, being whipped at her orders by two large black men. When he resists the whipping, his clothes are removed, except for a brief costume that covers his waist. He is manacled to an operating table and injected with a special serum that removes his resistance to commands from Fu Manchu and Fah Lo See. The film builds to a climax involving a series of tortures devised by Fu Manchu and Fah Lo See, including Barton dressed in a white costume facing the prospect of being hacked to death, Von Berg imprisoned in a metal cage while large spikes move steadily to impale him, and Nayland Smith being lowered head first into a pit of hungry crocodiles. In the final scene, Nayland Smith decides to throw the sword of Genghis Khan overboard during their voyage back to England just in case Fu Manchu rises again.

MASON, JAMES (1909–1984). Born in Huddersfield, England, James Mason began a stage career after studying architecture at Cambridge University. His first films were either substantial roles in low-budget films, such as Late Extra (1935), or supporting roles in more prestigious films. Mason was voted Great Britain's most popular male film star in the mid-1940s. Mason developed a seemingly dangerous screen persona following a series of roles in which he threatened, and sometimes physically brutalized, his female costars. This included the brooding, war-damaged composer who may have murdered a young girl in The Night Has Eyes (1942), his sadistic Lord Rohan in The Man in Grey (1943), and Ann Todd's perverse mentor in The Seventh Veil (1946).

In the mid-1940s, he starred as highwayman Captain Jackson in the historical crime film The Wicked Lady (1945), and in 1947 he was the doomed Irish gunman Johnny McQueen in Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947), which resulted in offers from Hollywood. Before he left Britain, however, Mason made one more crime film as Michael Joyce, a brain specialist who avenges the murder of his mistress Emma Wright (Rosamund John) by her sister-in-law Kate Howard (Pamela Kellino) in Lawrence Huntington's The Upturned Glass (1947). The film was written by Mason's wife, Pamela Kellino, who also played the woman murdered by Joyce (Mason) in the film.

In Hollywood, Mason was cast as a doctor who tries to help a woman (Barbara Bel Geddes) brutalized by her psychotic husband (Robert Ryan) in Caught (1949), directed by Max Ophüls. In his next film for Ophüls, The Reckless Moment (1949), Mason costarred as Martin Donnelly, a small-time criminal who falls in love with his blackmail victim (Joan Bennett). Toward the end of his career, Mason gave one of his finest performances as the suave, amoral lawyer Edward Concannon in Sidney Lumet's courtroom drama The Verdict (1982).

James Mason's other crime films include Troubled Waters (1936), Twice Branded (1936), Prison Breaker (1936), Catch as Catch Can (1937), I Met a Murderer (1939), Alibi (1942), They Met in the Dark (1943), One Way Street (1950), Lady Possessed (1952), The Man Between (1953), Cry Terror! (1956), The Deadly Affair (1966), Duffy (1968), 11 Harrowhouse (1974), The Marseilles Contract (1974), Murder by Decree (1978), and A Dangerous Summer (1982).

MATURE, VICTOR (1913–1999). Born in California, Victor Mature developed his passion for acting at the Pasadena Community Playhouse. He made his film debut in 1939 in the comedy The Housekeeper's Daughter. However, it was the early film noir I Wake Up Screaming, as the promoter Frankie Christopher in love with showgirl Jill Lynn (Betty Grable), that provided his breakthrough role. After the key role as Doc Holliday in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), Mature was cast in a series of superior crime films, beginning with Kiss of Death (1947). In this film he was the sympathetic ex-convict Nick Bianco, who is pressured by a ruthless assistant district attorney (Brian Donlevy) into infiltrating the gang of psychotic killer Tommy Udo.

Mature's ability to convey anguish and emotional pain was expertly rendered in Kiss of Death, a quality that he also exploited in the 1950s in the British film noir The Long Haul (1957). In this morally complex film directed by Ken Hughes, Mature was Harry Miller, an ex-soldier stationed in Germany who reluctantly follows his British wife to Liverpool and accepts a job as a truck driver. This brings him into contact with a corrupt trucking contractor and his mistress Lynn (Diana Dors). When Miller and Lynn fall in love and he accepts a crooked assignment of furs, his life falls apart.

In 1948, Robert Siodmak cast Mature as the rigid Lieutenant Candella in the superior film noir Cry of the City. Throughout the film, and across New York, Candella obsessively pursues murderer Martin Rome (Richard Conte). As both men emerged from the same background, New York's Little Italy, Siodmak contrasts Candella and Rome and highlights the deficiencies in both the lawman and the criminal.

With his tall, muscular build and his granite, stoic face, Mature was an ideal hero in the biblical epics that proliferated in the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, such as Samson and Delilah (1949), The Robe (1953), The Egyptian (1954), and Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954). Mature was also a racketeer in Gambling House (1951) and a Mafia don in Every Little Nook and Cranny (1972).

McCOY, HORACE (1897–1955). A writer for the pulps, novelist, and prolific scriptwriter, Horace McCoy's decision to become a novelist was made, according to W. R. Burnett, after he read Burnett's 1929 novel Little Caesar. Born in Pegram, Tennessee, McCoy began writing for Black Mask in 1927, and his series of short stories based on the adventures of pilot Jerry Frost, a Texas Ranger, was popular with readers. McCoy left Dallas for Los Angeles in 1931 and, except for sporadic jobs and a few stories for Black Mask, was mostly unemployed. However, a casual job as a bouncer at a dance contest on the Santa Monica pier provided the inspiration for his first, and best, novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? which was published in 1935. Unfortunately, this bleak story of a failed actress who enters a dance marathon contest did not initially enjoy good sales in the United States. It was not until French critics in the 1940s praised McCoy's terse, unsentimental view of life that it received recognition at home. In 1969, it was filmed with Jane Fonda as the failed actress who enters the dance marathon.

At the end of 1932, McCoy received his first credit as a screenwriter, and thereafter he spent most of his time writing scripts in Hollywood with an occasional break for his novels. No Pockets in a Shroud, based on his experiences as a sports journalist in Dallas, focuses on corruption in sports and politics. It was published in Great Britain in 1937 after failing to attract an American publisher; an abridged and censored version was published in America in 1948. I Should Have Stayed at Home, his 1938 book, focuses on the shady and superficial side of Hollywood.

Between 1937 and 1940, he wrote 10 crime films for Paramount, including four films loosely based on J. Edgar Hoover's nonfiction book Persons in Hiding. These films, produced by Paramount's B-picture unit, did little to advance McCoy's career as a screenwriter. Between 1944 and 1947, he spent most of his time writing his next novel, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Warner Bros. purchased the rights after publication for a 1950 film starring James Cagney as the psychologically disturbed gangster. Also in that year, McCoy sold his story treatment "This Is Dynamite" to Paramount for the 1952 film The Turning Point, starring William Holden as investigative reporter Jerry McKibbon, who probes the link between a crime syndicate and politicians in an unnamed Midwestern city. McCoy's story, and the film, appeared at the same time of the Estes Kefauver investigations into criminal syndicates in the United States. In 1954, McCoy coscripted Dangerous Mission with Burnett.

McGRAW, CHARLES (1914–1980). Born Charles Butters in Des Moines, Iowa, Charles McGraw, with his gravely voice and pugnacious mannerisms, was destined to be cast as tough guys and villains. After his film debut in The Undying Monster (1942), McGraw slowly graduated to more substantial roles, including a key part as the hit man who, with another gangster (William Conrad), murders Burt Lancaster in Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946). Similar roles followed, including gangsters in Anthony Mann's T-Men (1948) and His Kind of Woman (1951), plus Maximilian Robespierre's brutal henchman in Mann's violent period drama Reign of Terror (British title The Black Book, 1949).

The early 1950s was a productive period for McGraw as he starred in a number of crime films. In Armored Car Robbery (1950), he was Lt. Jim Cordell, who pursues a vicious killer and master criminal (William Talman). In Richard Fleischer's The Narrow Margin (1952), McGraw's best film, he was Det. Sgt. Walter Brown, who escorts a vital witness, a gangster's widow (Marie Windsor), on a train containing a hit man hired to kill her. During this period, McGraw also starred as a fall guy, insurance detective Joe Peters, who sacrifices his career and life for the wrong woman in Roadblock (1951). In 1955, McGraw played the part made famous by Humphrey Bogart in a television series based on the 1942 film Casablanca. Thereafter, he had supporting roles in crime films such as Chandler (1971), Pendulum (1969), and The Killer inside Me (1976), before his accidental death when he slipped in the shower in 1980.

MELVILLE, JEAN-PIERRE (1917–1973). Jean-Pierre Melville was the quintessential French film director who dominated French crime films for nearly 20 years. Born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, he renamed himself after novelist Herman Melville. Although he was influenced by Hollywood crime films and remained a staunch supporter of them, his own films are recognizably French and differ considerably from the American model. A crucial difference between Melville and his Hollywood colleagues was Melville's ability to retain extraordinary control over his films as producer, director, scriptwriter, editor, and sometimes actor.

His first major crime film, Quand tu liras cette lettre (When You Read This Letter, 1953), was followed by the influential caper film Bob le flambeur (Bob the Gambler, 1956). With location filming in Montmartre and Pigalle, Melville fashioned an exciting tale involving an aging criminal (Roger Duchesne) who is betrayed when he attempts to rob a casino. This film preceded a superior series of crime films over the next decade, including Le doulos (The Finger Man, 1963) and Le deuxième souffle (The Second Breath, 1966). Melville's career peaked with three films starring Alain Delon: as a hit man in Le samouraï (1967), a criminal in Le cercle rouge (The Red Circle, 1970), and a cop in Un flic (Dirty Money, 1972).

MILLAND, RAY (1905–1986). Ray Milland was born Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones in Neath, Wales, and after supporting roles in British films in 1929 and 1930, he moved to Hollywood and signed with Paramount. Milland enjoyed a long career on the screen, working up until his death in 1986. Milland had a key role in the Charlie Chan film Charlie Chan in London (1934), followed by an appearance as the wastrel son Taylor Henry in Paramount's first screen adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key (1935). Paramount also gave him the lead as Capt. Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond in Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1937), although the studio decided not to waste Milland's potential in a low-budget series, so John Howard replaced him for the remaining films in the series.

Milland went on to more prestigious projects, such as Beau Geste (1939), I Wanted Wings (1941), Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear (1944), and Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor playing an alcoholic. He was magazine reporter George Stroud, who becomes embroiled with Charles Laughton's mistress, in John Farrow's film noir The Big Clock (1948). Milland's best role was as the evil Mark Bellis, who seduces missionary widow Olivia Harwood (Ann Todd) in the British noir So Evil My Love (1948).

In 1951, he returned to Great Britain as Clay Douglas searching for his brother's killer in Jacques Tourneur's low-key crime film Circle of Danger. More experimental was The Thief (1952), with Milland as a scientist selling secrets to a foreign power in this innovative film without dialogue. In the mid-1950s, he directed two films for Republic, the western A Man Alone (1955) and the adventure film Lisbon (1956), with Milland also playing the lead roles in both films. In 1957, he starred as a killer on the run in Allan Dwan's tense crime film The River's Edge, shot on location in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Milland continued his career by directing for television, starring in low-budget films, and taking supporting roles on television and in higher-budgeted films such as Love Story (1970).

MILLS, JOHN (1908–2005). Born in North Elmham, Norfolk, British actor John Mills appeared in more than 100 films as well as numerous theater and television appearances. He trained as a dancer and appeared on stage in 1929 in the chorus of The Five o'Clock Revue. Mills alternated between films, musicals, and plays throughout the 1930s.

In the period from 1941 to 1952, Mills worked both sides of the law. In Cottage to Let (1941), his first film after being discharged from the army for medical reasons (a duodenal ulcer), he was a Nazi posing as a member of the Royal Air Force in a Scottish village. In Waterloo Road (1944), Mills was the heroic husband, Pvt. Jim Colter, who goes AWOL to save his young wife from a black marketer. In 1947, he had one of his more challenging roles as a psychologically disturbed man, Jim Ackland, who contemplates suicide after being accused of murdering a young woman, in Roy Ward Baker's The October Man. Robert Hamer's The Long Memory (1952) gave Mills the opportunity to vary this persona as the embittered Phillip Davidson, who serves 12 years for a murder he did not commit; the film ends with Davidson preferring to live in a cabin on the isolated coast of Kent with Eva Bergh rather than return to mainstream society.

In the 1950s, Mills was often cast as authority figures in such films as The Gentle Gunman (1952) and, in a different kind of role, the shabby private detective in The End of the Affair (1955). More typical were two thrillers based on stories by popular British crime writer Francis Durbridge. In Town on Trial (1956), based on Durbridge's The Nylon Murders and directed by John Guillermin, Mills was Scotland Yard superintendent Mike Halloran, who is sent to investigate a murder in a small country town. In The Vicious Circle (1956), scripted by Durbridge and based on his story The Brass Candlestick, Mills is Harley Street specialist Dr. Howard Latimer, framed for the murder of a German woman found dead in his apartment. Late in his career, Mills was Insp. Jim Carson in the British remake of The Big Sleep (1978).

MR. MOTO. The genesis of the Japanese agent Mr. Moto emerged with the death of Earl Derr Biggers, the creator of Charlie Chan. The Saturday Evening Post, which published an annual Chan mystery, suggested to author John P. Marquand that he might take a trip to the Orient and develop an Oriental crime fighter. This suggestion proved productive. Following Marquand's non-Moto novel Ming Yellow, Marquand's first Moto story, "Mr. Moto Takes a Hand," was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, beginning in the 30 March 1935 issue. Marquand's Moto, a shrewd, intelligent, resourceful, and obsequious Japanese secret agent, proved popular with the public, and Marquand followed with Thank You, Mr. Moto in 1936, Think Fast, Mr. Moto in 1937, and Mr. Moto Is So Sorry in 1938. Interspersed among the Moto stories, Marquand won the Pulitzer Prize for his social satire on Boston society in his 1937 noncrime novel, The Late George Apley.

A strong wave of anti-Japanese sentiment in the late 1930s and early 1940s, especially after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, resulted in declining public support for the Japanese agent. Marquand published Last Laugh, Mr. Moto in 1942, after serializing the story in Colliers magazine the previous year under the title Mercator Island. However, with the change in public opinion, this story differs from the earlier ones, reducing Moto to a peripheral character who is finally outwitted by an American. Marquand published one last Moto story, with an aging Moto, in Stopover Tokyo (1956). When 20th Century-Fox filmed the novel the following year, it eliminated Moto entirely and focused only on an American agent (Robert Wagner) sent to Tokyo to flush out Communist spies.

Having established a successful, long-running series with Charlie Chan, 20th Century-Fox decided to produce the Mr. Moto series in 1937. It cast one of its contract players, Peter Lorre, as the Japanese agent. Lorre, an excellent actor, made very little change to his appearance to convincingly portray the Japanese protagonist. Marquand's third Moto novel, Think Fast, Mr. Moto, formed the basis of the first film, which was released in 1937. Fox changed the setting from Honolulu in the novel to Shanghai in the film and retained Marquand's plot involving smuggling. Mr. Moto Takes a Chance (1938) was the next film in production, although it ended up being the fourth Moto film released. The setting this time was the Cambodian jungle. The third film in production, but second to be released, was Thank You, Mr. Moto (1937). Screenwriter Norman Foster, who also directed the film, and Willis Cooper reworked Marquand's plot to focus on the search for seven ancient scrolls that establish the location of Genghis Khan's treasure. Moto eventually acquires and destroys the scrolls.

The fourth film to be produced, but third to be released, was Mr. Moto's Gamble. This one is different from the other Moto films. It was directed by James Tinling, who was scheduled to begin production on Charlie Chan at the Ringside on 10 January 1938. When Warner Oland, playing Chan, had a nervous breakdown and subsequently died in August 1938, 20th Century-Fox temporarily ceased production of the Chan films and decided to rework Charlie Chan at the Ringside as a Moto film. Keye Luke, who played Chan's number one son in the Oland films, was retained for Mr. Moto's Gamble as Lee Chan because considerable footage had already been filmed with him.

Foster was back as director and co-screenwriter for the fifth Moto film, Mysterious Mr. Moto (1938). This was a more complex entry that begins with Moto escaping from Devil's Island with a criminal, Pierre Brissac (Leon Ames). In Mr. Moto's Last Warning (1939), one of the best films in the series, the setting is Port Said, Egypt, where spies attempt to sabotage French ships. The seventh Moto film in production, but the last to be released, was Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation (1939), involving an attempt to steal the crown of the Queen of Sheba.

The eighth and final Moto film in production was Mr. Moto in Danger Island (1939). Herbert Leeds replaced Foster as director, and the film was based not on one of Marquand's novels but on John W. Vandercook's 1933 novel Murder in Trinidad, which had formed the basis of an earlier film released in 1934. Mr. Moto in Danger Island was a fine end to the series as it was action based, with Moto summoned to Puerto Rico to investigate diamond smuggling. This film was also intended to be a Charlie Chan film. It was released in the United States in April 1939, a time when anti-Japanese sentiment was growing. This, plus Lorre's unwillingness to be involved in B movies, resulted in the cancellation of this better-than-average series, for which the studio expertly produced various exotic locales on its back lot.

Twenty-six years later, 20th Century-Fox released The Return of Mr. Moto (1965). However, it had little in common with the earlier series, being influenced by the James Bond films that were in vogue at that time. In this film, Moto is more athletic and, as a member of Interpol, he is assigned to protect an oil executive. Actor Henry Silva, with expertise as a martial artist, was cast as Moto, who foils a plot by an ex-Nazi to gain control of oil resources in the Middle East. The film was not a commercial success.

MITCHUM, ROBERT (1917–1997). Robert Charles Durman Mitchum, born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was expelled from school, rode boxcars, and was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah and sentenced to the chain gang before he joined the Long Beach Player's Guild, where he was cast as gangster Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. During World War II, Harry Sherman, the producer of the Hopalong Cassidy films, gave Mitchum his chance in Hollywood with supporting roles, mainly villains, in four films with William Boyd. Mitchum followed this as a murderer in When Strangers Marry (1944) before his big break, and an Academy Award nomination, in The Story of GI Joe (1945).

After the war, Mitchum returned to RKO and immediately found a niche in the moral complexities of film noir. Although he exuded masculinity and a sense of trouble, the studio during this period often cast Mitchum as troubled, passive characters—most notably in The Locket (1947), where he commits suicide after falling in love with a psychologically unstable woman. Similarly, in Out of the Past (1947), he sacrifices his vocation as a private detective, and ultimately his life, for a femme fatale (Jane Greer). This pattern was repeated in Where Danger Lives (1950), in which he plays a doctor manipulated by a scheming woman (Faith Domergue) after she has killed her husband. Jean Simmons also inveigles him into her world of madness and death in Angel Face (1952).

After leaving RKO, Mitchum mostly abandoned this persona for more conventional and heroic roles in such films as River of No Return (1954) and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957). However, in between these films, he gave one of his most memorable performances as "Preacher" Harry Powell, the psychotic villain, in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955). Mitchum returned to the crime genre in the 1960s and 1970s playing characters resigned to their fate in a cruel world—such as Harry Kilmer, a retired private detective who tries to rescue a friend's daughter in Japan, in The Yakuza (1975).

A consummate actor, Mitchum could play world-weary private detectives, such as Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely (1975) and The Big Sleep (1978), or psychotic criminals, such as Max Cady in Cape Fear (1962). He was also effective as the sad, middle-aged, small-time criminal trying to extricate himself from the police and his associates in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973).

Mitchum's other crime films include Undercurrent (1946), Crossfire (1947), The Big Steal (1949), His Kind of Woman (1951), The Racket (1951), Second Chance (1953), The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), The Amsterdam Kill (1977), Nightkill (1980), Agency (1981), a brief cameo in the Cape Fear remake (1991), and Woman of Desire (1993).

MOU GAAN DOU (2002). This emotionally and morally complex police thriller revitalized the Hong Kong cinema and generated two sequels within a year of its release. The film was also successful when it was released in the United States and elsewhere as Infernal Affairs, a title that reflects the film's closing quote involving the Buddhist concept of the Eighth Hell as life as a state of "continuous hell." The film eschews the pyrotechnic action sequences often associated with the Hong Kong cinema in favor of a character-driven plot involving personal torment and conflicting loyalties. The film's visual emphasis on gleaming surfaces captures the duplicitous basis of the plot, which involves two men: Ming (Andy Lau), a young man recruited from the ranks of the police graduates by Triad boss Hon Sam (Eric Tsang) to become his informer in the police department. Ming's counterpart is Yan (Tony Leung), a police cadet selected from the same graduating class by Superintendent Wong to infiltrate the Triad controlled by Hon Sam. Ten years later, Yan's attempt to reenter the police force is thwarted by events following Wong's murder.

The two moles Yan and Ming are successful in their assigned responsibilities. Yan becomes a trusted ally for Hon Sam, while Ming rises quickly through the ranks to a position of executive power in the police force. Both men experience anxiety emanating from their double lives. Yan suffers from insomnia and finds rest and security only on a psychotherapist's couch. Ming, on the other hand, shares an apartment with his lover, a writer who agonizes over the main character in her latest novel—she cannot decide whether he is good or bad. Ming faces the same dilemma. He is able to master the departmental politics necessary to propel him into a top job while simultaneously reporting to Hon Sam. As the lives of the two men become increasingly tangled, these anxieties intensify.

Directed by Lau Wai-Keung and Alan Mak, Mou Gaan Dou evolves into an intricate game of cat and mouse, as both men acknowledge the existence, if not identity, of the other. The seemingly good cop is pursued by the Triad gangster until the climax on the roof of a high-rise building where both men confront their real identities. The film was released with two different endings. While the print released in China imposed a banal, moralistic ending, the rest of the world enjoyed the irony inherent in the film's true ending. Four years later, director Martin Scorsese reworked the film by placing it in Boston in The Departed (2006).

MR73 (2008). Director-writer Olivier Marchal's third crime film—following Gangsters (2002) and 36 quai des Orfèvres (2004)—focuses on the dark underbelly of French society. This time, the corruption is located within the Marseilles police force, whereas 36 quai des Orfèvres had presented a similar situation in Paris. MR73 extends the cynicism and sense of fatalism of the earlier films. The film's title was slang used by French police in the 1970s and 1980s—when director Marchal was a policeman—for the handgun they used: the Manurhin 73. Marchal also cast a number of actors from 36 quai des Orfèvres, such as Daniel Auteuil, Catherine Marchal (the director's wife), and Francis Renaud as the villainous Kovalski.

The film begins with a drunken cop, Louis Schneider (Auteuil), hijacking a bus and its bewildered passengers because its route is too far from his house. This bizarre opening immediately establishes Schneider's fragile mental state and destructive behavior, attributes that escalate during the film. The motivation for Schneider's mental state is provided by the death of his young daughter in a car accident that also rendered his wife incapable of movement or speech. A second narrative strand is introduced by Marchal at the beginning as Charles Subra (Philippe Nahon), a murderer and rapist, seeks parole. His parole is strenuously opposed by a young woman, Justine (Olivia Bonamy), who 25 years earlier witnessed Subra slashing her father's throat and raping and murdering her mother. Marchal then introduces a third narrative strand: the rape and murder of five women by a serial killer.

Gradually, these strands come together, although Marchal is less interested in the investigatory processes undertaken by the police, which are presented in a perfunctory manner. Instead, he traces Schneider's downward spiral while simultaneously exposing the extent of the corruption within the Marseilles police. Eventually we learn that the police are more interested in protecting the identity of the serial killer—the son of a prominent police official—than in providing relief for the families of the dead women by revealing his identity. Subra's parole, and the explicit threat he represents toward the pregnant Justine, tips Schneider over the edge, and he commits two killings to protect her while obtaining some measure of justice for the dead women.
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NEWELL, MIKE (1942– ). Michael Cormac Newell was born in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, England, and joined Granada Television as a trainee director in the early 1960s after leaving Cambridge University. He worked as a television news reporter before directing popular serials such as Coronation Street. After directing a television version of the Alexandre Dumas story The Man in the Iron Mask (1977), which received some theatrical screenings, Newell's first feature film was The Awakening (1980). This was an adaptation of "Jewel of the Seven Stars," one of Bram Stoker's lesser known stories.

In 1981, Newell traveled to New Zealand for the downbeat crime film Bad Blood, which was shot on location in the Koiterangi Valley near Hokitika on the west coast. Based on true events, the film starred Australian actor Jack Thompson as a psychologically disturbed dairy farmer who, after shooting four policemen, becomes the main protagonist in one of New Zealand's largest manhunts. This kind of material suited Newell, as a dark fatalistic strain runs through his best films—for instance, the British film Dance with a Stranger (1985), Newell's critically praised account of the destructive relationship between Ruth Ellis, the last woman to hang for murder in Great Britain, and her lover David Blakely.

In Hollywood, Newell directed the bleak gangster film Donnie Brasco (1997), starring Al Pacino as the low-level gangster who forms a relationship with an FBI undercover agent (Johnny Depp). These films, plus the Hugh Grant comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), demonstrated Newell's ability to work in different genres in both Great Britain and the United States. In 2000, Newell was executive producer for two very different films: the award-winning Traffic, a film directed by Steven Soderbergh that examines the U.S.-Mexican drug scene from a variety of viewpoints, and Nick Hornsby's London-based story High Fidelity, transferred to an American setting.

NEWTON, ROBERT (1905–1956). A British actor known for his excessive characters on film and stage, Robert Newton was born into a family of artists. He experienced success at an early age with his stage debut at 15 and his Broadway debut when he replaced Laurence Olivier in Private Lives. However, Newton did not have Olivier's attractive physical features and was relegated to supporting roles in films in the 1930s, including an informer in the adaptation of Edgar Wallace's The Squeaker (1937). He also had a secondary role in The Busman's Holiday (1940), MGM's British version of the exploits of Dorothy Sayers's amateur criminologist Lord Peter Wimsey (played by Robert Montgomery). The film was released as The Haunted Honeymoon in the United States. Newton also appeared in Thorold Dickinson's Gaslight (1940) before winning the lead role in one of his best films, Lance Comfort's 1942 film adaptation of the A. J. Cronin novel Hatter's Castle. Newton gave a masterly performance as the tyrannical James Brodie, a wealthy, selfish man in 19th-century Scotland who, because of his unbridled greed and ambition, destroys his family and everybody else around him.

A rare heroic role for Newton was as Capt. David Grant, who infiltrates an espionage ring in Lawrence Huntington's Night Boat to Dublin (1946). After this, Newton was cast in a succession of villainous or oddball characters, including black marketer Harry Carter who blackmails Burt Lancaster in Kiss the Blood off My Hands (1948). This was followed by physician Clive Riordan in Edward Dmytryk's Obsession (1949), who kidnaps his wife's lover and imprisons him in a bombsite basement. Here Riordan intends to murder his rival and dispose of his body in an acid bath. In this film, Newton manages to contain his excessive style of acting, and Dr. Riordan is presented as a sane man with an insane desire—each night, he transports acid to the bombsite in a hot water bottle before conversing with his victim in a civilized manner.

Newton was also the pirate Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1950) and its sequel Long John Silver (1954). His drinking and excessive lifestyle caught up with him in 1956, and he died after completing a cameo role in Around the World in Eighty Days.

NEW ZEALAND NOIR. On the morning of 8 October 1941, Stanley Graham, a dairy farmer living in the small rural community of Koiterangi on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island, threatened a neighbor with a rifle. Later that morning, Graham and his wife pointed their rifles at a police constable, who retreated to the nearby town of Hokitika and returned to the Graham farm with three policemen. Graham shot and killed all four men. He also shot agricultural instructor George Ridley before escaping into the nearby mountains. He returned to his house the following evening and killed three home guardsmen. While the superficial explanation for the massacre was a government order to collect .303 rifles for the war effort, Graham's murderous response followed a prolonged period during which he felt alienated and persecuted. His only pleasure was to join his wife late at night firing at objects on the farm with their rifles.

In 1981, British director Mike Newell re-created the massacre for the film Bad Blood, starring Australian actors Jack Thompson and Carol Burns as Stanley and Dorothy Graham. Newell made the film in the actual location, the Koiterangi Valley, with Australian cinematographer Gary Hansen. Newell and Hansen transformed this quiet rural valley into a paranoid community dominated by its oppressive landscape of dark mountains and rain-sodden valleys. The mixture of isolation and community loathing is presented as a crucial factor in Graham's descent into madness.

On 22 June 1954, two teenage girls, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, traveled to Victoria Park in Christchurch with Pauline's mother, Honora Rieper. While strolling along a path, Pauline stopped and pointed to a small pink stone on the ground. As her mother leaned over to look at it, Pauline hit her over the head with a brick wrapped in a stocking. After 44 blows from the two girls, Pauline and Juliet ran screaming through the bush. Forty years later, director Peter Jackson and screenwriter Fran Walsh re-created these events in Heavenly Creatures (1994). The genesis of the film emerged out of their desire to present the motivation for the killing in a new light. While not necessarily condoning their actions, Jackson and Walsh tried to develop a cultural context to help explain the actions of the girls and to move beyond the spirit of blame and desire for retribution, as found in newspaper headlines such as "Lesbian Killers' Rampage" that had characterized the case since 1954. They also wanted to restore the existence of the two girls, which been systematically erased after the murder.

The film follows a pattern of repression punctuated by fantasy. It begins with a travelogue of postwar Christchurch, emphasizing its order and conformity, and this quiet sequence ends with chaotic images of the girls' feet as they run wildly through the bush after killing Honora. This juxtaposition dominates the film, as it alternates between a presentation of family and school life in Christchurch, which is shown to be repressive, and the fantasy world of Borovnia, where disorder and chaos—in the form of passion, sex, and murder—thrive.

It is this duality—the battle between order and chaos—that characterizes much of the best crime cinema in New Zealand. Eschewing the comforting characters and plots of many Hollywood crime films, New Zealand cinema often presents a fearful world of physical and psychological isolation. These films consistently present a bleak view of the world, a view similar to that found in Dashiell Hammett's novels (such as The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key) concerning the arbitrariness of existence. This existential denial of any sort of cosmic design or moral providence is not uncommon.

A thin veneer of rationality and order hiding a terrifying subterranean force occurs in the films of Alison Maclean, a Canadian-born filmmaker who spent her formative years growing up in Auckland before moving to New York and Los Angeles. This sense of a dual existence is captured in her award-winning short Kitchen Sink (1989) and her debut feature film Crush (1992). Both films were shown at Cannes. Kitchen Sink begins with a young woman (Theresa Healy) cleaning a long hair from her kitchen sink. As she pulls and pulls, the hair thickens until an entire person emerges from its umbilical cord. The woman's response is a mixture of repulsion and attraction, leading to the death of the "monster." Crush follows this pattern, with the bubbling thermal mud of Rotorua providing the thin barrier between order and chaos. In this film, chaos takes the form of an American, Lane (Marcia Gay Harden). Her Kiwi companion Christina (Donogh Rees) asks her at the beginning of the film, "Do you want my skin?" as both women share a meal of fried chicken. Lane greedily devours Christina's skin. Later, Lane tells a young teenage girl that "this country's obsessed with size." The motivation for this comment was Maclean's sense that New Zealand is always fearful of being crushed by the Other, the unknown fear that permeates the culture.

Other New Zealand films express this fear in different ways. In Vincent Ward's Vigil (1984), the terrifying landscape of New Plymouth threatens a widow and her daughter. At one point in the film, the woman explains, "We can't stop the hills from caving in on us." Similarly, Brad McGann's adaptation of the Maurice Gee novel In My Father's Den (2004) presents a morbid view as a man returns to his rural community in Otago to confront a devastating family secret. His return triggers a tragic sequence of events.

As Christina explains to Lane in Crush, New Zealand is "not like Australia. There are no predators, there's no venomous spiders, no snakes." It is, she argues, a benign paradise where everybody is uneasy because there is an "obsession to uncover the germ of evil, search for the snake. That's the New Zealand psyche." This comment precedes a car crash that damages Christina both physically and psychologically. The film ends with her murderous attack on her former lover. The final image shows the American's body floating serenely down a New Zealand river. See also FILM NOIR.

NICHOLSON, JACK (1937– ). Born in Manhattan and raised by his grandmother, Jack Nicholson thought for many years that his grandmother was his mother and his mother was his sister. He made his film debut in 1958 as a juvenile delinquent in Roger Corman's The Cry Baby Killer. Thereafter, throughout the 1960s, he alternated between television and low-budget films, while also coscripting films such as Thunder Island (1963), starring Gene Nelson as a hit man, and Monte Hellman's adventure film set in the Philippines, Flight to Fury (1964). A scene-stealing supporting role in the surprise hit Easy Rider (1969), followed by the lead role as the oil worker and former concert pianist who travels home with a waitress in Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970), consolidated his career. He also starred as the all-knowing sailor Buddusky who decides to "educate" a young sailor (Randy Quaid) in his custody into the world of drinking and women, with disastrous consequences, in Hal Ashby's bittersweet drama The Last Detail (1973).

His iconic role as the glib private detective J. J. Gittes in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) elevated Nicholson to major stardom. In this metaphor for the political and moral malaise in the United States following the Watergate scandal, Nicholson cemented his persona as an outspoken, larger-than-life tragic figure who fails to understand the depth of the financial and moral corruption in Los Angeles in the 1930s. Nicholson followed with a succession of celebrated performances in both crime and noncrime films. He starred as drifter Frank Chambers seduced into committing a murder in the 1981 remake of James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. In John Huston's darkly comedic gangster film Prizzi's Honor (1985), Nicholson was hit man Charley Partanna, who is forced to kill his wife, Irene (Kathleen Turner), a fellow killer for hire.

This black comedy was counterbalanced by powerful performances in two downbeat crime films. In Bob Rafelson's Blood and Wine (1996), Nicholson plays greedy Miami wine dealer Alex Gates, who participates in a burglary with disastrous consequences for all concerned, including his long-suffering wife (Judy Davis). Nicholson also excelled, in a restrained performance, in the Sean Penn–directed film The Pledge (2001) as a Nevada police detective who, on the day of his retirement, investigates the murder of a young girl. Gradually the case overwhelms his life, and his obsession with honoring his pledge to the dead girl's parents to catch the murderer ends in pain and tragedy.

A more characteristic film for Nicholson was his Irish mobster Frank Costello in Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006). In this violent gangster film, based on the 2002 Hong Kong film Mou Gaan Dou, Costello plants a mole (Matt Damon) in the police department, unaware that there is an undercover policeman (Leonardo DiCaprio) in his own gang.

NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950). When Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at 20th Century-Fox, realized in 1949 that the studio was about to blacklist director Jules Dassin, he urged Dassin to fly to London and start filming Jo Eisinger's script for Night and the City at London Film Studios at Shepperton. He told Dassin to begin with the most expensive scenes, so that it would be costly for the studio to remove him. He also asked Dassin to develop the female role in the film for Gene Tierney, as he wanted to get his female star out of Hollywood following a failed romance. Although Dassin did not have time to read Gerald Kersh's book, which was published in 1938, he devised a startling visual presentation involving a world of dark shadows and derelict buildings. To help overcome the problem of shooting at night, he received the cooperation of many businesses which agreed to leave their lights on. Hence Dassin, assisted by cinematographer Max Greene (Mutz Greenbaum), was able to transform London, including tourist landmarks such as Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, into an urban hell. To accentuate the film's depiction of desolation and alienation, some scenes were filmed just prior to sunrise.

The film begins with Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) running wildly through the dark streets. It also ends with Fabian running through the same wasteland until he is abruptly murdered by his nemesis, the Strangler, and his body dumped into the Thames at Hammersmith. In between, the film traces Fabian's downward spiral. Fabian, in an attempt to elevate himself from his role as a tout for Philip Nosseross's (Francis L. Sullivan) Silver Fox nightclub, enters the corrupt world of wrestling. This brings him into conflict with Kristo (Herbert Lom). To raise funds for his venture, Fabian gets caught between Helen Nosseross's (Googie Withers) desire to leave her husband and her husband's intense jealousy that, in turn, is fueled by sexual frustration.

Night and the City is a startling production from a major Hollywood studio due to its total lack of sentimentality. When Dassin returned to the United States for postproduction work on the film, he was prevented from entering the 20th Century-Fox studio because he had been blacklisted. Dassin had to convey his ideas concerning the film to editors Nick De Maggio and Sidney Stone and composer Franz Waxman by phone as they were too frightened to meet the director in person for fear it might damage their careers. The political climate also affected the film's critical reception, and it received mostly negative reviews in the United States and Britain and performed poorly at the box office. Dassin did not direct another film for five years. Night and the City was remade in 1992 starring Robert De Niro, with the setting transferred from London to New York. See also CITIES.

NOLTE, NICK (1941– ). The physically imposing American actor Nick Nolte was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He made his film debut in 1972 in an uncredited role in the revisionist western Dirty Little Billy, starring Michael J. Pollard as William Bonney—"Billy the Kid." In 1976, Nolte received his break as Tommy Jordache in the hit miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, and this role elevated him to lead roles on the large screen, such as his troubled soldier in Karel Reisz's Who'll Stop the Rain (1978).

Nolte's first major feature film hit was Walter Hill's 48 Hrs. (1982), playing tough cop Jack Cates. The on-screen chemistry between Nolte and Eddie Murphy in this blend of action, crime, and comedy produced a sequel in 1990, Another 48 Hrs., with Nolte and Murphy reprising their roles. With his tall, burly body and gravelly voice, Nolte easily graduated to villainous roles such as the corrupt, violent Capt. Michael Brennan in Sidney Lumet's Q & A (1990), while New Zealand–born director Lee Tamahori drew from the same persona (albeit not as loathsome as Brennan) in Mulholland Falls (1996). Here Nolte was the leader of a squad of tough cops (Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen, and Chris Penn) known as the "Hat Squad" in Los Angeles in the postwar period. These cops did not hesitate in taking the law into their own hands. Equally morally problematic was Nolte's troubled father trying to protect his family in Cape Fear (1991), Martin Scorsese's remake of J. Lee Thompson's 1962 film that presents Gregory Peck as a more morally virtuous parent.

Night and the City (1950), directed by Jules Dassin. Shown: Richard Widmark.

In Oliver Stone's film noir U Turn (1997), Nolte plays Jack McKenna, who hires drifter Sean Penn to kill his unfaithful wife, Grace McKenna (Jennifer Lopez). More challenging was his performance as the troubled small-town New Hampshire cop Wade Whitehouse, who struggles to recover from years of physical and emotional abuse from father Glen (James Coburn) in Paul Schrader's intense but downbeat film Affliction (1997). Following a supporting role as a cop chasing a serial killer in Night Watch (1998), a remake by Danish director Ole Bornedal's of his own 1995 Danish film Nattevagten, Nolte starred as Bob Montagnet in The Good Thief. This was a 2002 remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's film Bob the Gambler (1956), with Nolte as a thief, based in Nice, forced to rob a casino to fund his gambling debts and drug addiction. Nolte's relaxed performance anchors Neil Jordan's leisurely caper film.
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O'BRIEN, EDMOND (1915–1985). Born in New York City, Edmond O'Brien briefly attended Fordham University before studying acting at Columbia University. He made his Broadway debut in 1936. His major film break came when RKO executive Pandro S. Berman brought him to Hollywood for the key supporting role of Gringoire in the studio's prestigious production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) starring Charles Laughton. This role followed a period as a member of Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre group on radio and stage.

With his solidly built frame, heavy facial features, and strong voice, he specialized in roles that were designed to portray the ordinary, or everyday, man. This was most evident in Ida Lupino's film noir The Hitch-Hiker (1953) with O'Brien as Roy Collins who, with fishing partner Frank Lovejoy, is captured by a serial killer (William Talman) while driving across the Baja California desert in Mexico. O'Brien was perfect for this role, as Lupino's film emphasizes the fact that the two men are not heroes but two family men forced into a nightmarish situation. O'Brien perfected his everyman image as the likable investigator in Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1949) and the undercover cop Vic Pardo in White Heat (1949), who infiltrates James Cagney's gang. O'Brien took this persona to the limit as Frank Bigelow, a man poisoned for no obvious reason in the film noir D.O.A. (1950).

In the 1950s, O'Brien branched out into more challenging roles, such as the morally corrupt telephone repairman Mal Granger who, when the opportunity presents itself, transforms himself into the head of a betting syndicate in 711 Ocean Drive (1950) before dying in a spectacular fashion on top of the Hoover Dam. Similarly, in Shield for Murder (1954), codirected by O'Brien and Howard W. Koch, O'Brien is a corrupt cop prepared to murder to obtain money to fund his material desires. One of his most unusual films was Lupino's The Bigamist (1953), with O'Brien exposed as a man with two wives. O'Brien won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Barefoot Contessa in 1954 and received another nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as a drunken senator who exposes a coup in the political thriller Seven Days in May (1964).

O'Brien's other crime films include Brute Force (1947), The Web (1947), A Double Life (1947), An Act of Murder (1948), Backfire (1950), Between Midnight and Dawn (1950), Two of a Kind (1951), The Turning Point (1952), Man in the Dark (1953), A Cry in the Night (1956), The 3rd Voice (1960), and 99 and 44/100% Dead (1974).

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984). Italian director Sergio Leone's melancholy masterpiece was, through no fault of the director, one of the worst gangster films when it was released in 1984. After it was reedited, restoring Leone's intricate narrative structure, it became one of the very best. It was initially released in a 139-minute version, compared with the 229 minutes of the reedited version that includes Leone's careful shifts between three different periods—1923, 1933, and 1968. Key scenes, such as the brutal rape of Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern) by Noodles (Robert De Niro), were eliminated in earlier versions.

While Leone's film is often compared with Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), they are very different films in content and tone. Coppola's film is sentimental and nostalgic, while Leone's is dark, disturbing, and imbued with a deep sense of tragedy and guilt. The film begins and closes with Noodles in an opium den as he seeks to disperse the painful memories involving his boyhood dream girl, Deborah, and his boyhood friend Max (James Woods). Noodles cannot escape the memory of raping Deborah after their one romantic night together in an empty nightclub, and he cannot forgive himself for informing on Max to the police. To intensify his guilt, Leone uses a recurring sound motif, a ringing phone, throughout the film (although in the first American version, the sound of the phone ringing is reduced from 22 rings to only one).

After a 10-year absence from directing, Leone was encouraged in the early 1980s by his friend Martin Scorsese to direct Once upon a Time in America, which Leone had developed over a 20-year period. Scorsese also assisted Leone by bringing him into contact with producer Arnon Milchan and actor De Niro. The film was loosely based on the novel The Hoods, David Aaranson's autobiography, written under the pseudonym Harry Grey.

Leone's story involves the rise of four Jewish gangsters of Eastern European descent (not Italian) who escape the poverty of their Lower East Side ghetto to enjoy the material benefits of the American Dream as major criminals in New York 10 years later. Their success is due to their ability to exploit police and judicial corruption during the Prohibition period in the 1920s and early 1930s. Leone intersperses the story of their early years and their rise with the return of Noodles to New York in 1968 following a mysterious invitation from a powerful politician, Senator Bailey. Bailey turns out to be Max, the boyhood friend who supposedly died 35 years earlier in a police shootout following a tip-off from Noodles. Noodles also pays a visit to Deborah, who is now Bailey's mistress and a successful actress. Here he gains a fleeting glimpse of his son, a product of his impregnation of Deborah.

Once upon a Time in America benefits from Ennio Morricone's evocative score, which was written before the movie was filmed and played on the set for the actors to convey a sense of loss, a feeling of lost opportunities. While the pragmatic and ruthless Max succeeds by seemingly achieving the material benefits of the American Dream, Noodles is consigned to years of guilt and despair—alleviated only by the opium den. Scorsese claims Leone wanted to call the film There Was a Certain Type of Cinema because, Scorsese maintained, the film was an expression of Leone's love for the classical genres produced by Hollywood during the heyday of the studio period.

This film, in which Leone invested his deepest feelings about memory, obsession, and friendship, may have contributed to his death. He died five years after the film's release following a painful and prolonged dispute with the U.S. distributors who emasculated his masterpiece.
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PACINO, AL (1940– ). Raised in the South Bronx, New York, this son of Italian-American parents has been a towering presence in Hollywood since his performance as Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972). Pacino studied at the Actors Studio in the 1960s, followed by theater and minor film roles prior to The Godfather. After the massive success of this film, he selected challenging roles, mainly as outsiders, such as the hippie cop who informs on his corrupt colleagues in Serpico (1973), the troubled veteran who robs a bank to pay for his transgendered partner's sex-change operation in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and undercover cop Steve Burns who infiltrates the sadomasochist bars in New York in his quest to find the serial killer of gay men in William Friedkin's controversial film Cruising (1980). In one of his best known films, Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983), Pacino, as the Cuban criminal Tony Montana, gives an extroverted performance that matches De Palma's operatic approach to this remake of Howard Hawks's classic 1932 gangster film.

After an absence from the screen of four years, where he concentrated on the stage, Pacino was Det. Frank Keller chasing a serial killer in Sea of Love (1989). This role marked a transition in Pacino's career, as his characters subsequently appeared less optimistic and more self-aware, like his gangster Carlito Brigante in De Palma's Carlito's Way (1993), the troubled, obsessive cop Lt. Vincent Hanna pursuing criminal Neal McCauley (Robert De Niro) in Michael Mann's Heat (1995), and his idealistic mayor who cannot resist his corrupt impulses in City Hall (1996). However, it was his low-level Mafia gangster Lefty Ruggiero, who is betrayed by an undercover cop he treats like a son, in Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco (1997) that gave Pacino arguably his best role. In Christopher Nolan's Insomnia (2002), a remake of Erik Skjoldbjærg's 1997 Norwegian thriller, Pacino is another troubled cop dispatched to Alaska with his partner (Martin Donovan) to catch a devious serial killer (Robin Williams). He was reunited with De Niro in Righteous Kill (2008) with Pacino as a corrupt cop.

PALMER, STUART (1905–1968). Born in Baraboo, Wisconsin, Stuart Palmer attracted attention in 1931 with his spinster detective, schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers, in his first novel, The Penguin Pool Murder. This was one year after the appearance of Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple in her first novel Murder at the Vicarage. However, while Marple had to wait until 1962 for her first screen appearance in Murder, She Said, RKO launched a series of mystery films featuring Withers in 1932, beginning with The Penguin Pool Murder starring Edna May Oliver as the spinster sleuth. The essential differences between Christie's Marple and Palmer's creation emanated from the fact that Withers was a more outspoken, volatile character and Palmer's stories emphasized comedy as much as the intricate puzzles that characterized Christie's fiction.

After attending the University of Wisconsin, Palmer worked at a variety of jobs before The Penguin Pool Murder established his career in crime fiction. Thereafter, he developed a specific niche in this field of fiction as an expert practitioner able to blend comedy smoothly with the conventions of the crime novel. RKO continued to adapt Palmer's novels for its Hildegarde Withers series, including Murder on the Blackboard (1934) and Murder on a Honeymoon (1935), which was Oliver's third and last appearance as Withers. Murder on a Honeymoon was based on Palmer's novel The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree. Murder on a Bridle Path (1936) stars Helen Broderick as Withers and was based on Palmer's novel The Puzzle of the Red Stallion. Zasu Pitts replaced Broderick for The Plot Thickens (1936) and Forty Naughty Girls (1937), both based on stories by Palmer.

In 1936, he received his first film credit as a scriptwriter for Yellowstone, a murder story filmed in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. For the next seven years, Palmer's career as a screenwriter flourished due to his ability to fashion scripts that were an adroit mixture of comedy and crime. This skill was evident in films such as Hollywood Stadium Mystery (1938); Bulldog Drummond's Peril (1938); Arrest Bulldog Drummond (1939); Bulldog Drummond's Bride (1939); Death of a Champion (1939), involving the death of a champion dog, a Great Dane; Emergency Squad (1940); Opened by Mystery (1940); Who Killed Aunt Maggie? (1940); The Smiling Ghost (1941); Secrets of the Lone Wolf (1941); Halfway to Shanghai (1942), concerning a murder on a train bound for Shanghai; The Falcon's Brother (1942), which united Palmer with female crime writer Craig Rice (aka Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig); X Marks the Spot (1942); The Falcon Strikes Back (1943); Murder in Times Square (1943); and Petticoat Larceny (1943).

Palmer enlisted in the army during World War II, and this represented a decisive break in his Hollywood career. He never recovered his prewar momentum afterward, possibly due to the shift in the crime film from the comedy-crime films of the 1930s to the more hard-edged stories that dominated Hollywood in the postwar period. Palmer received only two screen credits after 1943, the first being Step by Step (1946), starring Lawrence Tierney and Anne Jeffreys as a young couple pursued by the police who believe, wrongly, that Tierney has murdered a federal agent. In 1950, MGM released Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone based on Once upon a Train; or, The Loco Motive by Rice and Palmer. The original story involved both Rice's series character, lawyer John J. Malone, and Palmer's Withers. MGM, however, eliminated Withers from the film and substituted Harriet "Hattie" O'Malley.

PATTERSON, LEE (1929–2007). Born in Vancouver, Lee Patterson was a popular star of supporting features in the British cinema throughout the 1950s before moving to Hollywood in 1960 and a lead role in the television series Surfside Six. Patterson remained in the United States, where he forged a career in television, along with supporting roles in Hollywood films, that lasted until 1994. With his dark hair, good looks, and masculine build, Patterson was suitable in lead roles, often of men unwillingly implicated in a crime. This included Vernon Sewell's Soho Incident (1956), with Patterson as a Canadian boxer seduced into the activities of a criminal gang by a femme fatale (Faith Domergue). Lawrence Huntington's Deadly Record (1959) and Sidney Hayer's White Trap (1959) also feature Patterson in two low-budget crime films that were released in Britain as second features before appearing on American television in 1961 as part of the Kraft Mystery Theater. Patterson's other crime films include 36 Hours (U.S. title Terror Street, 1953) and The Good Die Young (1954).

PAYNE, JOHN (1912–1989). John Payne's film career can be neatly divided into two parts, with the crime films appearing in the latter half of his career. Born in Roanoke, Virginia, Payne began his entertainment career as a singer, moved into summer stock, and spent the first 10 years mainly in musicals, primarily at 20th Century-Fox. Only after he had left Fox in the mid-1940s and his boyish looks had waned did he shift to crime films. These included Larceny (1948), where he plays a con man involved in a plot with Dan Duryea to swindle a war widow; The Crooked Way (1949), where he suffers from amnesia following a head injury suffered during World War II; and Phil Karlson's 99 River Street (1953) as an ex-boxer falsely accused of killing his unfaithful wife. Payne formed a special relationship with Karlson, who was able to extract a sense of brutality and ruthlessness from the actor in films such as Kansas City Confidential (1952) and Hell's Island (1955). These qualities were also evident in Slightly Scarlet (1956), director Allan Dwan's screen version of James M. Cain's Love's Lovely Counterfeit. In that film, Payne was Ben Grace, an ambitious operator for the syndicate who takes over control of the organization and a large city—until his former boss returns to shoot him. In his last significant crime film, The Boss (1956), Payne had a similar role as a corrupt politician. An automobile accident in 1962 severely hindered Payne's career. His other crime films include Tear Gas Squad (1940), Hidden Fear (1957), and They Ran for Their Lives (also directed by Payne, 1968).

PENN, ARTHUR (1922–2010). Born in Philadelphia, Arthur Penn was an eclectic director who reworked the conventions of western, gangster, and hard-boiled films to present a consistently dark vision of American society. His most notable film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), changed not only the gangster genre but Hollywood itself, as it marked the end of the classical studio system that had been the preeminent production system in Hollywood ever since the 1920s.

One of a group of film directors who emerged from live television dramas in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Penn's first feature film, The Left-Handed Gun (1958), was a strange western that abandoned many of the conventions associated with the genre. Filmed in black-and-white, Penn focused on the emotional and psychological problems of William Bonney (Billy the Kid, played by Paul Newman). In 1955, Penn had directed a television version based on a script by Gore Vidal that refused to conform to the usual depiction of Bonney as either a romantic hero or a vicious killer. Instead, both the film and the television movie focused on the surrogate father-and-son relationship between Bonney and Pat Garrett.

After more success with The Miracle Worker (1962), which Penn had directed on stage and on television, he was replaced by John Frankenheimer on the World War II action thriller The Train (1963). Mickey One (1964), starring Warren Beatty as a nightclub comic on the run from the Mob, was Penn's reaction to the blacklist and the anticommunist hysteria of the late 1940s and 1950s. The Chase (1965), adapted from Horton Foote's novel and play, involves racism and corruption in a small country town.

His most popular and influential film, Bonnie and Clyde, came next. Although Robert Benton and David Newman's script had been offered to other directors, this film was an ideal vehicle for Penn's ability to infuse a piece of history with contemporary issues. His use of violence included the controversial and protracted killing of Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) at the film's climax. The success of this film, which presented the outlaw couple as young, glamorous victims of a vindictive society, sparked the youth movie cycle in the late 1960s. It was also the only film directed by Penn to be nominated for Best Picture, although he was nominated for Best Director for Alice's Restaurant (1969) and The Miracle Worker. Penn's Little Big Man (1970), based on Thomas Berger's sprawling novel, also utilizes history to make a social point in its use of Jack Crabb's (Dustin Hoffman) eyewitness account of the notorious Washita River massacre and George Armstrong Custer's stand at the Little Big Horn.

A more disciplined, but equally effective, film was Penn's move into the world of the hard-boiled detective film, Night Moves (1975). It stars Gene Hackman as private detective Harry Moseby, who unwittingly causes the deaths of two women. In this film, Penn draws upon a pervasive sense of nihilism apparent in American society at this time. Accordingly, the film refuses to provide a comforting solution to the mystery and ends with Moseby trapped on a yacht, aptly named the Point of View, going around in pointless circles.

After Target (1985), starring Hackman as a man trying to find his wife who has been kidnapped, Penn's final crime film, Dead of Winter (1987), is a remake of Joseph H. Lewis's 1945 film My Name Is Julia Ross. Penn's film shifts the location from Cornwall to New England. It stars Mary Steenburgen as the heroine Julie Rose, instead of Julia Ross, who is lured to an isolated house for nefarious reasons.

PINK STRING AND SEALING WAX (1945). This British film, directed by Robert Hamer, is set in 1890s Brighton. It opens with members of the Sutton family anxiously awaiting the return of Edward Sutton (Mervyn Johns), the stern head of the family, for his evening meal. He has spent the day testifying, in his capacity of consulting pharmacist, at the trial of a woman arrested for poisoning her husband. When Peggy Sutton (Sally Ann Howes) notices her father's jaunty approach to the house, she realizes that the woman on trial has been condemned to death.

Patriarchal punishment of the "fallen woman" is a central motif in the film. Edward forbids his son David (Gordon Jackson) from contacting a young woman, while also opposing daughter Victoria's (Jean Ireland) desire to train as an opera singer, as he considers such desires immoral. His philosophy, which he explains to his long-suffering wife, Ellen (Mary Merrall), is that "love and fear are inseparable. God is love but we are taught to fear him." This results in humiliation and disgrace when David's estrangement from his father leads him into a troubled relationship with a married woman, Pearl Bond (Googie Withers). After Pearl poisons her abusive husband, Joe (Garry Marsh), she tries to blackmail Edward to sabotage his investigation into Joe's death. When this fails, Pearl commits suicide.

The film presents a repressive social context that is shown to be the direct consequence of Victorian patriarchy. Director Hamer refuses to reduce Pearl to an outright villain, and he generates considerable sympathy for this strong, sensual woman in an elaborate sequence involving a long tracking shot that records the final moments before she plunges to her death. Her suicide is presented as a necessary precondition for the restoration of patriarchal rule. The film's overt references to prostitution, together with the detailed presentation of Pearl's suicide and the poisoning of her husband, meant that Pink String and Sealing Wax was denied a Production Code Certificate in the United States. It was shown in 1950 in New York without a certificate.

POIROT, HERCULE. Hercule Poirot was created by Agatha Christie in 1916 in her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, although the novel was not published until 1920. Since that time, Poirot has become one of the most famous sleuths. After Christie killed off Poirot in Curtain, published in 1975 but written 30 years earlier, his "death" was reported on the front page of the New York Times.

Described by Christie as five-foot-four with an egg-shaped head, black waxed moustache, and black patent leather shoes to match his formal clothes and cane, this eccentric Belgian detective, like Miss Jane Marple, often camouflaged his sharp mind with a benign, even foppish, manner that was accentuated by his fractured English. According to his own fictitious biography, Poirot retired from the Belgian police force in 1904 and, as a refugee from the German occupation during World War I, escaped to an English village. For 55 years, this elderly (somewhere between 65 and 75 years of age) detective developed a strong following, although Christie began to tire of him from about 1930. Unlike Arthur Conan Doyle's treatment of Sherlock Holmes, when the author tried to kill his sleuth, Christie continued to feature Poirot until her death. Like Miss Marple, Poirot possessed an acute understanding of human behavior gained from years of observing people, and this ability, combined with his logical mind and a tendency for people to underestimate him, allowed him to solve some of the most convoluted crimes in the history of detective fiction.

The first actor to portray Poirot on-screen was Austin Trevor in three British films in the early 1930s. The first was Alibi (1931), based on Christie's 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This was followed by Black Coffee (1931), which was based on Christie's 1931 stage play. The final film starring Trevor was Lord Edgeware Dies (1934), based on Christie's 1933 novel.

In the 1960s, MGM used two of Christie's Poirot novels for its Miss Marple series starring Margaret Rutherford and then followed with The Alphabet Murders (1965), starring American actor Tony Randall as Poirot. This, like the Rutherford films, was filmed in Great Britain. It is an adaptation of Christie's The A.B.C. Murders, and Rutherford appears as Miss Marple in a cameo role.

In 1974, EMI produced a lavish adaptation of one of Christie's best books, Murder on the Orient Express, starring Albert Finney as Poirot and a cast that included Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, and Richard Widmark. The success of this film encouraged EMI to undertake three more large-budget adaptations, although Finney, fearing typecasting, refused to return as the Belgian detective. Peter Ustinov replaced him as Poirot in Death on the Nile (1978), directed by John Guillermin; Evil under the Sun (1982); and Appointment with Death (1988). Ustinov also played Poirot in three made-for-television films: Thirteen at Dinner (1985), Dead Man's Folly (1986), and Murder in Three Acts (1986).

Martin Gabel was the first actor to play Poirot on television in a 1961 General Electric Theater half-hour program. However, the actor most closely associated with Poirot on television is David Suchet, who began portraying the Belgian detective in 1989 for London Weekend Television. Other actors to portray Poirot have included Ian Holm, Alfred Molina, Anatoli Ravikoch, Konstantin Rajkin, Heini Gobel, and Horst Bollmann. See also CLASSICAL DETECTIVE FILMS.

POLANSKI, ROMAN (1933– ). Born Rajmund Roman Liebling in Paris of Polish-Jewish parents, Roman Polanski had to face the horrors of the German occupation of Cracow when he was seven and they imprisoned Jewish families in a ghetto. After his parents were taken away to concentration camps, Polanski spent most of World War II evading the Nazis. Polanski's personal memories of this period were reworked into the 2002 film The Pianist through his re-creation of the experiences of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brophy) who survives, against the odds, the German occupation during World War II. Although his mother and other siblings were killed, Polanski was reunited with his father after the war.

In 1953, Polanski was cast in a small role as a rebellious resistance fighter in Andrzej Wajda's A Generation. Wajda then assisted Polanski's entry into the Polish film school at Lodz. A short student film, Two Men and a Wardrobe, directed by Polanski in 1958, attracted attention with its surrealist presentation. His first feature film, Nózw wodzie (Knife in the Water, 1962), established a recurring theme involving the shifts in power, and the rivalries, among a sportswriter, his wife, and a hitchhiker. This film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Polanski went to England for Repulsion (1964), a disturbing film that details a young woman's (Catherine Deneuve) descent into insanity and murder. His second British film, Cul-de-Sac (1965), reworks the gangster-on-the run formula when an aging gangster, American actor Lionel Stander, takes refuge in an isolated house. MGM financed the horror spoof Dance of the Vampires (aka The Fearless Vampire Killers or Pardon Me, but Your Teeth Are in My Neck, 1967), where he appears opposite his future wife, American actress Sharon Tate.

Polanski moved to Hollywood, where he directed the popular horror film Rosemary's Baby (1968). In 1969, Polanski was shattered when Tate and his unborn baby were brutally murdered while he was in London working on a script. His next film was a violent reworking of the Shakespearean tragedy Macbeth (1971). After the lightweight sex comedy What? (1973), Polanski directed Chinatown (1974), a hard-boiled film with a nihilistic ending that Dashiell Hammett would have approved. While the film is set in Los Angeles in the 1930s, the film captures the dark mood of the United States in the early and mid-1970s following the Watergate scandal. The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

After the paranoid thriller Le locataire (The Tenant, 1976), which he filmed in France, he was arrested in 1978 in the United States and charged with having sex with an underage girl. Polanski left for France and has filmed only in Europe since that time. The thriller Frantic (1988) stars Harrison Ford as an American doctor who is forced to enter the underworld after his wife disappears on the first day of their trip to Paris. In Bitter Moon (1992), Polanski returned to the themes, if not the style, of Knife in the Water when a kinky couple (Peter Coyote and Emmanuelle Seigner) involve a British couple (Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas) in their destructive games. In 2010, Polanski returned to the world of power, betrayal, and murder in The Ghost Writer, starring Ewan McGregor as the hapless writer.

POLICE PROCEDURALS. Police procedural films focus on the investigation of a crime by the police. The emphasis is on the process of investigation and not on the behavior or reaction of the criminals. During the early years of the sound period, in 1931 and 1932, a cycle of vigilante films (such as The Beast of the City, 1932) was produced as a reaction against the inability of the police to control the power of gangsters in many American cities. The Beast of the City, for example, begins with a prologue by President Herbert Hoover calling for the glorification of the policeman rather than the gangster. In the mid-1930s, after the classic gangster films were banned by the Production Code Administration, Warner Bros. and other studios cast actors associated with the gangster genre as cops and government agents, such as James Cagney in G-Men (1935). These roles were similar to those of the gangster films in the early 1930s in that the actors played men who were individuals and not part of an investigative team.

This changed after World War II with the cycle of police procedural films that stressed the role of the policeman or agent as a representative of society. Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948) was the first filmed, although Anthony Mann's T-Men was released six weeks earlier. These films were influenced by the semidocumentary cycle of some mid-1940s crime films, produced mainly by Louis de Rochemont at 20th Century-Fox. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, de Rochemont had produced the March of Time newsreels, and he brought this style—including the authoritative voice-over, stirring music, location shooting, and other devices designed to reinforce a sense of "realism"—to his feature films. His first was House on 92nd Street in 1945, followed by 13 Rue Madeleine the next year. Both were directed by Henry Hathaway. These films were concerned with the process of investigation by government agents into foreign espionage, and J. Edgar Hoover encouraged and collaborated with de Rochemont as a means of promoting the FBI.

In addition to The Naked City and T-Men, other police procedural films include The Street with No Name (1948), He Walked by Night (1949), and Union Station (1950). Panic in the Streets (1950) follows the same style. This 20th Century-Fox production was filmed on location in New Orleans and stars Richard Widmark as a U.S. Health Service doctor desperately trying to find a gangster (Jack Palance) infected with bubonic plague. These films share the same dramatic structure. The story is told from the perspective of a government agency—whether it is the police, treasury officials, immigration officers, or public health officials. Often the stories are adapted from police records, FBI files, and newspaper articles, with the emphasis on the investigation, not the plight of the criminal. The function of this subgenre is to reassure the audience that the state can protect them. Hence the films frequently emphasize the power of the state, often through visual imagery such as recurring shots of imposing government buildings and the role of sophisticated technology in apprehending criminals.

In the 1950s, the police procedural shifted to television, with series such as the Dragnet, Mr. District Attorney, and the long-running (1958–63) television adaptation of The Naked City. This subgenre has remained popular on television since the 1950s and includes Without a Trace, the CSI franchise, and the Law and Order franchise.

In 1971, The French Connection was the third-highest grossing film in the United States, and it won every major award at the 1972 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Gene Hackman), Best Director (William Friedkin), Best Writing (Ernest Tidyman), and Best Editing. This film revitalized the police procedural with its troubling presentation of the lead investigator, Popeye Doyle, based on real-life policeman Eddie Egan, who, with his partner Sonny Grosso, uncovers the scheme after noticing a small-time criminal, Sal Boca, living it up at the Copacabana nightclub. Doyle, as he is presented in the film, is shown to be violent, impulsive, and racist. These traits, combined with the film's downbeat ending, with all of the major villains escaping justice, represented a major shift in the genre. The film's gritty, realistic presentation was reinforced by Friedkin's decision to film almost the entire film in the cold, squalid streets of New York. It was followed six weeks later with the release of Dirty Harry (1972), with another flawed detective, played by Clint Eastwood. In this film, however, the villain is dispatched at the end.

POLITICIANS. Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest presents political corruption as natural in Personville, the town where his detective, the Continental Op, is sent. Two years later, Hammett published his most damning story of institutional corruption, The Glass Key. In this story, his protagonist, Ned Beaumont, is the right-hand man of racketeer Paul Madvig, who controls the political machinery, and hence, the entire city. The Glass Key was filmed in 1935 and 1942. This novel, Hammett's favorite, seemed to confirm what many Americans had suspected for a long time, at least since Prohibition: that political corruption was widespread throughout the country. Politicians were often presented as villains in pre-1940s films, such as the corrupt senator played by Claude Rains in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Brian Donlevy's governor in The Great McGinty (1940). However, from the mid-1940s, and throughout the 1950s, political corruption was presented as endemic. Jules Dassin's Brute Force presents a totalitarian state, in the form of a prison controlled by the sadistic Captain Munsey, in a metaphor of contemporary American society. Literal presentations of political corruption include Flamingo Road (1949), All the King's Men (1949), Force of Evil (1949), The Captive City (1952), A Lion in the Streets (1953), The Phenix City Story (1955), New York Confidential (1955), Slightly Scarlet (1956), and The Boss (1956).

In the 1960s, a new film subgenre developed—the political thriller—based on a paranoid view of the state and the existence of subversive forces within society. This began with The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and was followed by Seven Days in May (1964), The President's Analyst (1967), and Executive Action (1973). In the 1970s, the Watergate scandal reactivated this subgenre, leading to such films as The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President's Men (1976), The Domino Principle (1977), Winter Kills (1979), Blow Out (1981), and Silkwood (1983). Politicians also fared badly in the British re-creation of the John Profumo–Christine Keeler scandal, which involved a suspected Russian spy, in Scandal (1989), as well as in American films such as Ruby (1992) and Nixon (1995). Political thrillers, often involving political assassination attempts, continued to thrive with such films as In the Line of Fire (1993), Absolute Power (1997), the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, Shooter (2007), and Vantage Point (2008). See also ITALIAN MAFIA; MAFIA; SERPICO.

PORTMAN, ERIC (1909–1969). Born in Halifax, Yorkshire, England, Eric Portman made his stage debut in 1924 and began appearing in small film roles in the early 1930s. After a brief unsuccessful stint in Hollywood, which included a small role in The Prince and the Pauper (1937), his breakthrough film role was as the ruthless Nazi Lieutenant Hirth, determined to let nothing interfere with his passage across Canada to the safety of a neutral United States in Michael Powell's The Forty Ninth Parallel (1941). Powell used him again as a member of a bomber crew in One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942). He was the factory foreman in Millions Like Us (1943), while director Lance Comfort gave Portman one his best roles in Great Day (1945) as the tragic Capt. John Ellis, a man who lives only in past military glories during World War I. Ellis's inability to adjust to civilian life during World War II results in a series of reckless acts, including petty theft, followed by a suicide attempt. Portman was also Thomas Culpepper in A Canterbury Tale (1944), a strange justice of the peace who diverts soldiers away from the local women by pouring glue on the hair of the unsuspecting women.

In the period from 1945 to 1949, Portman perfected his ability to portray unstable, brittle characters. Examples include such roles as the hangman in a doomed love affair with Ann Todd in Daybreak (1948); Paul Mangin, an obsessive artist infatuated with the image of Edana Romney in Corridors of Mirrors (1948); the dangerously effete Richard Howard in The Mark of Cain (1948); a murderer in Wanted for Murder (1946); a husband driven to murder by his unfaithful wife (Greta Gynt) in Dear Murderer (1947); and the sexually ambiguous policeman Ferdinand Maubert who pursues a clever thief (Guy Rolfe) in Robert Hamer's The Spider and the Fly (1949).

Never comfortable with heroic leading-man roles in films, Portman was able to imbue the most conventional film with a suggestion of perversity or psychological disturbance. Certainly his best performances contained a sinister edge. However, he was offered fewer opportunities in the 1950s and 1960s. He was the reliable Colonel Richmond in The Colditz Story (1954), the trade union leader turned governor in His Excellency (1952), a discredited doctor in The Deep Blue Sea (1955), Commo. Wolfgang Schrepke in the Cold War drama The Bedford Incident (1965), and, in his final role, the aging homosexual safecracker in Deadfall (1968).

POWELL, DICK (1904–1963). Dick Powell was born in Mountain View, Arkansas, and was one of the screen's favorite crooners in musicals for Warner Bros. from 42nd Street in 1933 to Naughty but Nice in 1939. Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet (1944) changed his image, and even Raymond Chandler was happy with Powell's interpretation of his famous detective. Although Powell made only a few crime films, his contribution to the genre was significant. He was the first Philip Marlowe (in Murder, My Sweet) and—along with Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941)—he changed the characterization of the screen detective from the lightweight, often comedic, sleuths of the 1930s to the tough, troubled, hard-boiled detectives of the 1940s.

Powell continued in this hard-boiled vein for his new studio, RKO, with Cornered (1945) before moving to Columbia for the role of a (slightly) crooked gambler in Johnny O'Clock (1947). The following year, he was John Forbes, an unhappily married insurance agent attracted to Lizabeth Scott in Pitfall (1948). Powell's last two crime films were Cry Danger (1951), as an ex-convict who finds out that his friends, including an ex-girlfriend (Rhonda Fleming), have betrayed him, resulting in his conviction for a crime he did not commit, and The Tall Target (1951), as a detective trying to prevent the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln during a train trip in 1861.

In the 1950s, Powell began directing, and his first film was Split Second (1953), starring Stephen McNally as an escaped killer who kidnaps a small group of people and takes them to an abandoned mining town in the Nevada desert near an atomic bomb testing site. See also FILM NOIR.

PREMINGER, OTTO (1906–1986). One of the great visual stylists in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, Otto Preminger was raised in Vienna, where he developed a passion for the theater under the supervision of legendary director Max Reinhardt. He directed his first film in 1931 and was invited to Hollywood in 1935 by Joseph Schenk, the founder of 20th Century Pictures. However, Preminger clashed with Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of production, and left for Broadway, where he worked as an actor and director. When Fox wanted to film Margin for Error (1943), Preminger returned to the studio as an actor, since he was appearing in the Broadway production. After Zanuck returned from military service, he resumed hostilities with Preminger and would allow him only to produce, not to direct, the studio's forthcoming production of Laura (1944), starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews. After the departure of director Rouben Mamoulian from Laura, Preminger was given the chance to direct the film that would change his career. He followed with Fallen Angel (1945), also starring Andrews, and five years later, he directed Andrews as an obsessive cop who inadvertently kills a war hero in Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), which also costarred Tierney. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Preminger worked outside the studio system as an independent producer and director. This included a film based on heroin addiction in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), rape and murder in Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and homosexuality and political corruption in Advise and Consent (1962). Other crime films directed by Preminger include Whirlpool (1949), The 13th Letter (1951), and Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965).

PRISON FILMS. The prison film, while usually associated with the crime film, is also found in other genres, including western, swashbuckler, comedy, social protest, and war films. The prisoner-of-war films that proliferated in Great Britain in the 1950s, such as The Colditz Story (1954), differed from the prison film because the prisoners are presented as heroes. Other prison films focus on the victimization of a prisoner, such as The Hill (1965), which was set in a military prison camp in the Libyan desert, where Joe Roberts (Sean Connery) is victimized by the camp's Regimental Sergeant Major Wilson (Harry Andrews). Some prison films focus on tales of survival—including The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), based on the life of convict Robert Stroud (Burt Lancaster), who became a world authority on birds, and The Shawshank Redemption (1994). There are also films that focus on the last days of a real-life convict before his or her execution, such as Susan Hayward as Barbara Graham in I Want to Live! (1958), Alan Alda as Caryl Chessman in Kill Me If You Can (1977), and Tommy Lee Jones as Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song (1982). Other prison films have the same narrative structure as the caper film, except that they are concerned with an elaborate escape attempt rather than a robbery, as in the Escape from Alcatraz (1979), starring Clint Eastwood. A few prison films utilize unusual settings, such as an out-of-control train traveling through Alaska in Runaway Train (1985).

The prison film emerged in the early 1930s with films such as The Big House (1930). This film, which stars Wallace Beery as a condemned convict, was the prototype for subsequent films like 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), starring Spencer Tracy. In the 1940s, Brute Force (1946), consistent with the shifts associated with film noir, emphasized the psychological effects of prison life on a group of doomed men. The film stars Burt Lancaster as Joe Collins, who is tortured and tormented by Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn). A similar, if less pessimistic, film has James Gandolfini tormenting Robert Redford in The Last Castle (2001).

The best prison film, however, was produced not in Hollywood but in Spain. Based on a novel by Francisco Pérez Gandul, director Daniel Monzón was determined that Celda 211 (released overseas as Cell 211, 2009) would not follow the sentimental path of American prison films like The Shawshank Redemption. Monzón's film refuses to present the prisoners in a sentimental manner or preach about the brutal conditions. Instead, he presents a harrowing, morally complex story concerning a young man, Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann), who is about to take up a position as a prison officer when he is caught up in a violent takeover of the prison by Malamadre (Luis Tosar), the leader of the prisoners. To save himself, Juan pretends to be a newly arrived prisoner in cell 211, the site of much pain and suffering. While the first half of the film is suspenseful, violent, and predicable as Juan attempts to maintain his cover until the prison authorities can extricate him, the film follows an entirely different narrative trajectory after Juan's pregnant wife is bashed and killed during a protest outside of the prison. The ending is as bleak as Jules Dassin's Brute Force. See also GANGSTER FILMS.

PRIZZI'S HONOR (1985). John Huston's dark, dangerous, and often funny response to such sentimental depictions of criminal families in films such as The Godfather (1972), this film draws upon many of the same character types, situations (such as the wedding that opens the film), and generic conventions (including the threat of gang warfare, corrupt police, and the authority of the crime patriarch). Working from a screenplay by Richard Condon and Janet Roach (based on Condon's novel), Huston relentlessly undermines the ethos of The Godfather.

The story centers on Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson), a hit man for the Prizzi family in New York. When he breaks off his marriage to the Godfather's granddaughter Maerose (Anjelica Huston) and falls in love with a California hit woman (Kathleen Turner), Maerose plots her revenge. However, the film's intricate plot does not distract the viewer from its central concern revolving around the operation of betrayal on all levels—criminal, romantic, and family. While The Godfather presents a romanticized image of the Mafia, Prizzi's Honor provides a counterview of a world devoid of familial support. During the film, Partanna learns that not even his father (John Randolph) can be trusted. Betrayal permeates the film and continues to the film's climax, where, in circumstances orchestrated by Maerose, Partanna is forced into a deadly confrontation with his beloved wife (Turner) in their bedroom—he armed with a knife and she with a gun. Only one survives.

John Huston elicits every ironic drop of Condon's novel. The smooth production, evident on the screen in the performances of the central characters, was assisted by the fact that the director was working with long-time friend Condon, his own daughter Anjelica, and her lover, at that time, Nicholson. The result is one of John Huston's great films, with Anjelica Huston winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

PROHIBITION. Before the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution came into force on 17 January 1920, Prohibition had been adopted in 26 states in the United States. The enabling legislation known as the Volstead Act, named after the Republican congressman who introduced the bill, prohibited the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages throughout the United States. This led to the rapid growth of organized crime and corruption in police and government agencies. On 5 December 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt fulfilled an election promise and repealed the Act, but it was too late. The huge profits from Prohibition in the 1920s facilitated the growth of organized crime and the rise of gangsters such as Al Capone.

Hollywood in the 1920s, with a few exceptions, virtually ignored Prohibition except as a plot device in such films as Those Who Dance (1924) and Twelve Miles Out (1927). It had little effect on the cinema until it was about to be repealed. Thereafter, in The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), and many other gangster films, the speakeasy, jazz music and dancing girls, hijackings, and scenes depicting hoods bullying bar owners formed an integral part of the genre. This pattern extended into the 1980s in films like The Roaring Twenties (1939), A Slight Case of Murder (1939), Pete Kelly's Blues (1955), Love Me or Leave Me (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), The Cotton Club (1984), Once upon a Time in America (1984), and The Untouchables (1987). A subgenre based on the fact that Prohibition continued in some states after Roosevelt's repeal in 1933 includes such films as Thunder Road (1958), The Moonshine War (1970), The Last American Hero (1973), White Lightning (1973), and Thunder and Lightning (1977). In these films, bootleggers battle government revenue men in rural settings.

PROSTITUTION. Warner Bros.'s production of Marked Women in 1937 was based on the true story of the successful prosecution of gangster Lucky Luciano for "compulsory prostitution" in 1936. The case against Luciano was predicated on the testimony of prostitutes who had been working for him. The film retains aspects of the case but, due to the demands of the Production Code Administration (PCA), the film changed not only the names of the characters but also their profession, due to a censorship requirement against the depiction of, or reference to, prostitutes. Luciano became Johnny Vanning (Eduardo Ciannelli), and the key witness against Luciano, Cokey Flo, was now called Mary (Bette Davis). The film also deleted Flo's drug habit and, importantly, changed the setting from Luciano's brothel to a sleazy nightclub called the Club Intime. Similarly, the women are no longer prostitutes in the film but "hostesses" at the club.

The censors' ban on prostitutes was strengthened in 1934 and lasted until the 1950s. Hence, Hollywood crime films were populated by nightclub hostesses, party girls, and models, while dance-hall girls were found in westerns. All were common euphemisms for prostitutes. There was a shift in this presentation in the final years of World War II and the immediate period after the war. This was part of the formal and ideological changes in the cinema commonly ascribed to film noir in the 1940s.

A striking example of this shift involved actress Joan Bennett in two films for director Fritz Lang in the mid-1940s: The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). While the term "prostitute" is never used, her vocation in each film is clear. But to avoid censorship problems, and knowing scripts were read by Joseph Breen's PCA before a film went into production, this was conveyed not through dialogue but by costume, setting, and Bennett's body language—elements that could be minimized in the script and then emphasized in the actual film. In The Woman in the Window, Bennett was the mysterious Alice who bedazzles Edward G. Robinson. She is first seen walking the street late at night dressed in a provocative costume consisting of a black sheath-like beaded jacket with black feathers adorning her face.

In Scarlet Street, she plays a more down-market prostitute, the slovenly Kitty "Lazy Legs" March, who wanders around in her slip as she seduces a middle-aged married man, again played by Robinson, for his money. A key sequence in the film shows Robinson's moral debasement as Bennett, in a negligee and lying provocatively on her bed, encourages Robinson, on his knees, to paint her toenails. This overt depiction of male submission was surprisingly passed by the PCA. Even more surprising was the fact that the PCA permitted the film's ending, wherein Kitty's killer (Robinson) wanders the street free (even if he is presented as mentally disturbed), while an innocent man, Kitty's pimp (Dan Duryea), is executed for her murder. Similar depictions of prostitution soon followed, for example, in Crossfire (1947), which shows Gloria Grahame as a sad nightclub hostess who takes soldiers back to her apartment, where her middle-aged male "friend" also lives.

Censorship strictures broke down throughout the 1950s—especially after Otto Preminger's challenge to the power of the PCA by including the words "virgin" and "seduce" in The Moon Is Blue (1953) and the decision by United Artists to release the film without the mandatory Production Code seal. In 1962, Edward Dmytryk's Walk on the Wild Side was set in a New Orleans brothel run by a lesbian madam (Barbara Stanwyck). Two years later, A House Is Not a Home traced the career of underworld madam Polly Adler (Shelley Winters). The film shows politicians and gangsters, such as Lucky Luciano (Cesar Romero), cavorting with prostitutes. The film did not to seek a Production Code seal of approval. Executive producer Joseph E. Levine exploited the "controversy" when the Catholic Legion of Decency condemned it for being "morally objectionable."

In the next few years, not only was prostitution openly depicted in Hollywood films, but the moral taint associated with it began to wane. For example, Jane Fonda won an Academy Award for her performance as a call girl in the mystery thriller Klute (1971). Similarly, Nicole Britton (Catherine Deneuve) in Robert Aldrich's police film Hustle (1975) is both the live-in girlfriend of police detective Lt. Phil Gaines (Burt Reynolds) and a prostitute. By 1997, in L.A. Confidential, both female (Kim Basinger) and male (Simon Baker) prostitutes were presented so matter-of-factly that prostitution was now treated less as a morality issue and more as a signifier of reality in depicting contemporary society.

PUBLIC ENEMIES (2009). Based on Bryan Burrough's 2004 book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34, this is the third theatrical film to focus on gangster John Dillinger. Directed by Michael Mann, it is similar to John Milius's 1973 film Dillinger in that it chronicles the final year in Dillinger's life, with both films enhancing the legend of this flamboyant gangster. On the other hand, the first screen biography, Dillinger (1945), starring Lawrence Tierney, presents the gangster as a sociopathic killer with a sadistic streak. Johnny Depp in Public Enemies is the opposite. He is charismatic, romantic, and generous.

The film focuses on the most notable incidents in the final year of Dillinger's life, including his "photo shoot" at Crown Point, where the local sheriff attempts to exploit Dillinger's reputation. However, the gangster completes an audacious breakout from the heavily fortified jail wielding only a fake handmade wooden pistol. It also depicts his escape from a rural Wisconsin hideout following a raid by FBI agent Melvin Purvis and, of course, his death on 22 July 1934 when Purvis and 16 agents trap and kill Dillinger as he leaves a screening of Manhattan Melodrama at the Biograph Theater in Chicago. A great deal of the film is taken up with his romance with hatcheck girl Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard).

Public Enemies was filmed by cinematographer Dante Spinotti on high-definition video instead of celluloid, and the effect simulates the high-contrast visual presentation of a newspaper or newsreel. It is a film drained of color, leaving only dull browns and grays punctuated by dazzling bursts of white when the tommy guns erupt. Mann also jettisons the classical Hollywood narrative form by reducing the information necessary to provide an adequate historical and narrative context down to two basic strands: the romance between Dillinger and Frechette and his pursuit by Purvis. In the latter strand, the film contrasts the two men—Dillinger is the apotheosis of charm, glamour, and romance, while Purvis, as played by Christian Bale, is intense and repressed. In this regard, the film seems to anticipate Purvis's suicide in 1960 from the gun with which he killed Pretty Boy Floyd.

PUSHER (1996). Director Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher was, deservedly, hailed as a major film debut in Denmark and other European countries. It is a relentlessly harrowing film. Frank (Kim Bodnia), the main protagonist, is a midlevel drug dealer. He and his enforcer Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen) spend their days dealing drugs while talking about sex, drinking, and following other mindless pursuits in bars and strip joints. The narrative, which is spread over seven days, begins in a leisurely manner. A shift takes place when a Swedish customer seeks a large supply of heroin. Frank agrees to the deal and obtains the drugs from Serbian drug lord Milo (Zlatko Buric). Milo provides the drugs on the proviso that Frank return with the money as soon as the deal has been completed. But the deal goes sour when police intervene, and Frank is forced to dump the heroin in a nearby lake. Following 24 hours in custody, Frank attacks Tonny with a baseball bat, believing that he cooperated with the police.

Frank spends the rest of the week attempting to recover sufficient money from his debtors to keep Milo and his henchman Radovan (Slavko Labovic) at bay. His only companion is Vic (Laura Drasbaek), a lonely prostitute. She loves Frank, but he cannot tolerate her touch—except when she performs oral sex. The narrative includes a subplot involving Vic's sick dog. Pointedly the dog dies on the seventh day as Frank, without hope of surviving on the streets of Copenhagen, contemplates his bleak future.

Pusher began as a five-minute film developed by Winding Refn as part of his application for entry into a Danish film school. When he was not selected, he turned it into a feature film. The film has a rough, semirealist edge, partly due to the fact that it was filmed entirely with handheld cameras and partly due to the high degree of backlighting, which often prevents detailed recognition of the actors (especially during the credit sequence). This sense of realism is reinforced by its precise editing, which disorients the viewer on occasions.

The critical and commercial success of the film resulted in two sequels. In Pusher II (2004), Winding Refn focuses on Frank's former partner Tonny as he struggles with drug deals, bad sex, a recalcitrant father, and the bleak possibilities of fatherhood. Pusher 3 (2005) switches its attention to Milo, the drug lord, as his preparation of a birthday feast for his daughter is interrupted by his drug addiction and troublesome drug deals. Winding Refn's film Drive (2011) premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where he won the Best Director Award.
Q

QUEEN, ELLERY. The gentleman detective Ellery Queen was created by cousins Manfred B. Lee (Manford Lepofsky) and Frederic Dannay (Daniel Nathan) for their first crime story, The Roman Hat Mystery, which was submitted to a mystery novel competition sponsored by McClure's magazine in 1928. Because all entries had to be submitted under a pseudonym, the two men took the name of their detective, as they believed that readers were more likely to remember a character's name than names of the authors. Frederick A. Stokes published the novel, although the competition prize was eventually awarded to someone else after the magazine was bought by Smart Set.

The early Ellery Queen novels were indebted to the style and plotting found in S. S. Van Dine's novels featuring the similarly debonair Philo Vance. However, beginning with Calamity Town in 1942, they moved away from the puzzle-based mysteries of the 1930s toward the more character-driven detective fiction of the 1940s.

In 1935, Nat Levine of Republic Pictures approached the cousins for the film rights, and The Spanish Cape Mystery was released the same year with Donald Cook as Ellery Queen. In this lackluster film, Queen travels to the California coast with his friend Judge Macklin, where they become embroiled with kidnapping and murder involving the Godfrey family, who live on an estate at Spanish Cape. Republic filmed The Chinese Orange Mystery, released as The Mandarin Mystery, in 1937, and Queen was played by comic actor Eddie Quillan. This poor film is a locked-room mystery involving a thief found murdered in a room where the door is locked on the inside.

Republic did not produce further Ellery Queen films, and the character remained dormant on-screen until it was revived by low-budget producer Larry Darmour for a series of seven films for Columbia Pictures. The first four of these starred Ralph Bellamy as Queen, and the first and best film, Ellery Queen, Master Detective (1940), was based on the 1937 novel The Door Between. Despite a short shooting schedule of 10 days, Bellamy was excellent as the flirtatious detective who strikes up a romantic relationship with Nikki Porter (Margaret Lindsay). Porter was added to the series by screenwriter Eric Taylor. After four films, Bellamy left for better roles and was replaced by William Gargan for the final three in the series. The last, Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen, which was released in 1942, added a topical aspect: Queen, Porter, and his friends, including Inspector Queen (Charley Grapewin), battle Nazi spies on a New York train containing an Egyptian mummy that is hiding diamonds smuggled out of Holland.

This was the last feature film involving Ellery Queen, although in 1971 French director Claude Chabrol reworked one of the Ellery Queen novels he found in an attic during the German occupation of France. The resultant film La décade prodigieuse (Ten Days' Wonder) did not feature Queen and was a commercial failure. Queen had a longer life on radio, beginning in 1939, and on television, including a 1971 made-for-television film, Don't Look Behind You, starring Peter Lawford as Queen. Jim Hutton played Queen in a 1975 made-for television film Ellery Queen, which became a television series starring Hutton and David Wayne as his father. See also CLASSICAL DETECTIVE FILMS.
RAFT, GEORGE (1895–1980). Closely associated with the crime genre, especially the gangster film, for much of his career, George Raft was born in Hell's Kitchen, one of the toughest areas of New York City. There is confusion as to Raft's actual birth year; while his gravestone states 1895, other sources cite 1901 based on the New York census. Raft mixed with criminals from a young age, although his legitimate profession was as a dancer. This, together with his dark hair, good looks, and slick clothes, created sufficient interest in him in Hollywood that he was cast in a number of supporting parts (mainly in gangster films such as Roland Brown's Quick Millions, 1931) before his breakthrough role as Guino Rinaldo in Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932). This film impressed real-life gangster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, and for a period he moved into Raft's house. Later, Raft was guest of honor when Siegel opened the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas in 1946. His friendship with gangsters such as Siegel and Meyer Lansky caused problems for Raft throughout his career. After Siegel was murdered, Raft and Lansky financed casinos in Havana, although this enterprise was terminated by Fidel Castro's 1958 revolution. Raft and Lansky then moved to London, where Raft was involved with the Colony Club until his deportation in 1966.

Raft's film career peaked in the late 1930s and early 1940s. His best role was as the amoral Ed Beaumont in Paramount's 1935 version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key. In 1939, Warner Bros. signed Raft to a lucrative contract and cast him in a series of major crime films. These included Each Dawn I Die (1939) opposite James Cagney, Invisible Stripes (1939) opposite Humphrey Bogart, and as a truck driver in They Drive by Night (1940), again opposite Bogart. He was a linesman competing with Edward G. Robinson for Marlene Dietrich's favors in Manpower (1941) and Joe Barton in the film adaptation of Eric Ambler's espionage drama Background to Danger (1943), costarring Sydney Greenstreet. However, it was not just the films that Raft made during this period but also the films he turned down—such as Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941), John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), and Casablanca (1942)—that adversely affected his career. All of these films starred Bogart and elevated his career from a long-established contract player in supporting roles to major star.

Raft's limited acting range and advancing years resulted in a gradual decline in his career, although he continued to star in medium- and low-budget crime films until the mid-1950s. In 1959, Billy Wilder cast Raft as Spats Colombo in his comedy Some Like It Hot, with Raft contributing an amusing parody of his tough-guy image. The highly fictionalized 1961 film biography The George Raft Story stars Ray Danton as Raft. This was not, however, the first film to "borrow" aspects of Raft's association with the underworld. In 1942, he starred, as himself, in Broadway, Universal's remake of its 1929 film of the Phillip Dunning-George play. The remake includes a nostalgic stroll by Raft along Broadway while he reminisces about his youth and the gangsters and bootleggers he knew. Since that time, other films such as Barry Levinson's film Bugsy (1991) with Warren Beatty as Bugsy Siegel and Joe Mantegna as Raft, have also dramatized Raft's long-established connections with the Mafia.

Raft's other crime films include Night World (1932), Madame Racketeer (1932), Under-Cover Man (1932), Pick-up (1932), Midnight Club (1933), I Stole a Million (1939), The House across the Bay (1940), Johnny Angel (1945), Whistle Stop (1946), Mr. Ace (1946), Intrigue (1947), Race Street (1948), A Dangerous Profession (1949), Johnny Allegro (1949), Red Light (1949), I'll Get You for This (U.S. title Lucky Nick Cain, 1950), Loan Shark (1952), Black Widow (1954), Rogue Cop (1954), A Bullet for Joey (1955), Ocean's Eleven (1960), and Du rififi à Paname (1966).

RAINES, ELLA (1920–1988). At the peak of her career, Ella Raines starred in Robert Siodmak's film noir The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), the third of three crime films Raines made with Siodmak. Yet her career could also be described as the "strange career of Ella Raines." As quickly as she rose to fame, she lost favor. Throughout the 1940s, her dark, sultry appearance and acting talent were used to good effect in a series of excellent films, beginning in 1943 with Corvette K-225 opposite Randolph Scott. At the end of the decade, her career abruptly declined. In 1949, she costarred with Scott in the excellent offbeat western The Walking Hills, followed by the lead female roles in Impact, opposite Brian Donlevy, and A Dangerous Profession, with George Raft. The following year, she was appearing in a low-budget Republic western, Singing Guns (1950), opposite singer Vaughn Monroe, followed by another Republic western, Ride the Man Down (1952). Thereafter, there were some television appearances and a final film, the espionage thriller The Man in the Road (1956), filmed in Great Britain under Lance Comfort's direction.

Between 1943 and 1950, Raines starred in a number of top-notch crime films, beginning with her best role as Carol "Kansas" Richman in Siodmak's Phantom Lady (1944). Richman, in an attempt to save her boss Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) from the electric chair, undergoes a transformation from a prim, repressed secretary to a captivating femme fatale. During her journey into the underworld, Richman abandons her prim persona and adopts the clothes (black dress, fishnet stockings) and mannerisms of a sexually available woman so that she can elicit information from a reluctant barman (Andrew Tombes) and an excitable drummer (Elisha Cook Jr.). Her investigation results in the death of both men.

Her other roles for Siodmak were less challenging. As a young woman, Mary Gray, who falls in love with an older man, Philip Marshall (Charles Laughton), in The Suspect (1944), her appeal motivates Marshall into killing his shrewish wife. The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry offered Raines a similar role as Deborah Brown, a young woman who loves a repressed middle-aged man, Harry Melville Quincey (George Sanders). Quincey's love for Brown provides the motivation for his desire to murder his domineering sister. Her attraction to older men continued in Impact, her last significant crime film, in which her character contains a few aspects of her most famous role as Richman in Phantom Lady. Here she assists Lieutenant Quincy (Charles Coburn) find the evidence necessary to prove Walter Williams's (Donlevy) innocence after his wife (Helen Walker) had devised an elaborate plot to implicate him in a crime. Other crime films starring Raines include Enter Arsène Lupin (1944), The Runaround (1946), Jules Dassin's Brute Force (1947), and The Web (1947). See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

RAY, NICHOLAS (1911–1979). Nicholas Ray was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle in Wisconsin and studied architecture at the University of Chicago under Frank Lloyd Wright before working in community theater and radio as an actor and director. He went to Hollywood in 1944 and served as Elia Kazan's assistant on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), followed by an early television version of Sorry Wrong Number. The opening minutes of Ray's first film, They Live by Night (1948), involve an aerial shot (from a helicopter) of a car racing through the countryside and signaled the arrival of a major talent in Hollywood. They Live by Night was a screen adaptation of the 1937 Edward Anderson novel Thieves Like Us. It was released on 8 June 1948 as The Twisted Road and then rereleased as They Live by Night on 4 November 1949. Although it was well received by the critics, especially in Europe, the film lost money at the American box office.

His follow-up film, Knock on Any Door (1949), was also concerned with crime and troubled teenagers, and it was the first of two films he directed for Humphrey Bogart's company, Santana. However, it was his second film for Santana, In a Lonely Place (1950), that established Ray as a major director. Ray contemplated two endings to the film—one where Dixon Steele (Bogart) murders his lover Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) in a violent rage, and the other showing her survival and the famous final bittersweet scene of love lost. The latter was selected for the release version.

Ray followed in 1950 with another study of the male violence in On Dangerous Ground, although the film was not released until 12 February 1952. Based on Gerald Butler's novel Mad with Much Heart, the film consists of two parts. The first section traces the psychological disintegration of cop Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) in New York, while the second details his emotional redemption in rural Westham. Two other crime films by Ray were A Woman's Secret (1949) and, as uncredited codirector, The Racket (1951). Rebel without a Cause (1955), starring James Dean as a troubled youth, was Ray's most commercially successful film. Ray's final crime film was Party Girl (1958), set in 1930s Chicago and featuring Robert Taylor as a disabled lawyer working for gangsters. Although his career was relatively brief, from 1948 to 1962, due primarily to illness, depression, alcoholism, and drugs, his impact on the crime genre was profound.

REED, CAROL (1906–1976). Born in London, the illegitimate son of theater manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Carol Reed was an important director in the British cinema. Beginning as a stage actor with Sybil Thorndike's company, he became an assistant to Edgar Wallace. After Wallace's death, Reed worked for Basil Dean, first as dialogue director, then as a second-unit and assistant director. His first film as solo director was Midshipman Easy (1935), followed by films in a range of genres, including the thriller Night Train to Munich (1940) and an adaptation of A. J. Cronin's political drama The Stars Look Down (1940) concerning the nationalization of the British mines. While the politics of the film did not interest Reed, he was passionate about the cinema, and his penchant for location shooting and beautifully composed images is evident in these films.

In the early 1940s, Reed worked for the film unit of the War Office and directed a training film, The New Lot (1943), that became the basis for his feature film The Way Ahead (1944). This film traces the development of a group of raw recruits into an efficient fighting unit. After World War II, Reed directed three critically celebrated films. The Odd Man (1947) details the last hours of a Northern Irish gunman (James Mason) on the run in Belfast after a failed robbery. This downbeat story gave Reed an opportunity to develop a recurring theme in his films concerning the destructive aspects of the large industrial city, a place of alienation and despair. In collaboration with Graham Greene, Reed intensified this theme in his greatest film, The Third Man (1949). This film was the fortunate combination of many talents, including actors Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard, and Alida Valli, together with Anton Karas's haunting zither music and the expert photography of cinematographer Robert Krasker, who won an Oscar. Reed's contribution was also significant in terms of composition, imagery, and story details—for example, his staging of Valli's unforgettable long, silent walk, filmed without a cut at the end of the film as she walks past the love-stricken Holly Martins (Cotten) along a path lined with trees shedding the last vestiges of their foliage. Reed preceded this film with another collaboration with Greene, The Fallen Idol (U.S. title The Last Illusion, 1948) concerning a young boy (Bobby Henrey) forced to confront the moral complexities of the adult world.

Reed's Outcast of the Island (1952) is one of the best screen adaptations of a Joseph Conrad novel. Howard gave one of his great performances as a man who brings death and disgrace to those around him in a colonial outpost due to his desire for a native woman. Reed followed with another doomed love affair in The Man Between (1953). The Running Man (1963) stars Laurence Harvey as a man who fakes his own death to collect the insurance money and, in 1968, Reed's Oliver! won Oscars for Best Director and Best Film.

RELPH, MICHAEL (1915–2004). See DEARDEN, BASIL.

RICE, CRAIG (1908–1957). Craig Rice was the most favored pseudonym of female mystery author and scriptwriter Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig. Her other pen names included Daphne Sanders, Ruth Malone, and Michael Venning. Author of 22 mystery novels, Rice developed a number of popular series characters, including alcoholic lawyer John J. Malone, itinerant photographers Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak, and Melville Fairr, a colorless New York private detective who relies on his psychological prowess to solve crimes. Rice also edited a true-crime book, Los Angeles Murders, in 1947 and wrote 45 Murderers in 1952, which listed various real-life crimes. Among her nonseries crime novels, Home Sweet Homicide (1944) was the most revealing, as it contains autobiographical elements involving a female mystery writer trying to meet a deadline while her three children solve a murder. The children also introduce their mother to a handsome homicide detective. The novel was filmed by 20th Century-Fox in 1946 starring Peggy Ann Garner, Dean Stockwell, and Connie Marshall as the children and Lynn Bari as the crime-writing mother who finds romance with detective Randolph Scott.

Born in Chicago, Rice lived there and worked in radio and public relations for many years before moving to Los Angeles. Aside from the 2001 biography Who Was That Lady? Craig Rice: The Queen of Screwball Comedy by Jeffrey Marks, little has been written about Rice. Time magazine in its 28 January 1946 issue placed her on the cover and included a profile. She was married at least four times and had three children. Her first mystery novel 8 Faces at 3 was published in 1939.

After moving to Hollywood in the 1940s, Rice collaborated with mystery writer and friend Stuart Palmer on The Falcon's Brother (1942). She also wrote the screenplay for The Falcon in Danger (1943). Her 1943 novel Having Wonderful Crime was filmed in 1945 by RKO starring Pat O'Brien as Michael J. Malone. Brian Donlevy was Malone in The Lucky Stiff (1949), based on Rice's 1945 novel. Cy Endfield's film noir The Underworld Story (1950), starring Dan Duryea as the newspaper reporter who exposes a corrupt magnate, was based on an original story by Rice. In 1950, MGM released Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone, based on Once upon a Train; or, The Loco Motive by Rice and Palmer. The original story involved both Rice's John J. Malone and Palmer's series character, the spinster detective Hildegarde Withers. MGM, however, eliminated Withers and substituted Harriet "Hattie" O'Malley, played by Marjorie Main in the film.

While working on the Falcon series at RKO in the early 1940s, Rice also worked as a publicist for George Sanders, the star of The Falcon's Brother. During this period, she was the ghostwriter for Crime on My Hands (1944), a mystery novel credited to Sanders. Rice may have also ghostwritten two crime novels credited to burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee: The G-String Murders (1941) and Mother Finds a Body (1942). Rice suffered from an addiction to alcohol from an early age. Her contribution to both the mystery novel and the crime film emanated from her ability to successfully blend elements from both comedy and mystery. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

RILLA, WOLF (1920–2005). Wolf Rilla, the son of actor Walter Rilla, was born in Berlin. Wolf Rilla directed a number of low-budget crime films in the 1950s, including Marilyn (1953). Released in the United States as Roadhouse Girl, this film noir, based on a play by Peter Jones, contains many of the elements of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity—a sensual young wife (Sandra Dorne) encourages a virile garage assistant (Maxwell Reed) to kill her middle-aged husband (Leslie Dwyer). Rilla's other crime films include The Large Rope (1953) and Silent Witness (1959). In 1960, Rilla directed the cult science-fiction film The Village of the Damned.

ROBINSON, EDWARD G. (1893–1973). Edward G. Robinson's distinctive physical appearance, occasionally referred to as a "bullfrog" in films, ensured that he would rarely play conventional leading-man roles in the cinema. He was, with the possible exception of James Cagney, the actor most closely associated with the gangster film. Born Emmanuel Goldenberg in Romania, Robinson worked in summer stock before making his Broadway debut in 1915. He initially expressed little interest in the cinema. Robinson's first sound feature was as a gangster, "the Fox," in The Hole in the Wall (1929). His second gangster role was the vicious Tony Garotta in Night Ride (1930), followed by his first film for Warner Bros. as Dominic, a racketeer, in The Widow from Chicago (1930). Then came his breakthrough role as Enrico "Rico" Bandello in Little Caesar (1930). In an unsentimental performance, Robinson transformed the screen gangster into a loathsome figure that intrigued audiences, and the popularity of the film ensured his typecasting for many years.

Robinson fought for other roles, including the tough newspaper editor in Five Star Final (1931), an undercover cop in Bullet or Ballots (1936), a boxing promoter in Kid Galahad (1937), and a law professor turned special prosecutor in I Am the Law (1938). There were also many gangster roles, in such films as Smart Money (1931), The Hatchet Man (1932), The Little Giant (1933), The Whole Town's Talking (1935), The Last Gangster (1937), and A Slight Case of Murder (1938). By the end of the 1930s, Robinson agreed to play one more gangster for Warner Bros. in Brother Orchid (1940), providing the studio would cast him as Paul Ehrlich, the Jewish doctor responsible for finding salvarsan (a cure for syphilis), in Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940). He followed with one of his best roles as the psychologically complex, sadistic sea captain in Warner Bros.'s 1941 version of the Jack London novel The Sea Wolf.

Robinson's career began to wane in the early 1940s after his last gangster role for Warner Bros. (Larceny, Inc., 1942) as a contracted player. Robinson initially rejected the role of Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity at Paramount as it was third billed below Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. However, as he was now 50 years of age, he reconsidered his decision, and this film restored his status in Hollywood. Starring roles in The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945), both directed by Fritz Lang, followed. In 1947, during the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings, actor Adolph Menjou named Robinson as a man with Communist connections. This accusation damaged Robinson's career, and at one point his passport was confiscated.

Although Robinson appeared again as gangsters in the 1950s in films such as Black Tuesday (1954), his last prestigious gangster role was Johnny Rocco in Key Largo (1948), John Huston's adaptation of Maxwell Anderson's play. In 1956, Robinson played his last substantial role as a menacing gangster who dies with a gun in his hand in Hell on Frisco Bay, costarring Alan Ladd. In 1964, he parodied his screen image in a brief appearance (he is killed less than three minutes into the film) in Robin and the 7 Hoods. His final crime film was the Italian caper film Ad ogni costo (The Grand Slam, 1967) as a retired professor who masterminds a diamond heist with his secretary (Janet Leigh).

Robinson's other crime films include Outside the Law (1930), Two Seconds (1932), Dark Hazard (1934), The Man with Two Faces (1934), Blackmail (1939), The Stranger (1946), The Red House (1947), The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), House of Strangers (1949), Vice Squad (1953), The Glass Web (1953), Tight Spot (1955), A Bullet for Joey (1955), Illegal (1955), Nightmare (1956), Seven Thieves (1960), and The Cincinnati Kid (1965). See also BLACKLIST.

ROSSEN, ROBERT (1908–1966). A multitalented writer and director, Robert Rossen was a victim of the blacklist. Born in New York City, Rossen frequented pool halls and fought as a prizefighter in his youth, activities that may have prepared him for two of his best films, Body and Soul (1947) and The Hustler (1961). Rossen's left-wing credentials were developed in the 1930s as a theater director and playwright for the radical theaters in New York, where he associated with future filmmakers Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, and Jules Dassin—all victims, in different ways, of the anticommunist purge of Hollywood in the late 1940s and 1950s by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).

Rossen's theater work attracted the attention of Warner Bros., and he cowrote the hard-hitting crime melodrama Marked Women (1937) with Abem Finkel. This thinly veiled account of the prosecution of gangster Lucky Luciano was based on the testimony of prostitutes exploited by Luciano. Rossen followed with a series of crime-based scripts for Warner Bros., many imbued with a social agenda. These included They Won't Forget (1937), a fictional account based on a real-life lynching in a Southern town; Racket Busters (1938), starring Humphrey Bogart; Dust Be My Destiny (1939), starring John Garfield; The Roaring Twenties (1939), starring James Cagney; and The Sea Wolf (1941), Jack London's tale of a sadistic sea captain (Edward G. Robinson) converted by Rossen into an allegory warning of the dangers of fascism. He also wrote the crime drama Out of the Fog (1941), starring Garfield as gangster Harold Goff.

After scripting one of the best combat films produced during World War II, the elegiac A Walk in the Sun (1945), Rossen joined a picket line outside the Warner Bros. studio in 1945, earning the anger of Jack L. Warner, who named him as a Communist to a HUAC subcommittee in 1947. That year, Rossen resigned his membership in the Communist Party after a decade-long association. At this point, his career went from strength to strength. He wrote the script for the perverse film noir The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), starring Barbara Stanwyck as the dominating wife of an alcoholic district attorney. This film reworked the recurring theme in Rossen's late 1930s crime films concerning the strong association between personal corruption, money, and political power. Dick Powell, at the peak of his career, encouraged Columbia to allow Rossen to both write and direct his gangster film Johnny O'Clock (1947), another tale of greed and betrayal with a redemptive ending.

Rossen then moved to the newly formed Enterprise Studio after he signed with John Garfield's production company, Roberts Productions, to direct one of his best films, Body and Soul, a boxing melodrama written by Abraham Polonsky. Unsurprisingly, with Rossen, Polonsky, and Garfield involved, this film also contained a strong social context as it dramatized the infiltration of the boxing industry by criminals with money.

Rossen then formed his own production company and produced the Joseph L. Lewis crime film The Undercover Man (1949). This concerned the determination of a treasury agent (Glenn Ford) to bring down a major gangster, a thinly veiled portrait of Al Capone. Next came Rossen's greatest success as writer and director, All The King's Men (1949), another barely disguised biopic, based on the activities of the populist governor of Louisiana, Huey Long. Rossen's adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel earned Oscars for Best Picture and Best Actor (Broderick Crawford).

After directing the bullfighting film The Brave Bulls (1951), Rossen was placed on the blacklist in 1951 after refusing to answer questions submitted to him by a HUAC investigation. When he returned to HUAC in 1953 and supplied the names of 57 people, his blacklisting was lifted. In 1961, Rossen's last great film, The Hustler, starred Paul Newman as the drifter and pool hustler Fast Eddy Felson, who challenges Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleeson). Martin Scorsese's 1986 sequel The Color of Money saw Newman return to his role as Felson.

RUTHERFORD, MARGARET (1892–1972). Beloved British character actress and perennial scene-stealer Margaret Rutherford was a unique figure in the British film industry with her lumpy body, multiple chins, and bizarre costumes—sometimes tweed, sometimes a strange assortment of capes, blouses, and skirts that refused to blend together. She specialized in eccentric characters, perhaps authoritarian, but always highly visible. What distinguished Rutherford was that she never played for laughs, preferring instead to present herself as earnest and ever serious.

Originally a speech and piano teacher, she studied acting at the Old Vic and made her stage debut in 1925. Her film debut came in 1935 in Dusty Ermine. Her most notable early role was the clairvoyant Madame Arcati in David Lean's Blithe Spirit (1945). This represented the first fully developed presentation of her screen persona, which she tweaked over the next 30 years. In 1950, Rutherford was cast opposite that other great eccentric of the British screen, Alastair Sim, in Frank Launder's The Happiest Days of Your Life.

Her best-known role in later years was as Miss Jane Marple, the spinster sleuth created by Agatha Christie. Rutherford played the role in four films for MGM that were filmed in Great Britain: Murder, She Said (1961), Murder at the Gallop (1963), Murder Most Foul (1964), and Murder Ahoy (1964). Stringer Davis, Rutherford's real-life husband, was also cast and gave Miss Marple limited assistance in the four films. Rutherford returned as Marple for a humorous cameo in The Alphabet Murders (1965), starring Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot. In 1964, Rutherford was awarded an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for The VIPs (1963). She became a dame of the British Empire in 1966 and published her autobiography in 1972, the year she died. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

RYAN, ROBERT (1909–1973). Robert Ryan was born in Chicago and educated at Dartmouth College, where he was heavyweight boxing champion for four years. This attribute gave him credibility in his favorite role as the aging boxer "Stoker" Thompson in The Set-Up (1949). He made his screen debut at Paramount in 1940 in Queen of the Mob, which was based on J. Edgar Hoover's 1939 book Persons in Hiding. Ryan then returned to the stage until he was noticed by RKO in the part of Joe Boyle in the Broadway production of Clash by Night; 11 years later, he starred in Fritz Lang's film version as Earl Pfeiffer. After military service, Ryan costarred with Joan Bennett in Jean Renoir's final American film, The Woman on the Beach (1947).

Ryan made a strong impact in Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire (1947) as an anti-Semitic bigot who murders a Jewish man. Thereafter, Ryan was regularly cast as villains, especially psychologically disturbed characters capable of sudden bursts of violence. His sharp, angular facial features and rasping voice reinforced this persona. Nothing could have been further from his off-screen life and his resolute support for liberal causes.

After Crossfire, Ryan was the embittered ex-army veteran who obsessively pursues a former soldier (Van Heflin) in Act of Violence (1949) and the sadistic millionaire Smith Ohlrig who brutalizes his wife in Max Ophüls's Caught (1949). Robert Wise's The Set-Up provided some relief from this sequence of villains, but Ryan was unable to break away from this screen persona and played a series of roles as vicious villains in many crime films and westerns throughout the 1950s and 1960s. However, he was very good at conveying a sense of menace in such films as Beware, My Lovely (1952), playing Howard, an unstable itinerant handyman who terrorizes war widow and teacher Mrs. Gordon (Ida Lupino).

In a rare deviation from this persona, British director Roy Ward Baker cast Ryan in Inferno (1953). This role provided him with a more multidimensional character. He begins as the self-pitying millionaire trapped in the California desert with a broken leg. Forced to examine his attitudes and lifestyle after he is abandoned by his wife (Rhonda Fleming) and her lover (William Lundigan), he undergoes a positive transformation. Since there are, for most of the film, no other actors with whom to exchange dialogue, Ryan has to convey this transformation with very little dialogue—except his musings to himself in the desert. A similar redemptive process occurs in Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground (1952), where Ryan, as troubled cop Jim Wilson, regains his moral equilibrium with the assistance of Ida Lupino.

He returned to his evil, neurotic persona in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) as a bigot responsible for the death of a Japanese-American man in a small desert town during World War II. Similarly, he was the vicious head of a gang of ex-servicemen in Tokyo after World War II in Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo (1955) and a racist criminal who willfully jeopardizes a robbery because of his loathing for Harry Belafonte in Robert Wise's downbeat caper film Odds against Tomorrow (1959). Although he continued in films, mainly in supporting roles, Ryan focused more on the stage until his death from lung cancer in 1973. His other crime films include The Woman on Pier 13 (aka I Married a Communist, 1950), The Secret Fury (1950), The Racket (1951), and The Crooked Road (1965). See also FILM NOIR.
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SAINT, THE. The creator of the Saint, Leslie Charteris, was born Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin in 1907 in Singapore. His father was Chinese and his mother English. He changed his name to Charteris, the surname of an English adventurer, in 1926, and two years later he wrote the first Saint novel, Meet the Tiger. After 1929, with one exception, he published only stories based on the Saint, a "modern-day Robin Hood" who pursued criminals who preyed upon the innocent. Charteris initially published his stories in the British magazine Thriller until he created his own periodical, the Saint Magazine. In 1932, he moved from England to the United States and became a naturalized American in 1946.

Charteris's stories, though often formulaic, were extremely popular. Audiences relished the Saint as a figure sometimes forced to operate outside the law in his pursuit of larger-than-life criminals. This attribute is evident in his best novel, The Saint in New York (1935), the first Saint novel set in the United States. RKO purchased the rights to this novel, and it became the basis of the first in a series of eight Saint films. The film was released on 25 May 1938. It stars South African–born actor Louis Hayward as Simon Templar, the Saint. This film, unlike subsequent films in this series, retains the vigilante motif favored by Charteris. The Saint in New York is noticeably tougher than the seven subsequent Saint films released between 1939 and 1943. Hayward's Simon Templar is a killer, not the romantic figure played by George Sanders and Hugh Sinclair in the later films. Variety, in its 1938 review of the film, described it as a "rugged gangster melodrama."

In The Saint in New York, Templar is invited by the head of a crime commission in New York to rid the city of six gangsters terrorizing the public. Dressed as a nun, he kills the first man on the list, Jake Irbell. He then systematically eliminates the rest of the gangsters. In the process he is assisted by a mysterious woman, Fay Edwards (Kay Sutton), the mistress of one of the gangsters. The film benefits from Joseph August's cinematography, which conveys Edwards's dark sexuality, most noticeably in a darkened apartment with Edwards, in a black evening dress enveloped by furs, filmed through a chiaroscuro lighting pattern. This is an early example of the femme fatale with strong film noir overtones.

Hayward did not return for the next Saint film, The Saint Strikes Back (1939), based on the 1931 Charteris novel Angels of Doom. Instead, RKO cast British-born actor George Sanders, who transformed the Saint into a more debonair, lightweight character. Based on a script by John Twist and capably directed by John Farrow, the film was set in San Francisco, where Val Travers (Wendy Barrie) has organized an underworld gang to avenge the death of her father, a policeman. The next in the series, The Saint in London (1939), was based on Charteris's short story "The Million Pound Day" and was produced in Great Britain. In it, Templar exposes a counterfeiting gang with the assistance of socialite Penny Parker (Sally Gray). The Saint returned to the United States for The Saint's Double Trouble (1940), with Sanders in the dual role of Templar and gangster Duke Plato.

Charteris was unhappy with the series, even though RKO allowed him to make suggestions for the next film The Saint Takes Over (1940). But Charteris's participation did not change RKO's formula, with the Saint helping Inspector Fernack with bribery charges. The Saint in Palm Springs (1941) was Sanders's last appearance as the Saint. Jerry Cady provided the screenplay from a story outline provided by Charteris. Here the Saint is asked to deliver an inheritance—three rare stamps—to a girl in Palm Springs, California.

The remaining Saint films produced by RKO were filmed in London, where the studio utilized funds that were frozen in Britain. They featured British actor Hugh Sinclair as the Saint. The Saint's Vacation (1941), based on Charteris's 1932 novel The Saint's Getaway, costars Sally Gray as a newspaperwoman who helps the Saint expose an espionage ring in Switzerland. Charteris's first novel was finally filmed in 1941, as The Saint Meets the Tiger, but RKO was so unhappy with the film that, after releasing it in the United Kingdom, the studio withheld the U.S. release until it sold the rights to another studio, Republic, which finally released it in 1943. Jean Gillie costarred as the heroine Pat Holmes.

In 1954, RKO distributed a British film, The Saint's Girl Friday, made by Royal Productions, with Hayward returning as the Saint after 16 years. In this film, the Saint investigates the car crash of a female friend, which leads him to an illegal gambling casino. Two French films, Le Saint mène la danse (1959) and Le Saint prend l'affût (1966), were minor entries, and Charteris opposed their release outside France. In 1996, Val Kilmer starred in The Saint, a big-budget Hollywood film directed by Philip Noyce, in which the Saint agrees to steal a formula and then falls in love with the woman who developed it. See also FALCON, THE; SHAYNE, MICHAEL.

SAN QIANG PAI'AN JINGQI (2009). A flamboyant Persian trader (Julian Gaudfroy) visits a remote noodle restaurant in a small desert town in Gansu Province, China, and demonstrates his merchandise to the inhabitants in the shop. This includes the sexy wife (Ni Yan) of the elderly proprietor, Wang (Dahong Ni), as well as Wang's long-suffering employees, waiter Zhao (Ye Cheng), waitress Chen (Mao Mao), and cook Li (Xiao Sheng-Yang). After Wang's wife purchases a gun, she proudly declares, "I own the world's most powerful weapon"—which, in the context of the film, has a double meaning because she is conducting an adulterous affair with Li. When they fire the Persian's cannon, they attract the attention of the local police force and its police chief (Zhao Benshan), who is arresting adulterous couples in the district. He leaves behind the stoic policeman Zhang (Honglie Sun) to investigate the noodle shop for any sign of sexual impropriety. Wang, who is sexually brutalizing his young wife, then hires Zhang to kill her and Li. Zhang, however, has other ideas and shoots Wang—the first in a series of brutal killings as greed, revenge, and lust overwhelm the characters.

San qiang pai'an jingqi was released as A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop outside China. It was directed by acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou, who also directed Raise the Red Lantern (1991), Hero (2002), and House of the Flying Daggers (2004), as well as the spectacular opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The film was based on the Coen brothers' debut film Blood Simple (1984), which seems to be a strange choice for Zhang, although the director said that the film had been a favorite for many years. San qiang pai'an jingqi was nominated for a Golden Bear Award at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival, and when Zhang appeared at the festival he related that he had received a message from the Coen brothers saying that they loved the Chinese version of their film.

Scripted by Jianquan Shi and Jing Shang from the 1984 story by the Coen brothers, the film retains the basic storyline while transforming virtually every other aspect of the earlier film. Its premise is classic film noir, as popularized by film adaptations of James M. Cain's novels Double Indemnity (1944) and A Postman Always Rings Twice (1946): a femme fatale planning the demise of her husband while having an affair with another man. At this point, the cultural influences overwhelm the story and render it far different from the 1984 American film. The electric blue sky of the desert and jagged sandstone hills provide a theatrical backdrop for the story, which shifts from bedroom farce and broad comedy (mostly executed by Cheng and Mao) in the first half to a much darker premise as the killings intensify in the second half.

Unlike the underplayed film from the Coen brothers, Zhang's rendering is highly theatrical and consistent with the tone and characters found in the Beijing Opera. Everything is larger than life—the acting; the gold-and-red fabrics set against the barren desert; the bright costumes, especially the one selected for the ineffectual lover Li, who is dressed in pink to indicate his "feminine" side while Zhang, the police officer who is corrupted by greed and lust, is clad head to toe in dark armor. The stunning visuals, the powerful sense of theater with its stylized setting and excessive acting, and the use of farce contributed to the film's success in China, where it was a strong box-office success, grossing 261 million yuan (approximately $38 million) in the first six weeks after it release. Overseas, the critical reaction was mixed, and the specific Chinese take on this archetypal film noir plot did not go down well with Western audiences. Nevertheless, the film managed to convey the nihilism evident in the 1984 film, and both films present human endeavor as essentially absurd.

SAVAGE, ANN (1921–2008). Ann Savage was born Bernice Maxine Lyon in South Carolina. She signed with Columbia and appeared in supporting roles in the Lone Wolf series starring Warren William, first in One Dangerous Night (1943) and then, as a German spy, she was the top-billed female in Passport to Suez (1943). Savage also appeared in the studio's Boston Blackie series in After Midnight with Boston Blackie (1943). Her first starring role was in Klondike Annie (1943) opposite Tom Neal.

Following conflict with studio personnel, Columbia did not renew her contract, so on Neal's advice, she signed with Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) and costarred with him in Detour (1945). Savage fully committed herself to the role of the ruthless harridan and altered her normally glamorous appearance. This film, which comprised three days of filming for director Edgar Ulmer, was the high point of Savage's career. She portrayed one of the most ferocious femmes fatales in the cinema, tormenting a hitchhiker (Neal) during their road journey to Los Angeles. However, films released by PRC were rarely noticed by the critics, and as the studio could not afford extensive publicity, her striking performance went unnoticed for many years.

Apology for Murder (1945), Savage's next film, was PRC's attempt to emulate Paramount's 1944 Double Indemnity. However, when Paramount discovered this, it insisted that Apology for Murder be removed from circulation. Hence Savage's two best film roles, for different reasons, did nothing for her career.

She was a nightclub singer in Republic's crime film The Last Crooked Mile (1946), followed by a small role in The Spider (1945) for 20th Century-Fox, where she was cast as Richard Conte's partner in a detective agency. Her character is murdered early in the film, and the studio did not offer her a contract after it was completed. A supporting role at Universal for The Dark Horse (1946) was followed by her return to PRC in the lead role in Lady Chaser (1946). Disillusioned, Savage gave up her Hollywood career in the mid-1950s, although she made one more film appearance in 1986. Her other crime films include Murder in Times Square (1943), Dangerous Blondes (1943), Scared Stiff (1945), Midnight Manhunt (1945), and Pier 23 (1951). See also FILM NOIR; WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

SCARFACE (1932/1984). The original version of Scarface encountered substantial censorship problems during the production of the film and after its initial release. Producer Howard Hughes withdrew the film, and over the next two years fought hard to get it rereleased. To appease the censors, a subtitle—Shame of the Nation—was added, scenes were cut, and additional scenes denouncing gangster Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) were inserted. In some prints, an alternative ending was used, showing Camonte in court followed by his execution by hanging. However, as Muni was no longer available for these additional scenes, including the revised ending, another actor, shown only in shadow and his hands, was used.

The original ending in the 1932 release shows Camonte's death when he is riddled with machine-gun bullets from the police. He dies under a Cooks Tours sign that indicates "The world is yours." The 1983 version of the film, scripted by Oliver Stone and directed by Brian De Palma, concludes in a similar manner when its gangster, Tony Montana (Al Pacino), is riddled with bullets from Bolivian gangsters in his mansion near a sign that also reads "The world is yours."

The script for the 1932 film was worked on by a number of writers, including Ben Hecht, W. R. Burnett, John Lee Mahin, Seton Miller, and Fred Pasley. Among the many changes, the premise by director Howard Hawks that the Camonte family should be seen as the equivalent of the Borgias living in Chicago largely disappeared. However, the film retained the notion that Camonte's fatal flaw was sexual—his incestuous desire for his sister Ceska (Ann Dvorak). Within the classic rise-and-fall trajectory of the gangster, Camonte reaches the top by murdering Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins), thereby acquiring Lovo's mistress (Karen Morley) and his criminal empire that was based on the sale of illegal alcohol. After shooting his best friend Guino (George Raft) when he finds him living with Ceska, his fall is rapid as both Ceska and Camonte perish.

The film includes a number of real-life incidents from Al Capone's life, such as the murder of Big Jim Colosimo (with a name change in the film), the St. Valentine's Day massacre, and the murder of Legs Diamond (with another name change) in the hospital. Yet Hawks' expressionistic style throughout the film represents a departure from the flat realism of earlier gangster films such as Little Caesar (1931). Each death in Scarface is preceded by the sign of a cross—a cross on an indoor bowling score sheet, a street sign, a trellis, or a shadow created by the lighting.

Scarface (1932) directed by Howard Hawks. Shown from left: Paul Muni, Karen Morley, and Osgood Perkins.

The preproduction for the updated version of Scarface stalled until screenwriter Stone accepted Sidney Lumet's suggestion that they shift the setting to Miami in 1980 and base the story around the real-life expulsion of Cuban criminals to the United States by Fidel Castro. This also necessitated that the criminal activity change from the illegal sale of alcohol to the cocaine trade between Bolivian suppliers and American gangsters. However, Lumet wanted a stronger political context, and he also objected to the copious violence in Stone's script. After Lumet left the film, producer Martin Bregman offered it to director De Palma. The filmmakers, however, were forced out of Florida after two weeks of filming when Cuban-born locals objected to the suggestion that the refugees were criminals. The combination of Stone's script and De Palma's direction, assisted by cinematographer John Alonzo and composer Giorgio Moroder, resulted in an excessive gangster film (often described as "operatic" by critics) that retains the basic rise-and-fall plot of the 1932 film.

The story concerns ambitious Cuban Tony Montana (Pacino), who befriends criminal Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia) after arriving in Miami and enters the drug trade. Following an attempt on his life, he kills Lopez and takes control of Lopez's criminal empire. Montana also marries Lopez's bored, drug-taking mistress Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer). However, consistent with the narrative conventions of the 1930s films, the hubris of Montana, having reached the top, necessitates his spectacular downfall—epitomized at the film's climax by Montana repeatedly plunging his face into a huge pile of cocaine on his desk. After he fails to fulfill a promise to a Bolivian gangster, his mansion is invaded, and Montana is killed during a violent battle.

This extravagant update of the earlier film was deliberate, as Bregman encouraged De Palma and his visual consultant Ferdinand Scarfiotti to employ bright colors, larger-than-life sets, and distinctive clothes to provide a sumptuous visual context for their gangster parable. This excessive presentation is matched by Pacino's intense, excessive performance as Montana. He is constantly shouting profanities at colleagues, enemies, and especially his wife, Elvira. On one occasion, in a restaurant, he manages to penetrate Elvira's indifference, and the intensity of their exchange of insults matches the film's physical violence. This film, produced in a different censorship regime, makes Montana's incestuous desire for his sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) explicit. He kills his best friend Ray Manolo (Steven Bauer) when he finds him with Gina, and this provokes a morally disturbing scene during the film's climax as the distraught Gina attempts to simultaneously seduce and kill her brother.

SCHRADER, PAUL (1946– ). American writer and director Paul Schrader was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and due to his strict religious (Calvinist) upbringing, did not see his first film until he was 18 years old. After gaining a master's degree in film studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, he worked as a film critic. In 1972, he published Transcendental Style in Film, a study of the films of Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, three directors who subsequently influenced his films.

Schrader's first script was cowritten with his brother Leonard for the Sidney Pollack film The Yakuza (1975). This quasi-action film foreshadowed Schrader's subsequent penchant for guilt and moral introspection. The film stars Robert Mitchum as a man who goes to Japan to seek the release of an old army friend's daughter. His quest leads to pain and spiritual redemption—qualities that define many of Schrader's films. These emotions are evident in his next script for director Brian De Palma. Obsession (1976), a perverse romance dominated by melancholy within a crime format, gave De Palma an opportunity to display his melodramatic style of filmmaking. The film stars Cliff Robertson as a man trying to find salvation after his wife and daughter are kidnapped and, presumably, murdered.

It was Schrader's next film, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), starring Robert De Niro as the troubled, violent New York taxi driver Travis Bickle, that elevated his career. Schrader then cowrote Rolling Thunder (1977), a revenge film, prior to his first film as director, Blue Collar (1978), with Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto as three working-class men who rob their own union. He followed this, as writer and director, with Hardcore (1979), a film that explores many aspects of Schrader's repressive upbringing within a more conventional story. It involves the search by a Calvinist midwestern businessman, Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott), for his daughter who is working in the porn industry in California.

Schrader continued throughout the 1980s—in various genres—to explore the moral complexities of modern society through his tormented characters who battle to discern some kind of meaning in their troubled lives in films such as American Gigolo (1980); Cat People (1982), an updated version of the 1942 Val Lewton film; The Comfort of Strangers (1990), scripted by Harold Pinter from the Ian McEwan novel concerning the downfall of a married couple at the hands of a mysterious stranger while vacationing in Venice; Light Sleepers (1992); Bringing Out Your Dead (1999); and The Walker (2007), starring Woody Harrelson as Carter Page, a paid escort for wealthy ladies in Washington until murder destroys his vocation.

Schrader also scripted and directed Affliction (1997), based on Russell Banks's novel. This downbeat story details the lifelong trauma of a cop (Nick Nolte) following the emotional and physical abuse from his father (James Coburn) in a small New Hampshire town. In 2002, Schrader directed Auto Focus, starring Greg Kinnear in a downbeat account of the life and death of the real-life radio and television star Bob Crane (Hogan's Heroes). Aside from his films, in 1972 Schrader wrote the influential essay "Notes on Film Noir," which argues that film noir represents a specific period in American culture. His prediction that, following the turmoil of the Vietnam War, there would be an eagerness to examine the dark underbelly of American society was confirmed by his own contribution to the American cinema over the next 40 years.

SCORSESE, MARTIN (1942– ). An intense, intelligent filmmaker with a profound knowledge of film history and filmmakers, Martin Scorsese is a genre director who refuses to be constrained by the conventions of a genre. His films reflect an interest in outsiders, sometimes neurotic characters who contribute to their own downfall.

Scorsese was a frail, sickly child who was fascinated with the cinema from an early age after he saw a trailer for a Roy Rogers western. This passion was reinforced after his family purchased a television set in the late 1940s, which allowed the young Scorsese to watch the numerous B movies that were released to television by the minor studios such as Republic, Monogram, and Producers Releasing Corporation. As a teenager, he was influenced by Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). While his initial vocation was to train as a priest, he became even more infatuated with the cinema after enrolling at New York University, where he studied from 1960 to 1965. During this period, he worked on a number of student films, including It's Not Just You (1964) and Bring On the Dancing Girls (1965)—which, after more footage was added, became Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1968).

After being fired from the low-budget crime film The Honeymoon Killers (1968), Scorsese assisted on various projects until Roger Corman offered him the chance to direct Boxcar Bertha (1972), a low-budget crime film set in the 1930s Depression with location shooting in Arkansas. This film details the bitter confrontation between a railroad company and its employees within its overall narrative framework involving a small-town girl (Barbara Hershey) who joins David Carradine and his gang of train robbers. Corman conceived the film as a follow-up to his earlier period crime film Bloody Mama (1970). Scorsese had a relatively free hand, providing he delivered the film on schedule, within the budget, and containing the requisite amount of violence and nudity. Scorsese welcomed the chance to direct, especially after he discovered that the film ended in the virtual crucifixion of Bertha's lover that foreshadowed the director's fascination with religious iconography and violence.

Scorsese's next film, Mean Streets (1973), was a more personal project set on the streets of Little Italy in New York, involving types of characters—street wiseguys and small-time hoodlums—that were familiar to Scorsese. The experience of working for Corman was useful because Scorsese was able to use some of the crew from Boxcar Bertha, and the tight budget on Mean Streets meant that he had to follow Corman's regime of filming under the pressure of tight schedules and small budgets. The $500,000 budget for Mean Streets permitted only one week of location shooting in New York. Thereafter, Scorsese matched these scenes with studio interiors and exteriors in Los Angeles.

Mean Streets (originally titled Season of the Witch) established Scorsese as a new talent. Influenced by the films of John Cassavetes and Jean-Luc Godard, he employed a whole arsenal of devices to visually tell a story, including handheld filming, jump-cuts, and semi-improvised acting, along with his characteristic long take by a mobile camera. The images were then matched to contemporary rock songs. The film also marked his first feature-film collaboration with Robert De Niro, an actor who would be an important part of Scorsese's cinema for the next 25 years.

In 1976, Scorsese took this collaboration to a new level with Taxi Driver, based on Paul Schrader's confrontational script. The film earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Actor (De Niro). After the box-office failure of his homage to the musical biographies of the 1940s, New York, New York (1977), Scorsese and De Niro followed with another critical and financial success, Raging Bull (1980), winning an Oscar for De Niro as boxer Jake La Motta and another nomination for Scorsese.

Following the change-of-pace black comedy After Hours (1985), Scorsese directed his second gangster film, Goodfellas (1990), based on New York crime reporter Nicholas Pileggi's biography Wise Guys. It traces the day-to-day activities of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), an underling working for a Sicilian family in Queens, New York. Goodfellas marked a high point in the genre by not only showing the explicit violence of the world of the wiseguys but also their sense of desperation combined with long periods of domestic friction and tedium. Scorsese changed genres again for Cape Fear (1991), an extended remake of J. Lee Thompson's chilling 1962 film noir. Scorsese's remake, as expected, transformed the morally upright father in Thompson's film into a more morally problematic figure (Nick Nolte).

The favorable critical reception Scorsese received for Goodfellas was not repeated for his next gangster film, Casino (1995), which traces the downfall of Sam "Ace" Robinson (De Niro), a successful gambler selected by the Chicago Mafia to run the Tangiers casino in Las Vegas in the 1970s. While Scorsese repeated the stylistic devices from the earlier film, including jump-cuts, freeze-frames, and slow motion, the film did not deliver the same impact.

Scorsese's next crime film, Gangs of New York (2002), starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Amsterdam Vallon and Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill the Butcher, was an historical gangster film involving rival gangs in New York in the 1860s. Next came one of his best films, The Departed (2006), based on William Monahan's script that, in turn, was inspired by the 2002 Hong Kong police film, Mou gaan dou (Infernal Affairs). Jack Nicholson starred as Boston gangster Frank Costello, an Irish gangster who has embedded his own agent (Matt Damon) within the Massachusetts State Police, while the police have also infiltrated Nicholson's gang with their own informer (DiCaprio). This narrative pretext provided Scorsese with ample opportunity to explore the moral corruption of both institutions. The complex layers in the film also detail class and racial (Irish) antagonisms within a specific time and place. It deservedly won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Editor (Thelma Schoonmaker).

Less successful with the critics and the box office was Scorsese's 2010 adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel Shutter Island, concerning the visit of federal marshals (DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) to a remote penal institution off the coast of Boston to investigate the disappearance of a violent female patient from the asylum within the prison. However, this only provides the narrative and generic surface for a story where everything is not what it seems. Again, despite largely negative reviews, the visual skill and courage of Scorsese in taking on this difficult project cannot be denied.

SCOTT, LIZABETH (1922– ). Although Lizabeth Scott's time as a major star was relatively brief, she made a strong impact on the crime film genre in the late 1940s and early 1950s. With her husky voice and striking looks, Scott appeared frequently as a sensual, mostly dangerous, woman.

Born Emma Matzo in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Scott was discovered by Hollywood producer Hal Wallis in 1942. In her second role, she costarred opposite Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, and Kirk Douglas in Lewis Milestone's film noir The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). In this film, Scott had one of her few sympathetic roles, as the vulnerable Toni Marachek. Her next film, as the deadly Coral Chandler in Dead Reckoning (1947), established her as a distinctive femme fatale, a persona that she varied for Pitfall (1948) as sensual model Mona Stevens, who seduces a married man (Dick Powell). However, Stevens is more vulnerable than dangerous in this film. This vulnerability disappeared in Scott's next film as the greedy Jane Palmer in Too Late for Tears (1949), in which she kills two husbands and a corrupt private detective (Dan Duryea). A rare exception to this pattern was as Mary Astor's willful daughter in the bizarre crime melodrama Desert Fury (1947), where she falls in love with a gangster, her mother's ex-lover. Other crime films of this period include I Walk Alone (1948), Dark City (1950), The Racket (1951), and Two of a Kind (1951).

In the 1950s, Scott's Hollywood career was damaged by an article in Confidential magazine that alleged that she was a lesbian, and major film roles soon dwindled. She starred in two low-budget British crime films. The first, Stolen Face (1952), was produced as part of the Hammer coproductions with American independent producer Robert Lippert. The second, a more interesting film, was The Weapon (1956), with Scott as the distressed mother of a young boy who runs away after accidentally shooting a playmate with a German gun found in the industrial ruins of Aldergate. This taut thriller was directed by Val Guest and costars Steve Cochran as an American military man. Scott made one last screen appearance in Michael Hodges's crime parody Pulp (1972).

SCOTT, PETER GRAHAM (1923–2006). Peter Graham Scott was born in East Sheen, Surrey, England, and for most of his career he was associated with British television as a director and producer, although he did direct a number of low-budget crime films in the 1950s and 1960s. The Hide-Out in 1956, starring Dermot Walsh and Rona Anderson, was a taut thriller involving fur smuggling and anthrax, while Honor Blackman starred in Account Rendered (1957), which involves blackmail and murder. In The Big Chance (1957), William Russell played a clerk who embezzles funds before suffering guilt and redeeming himself. Scott's most unusual thriller, however, was Devil's Bait in 1959, starring Geoffrey Keen as baker Joe Frisby. When Frisby's wife Ellen (Jane Hylton) discovers rats in the bakery, she employs a rat catcher to eradicate them. However, Ellen inadvertently bakes bread contaminated by the cyanide used to kill the rats, and this leads to a desperate attempt by Joe, Ellen, and the police to recover the bread and warn their customers.

SEARLE, FRANCIS (1909–2002). Francis Searle was a prolific British director who specialized in low-budget genre films, especially crime films in the 1950s. After beginning his career with documentaries and short films, Searle's first two feature films were comedies: Girl in a Million (1946) and Things Happen at Night (1947). Thereafter, he directed various forms of crime films, including the police procedural One Way Out (1955) and the film noirs The Man in Black (1949) and Wheel of Fate (1953), starring future British writer-director Bryan Forbes as a doomed gambler. He also directed the race-against-time film Emergency (1962) and the downbeat thriller Freedom to Die (1962).

In the early 1950s, Searle worked extensively for Hammer during its pregothic period when the studio concentrated on low-budget crime films. During this time, he directed the thriller Cloudburst (1951), Hammer's first Anglo-American production, with Hollywood actor Robert Preston in the lead role. This was followed by Whispering Smith Hits London (1952), a rather bizarre attempt to exploit the American railroad detective who featured in Hollywood-produced films in 1916, 1926, 1935, and 1948. The premise for the British Hammer production was that Smith, played by American actor Richard Carlson, is hired by Rona Anderson to investigate the death of her employer's daughter while he is vacationing in London.

SERPICO (1973). Based on Peter Maas's book detailing the career of real-life New York police officer Frank Serpico, Serpico proved to be the right film for the right time. It was released late in 1973 following months of political turmoil involving President Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. Despite the fact that no major studio would finance it, independent producer Dino De Laurentiis picked up the project, and it was embraced by the public. The story was a strange ideological mix involving a dedicated, idealistic cop determined to protect his alternative lifestyle, consisting of a shaggy beard, love beads, and an apartment in Bohemian Greenwich village. His high ideals for a dedicated police force are matched by an intense desire to capture criminals. The film's plot, involving Serpico's (Al Pacino) desire to expose police corruption in New York whatever the personal cost to him, resonated with a public familiar with a similar story of corruption at the highest political level following the Watergate scandal. However, the film does not shy away from showing the personal cost to Serpico, which included the breakup with long-time live-in girlfriend Laurie (Barbara Eda-Young) and his victimization by the police department. He was denied promotion and lived with the constant fear that his fellow officers would kill him. This fear was nearly realized after a near-fatal gunshot to his head following the machinations of corrupt narcotics officers.

Director Sidney Lumet emphasized the dirty, dangerous side of New York in the 104 locations used during filming. He presents a city bereft of morality and justice, epitomized by the mantra of the men selected to protect the city that you "cannot trust a cop who does not take money." The film's downbeat ending suggests that despite the establishment of an independent commission to investigate police corruption, little will change. The film concludes with Serpico's departure from the force as he sits alone with his dog. An end-title explains that he now lives in Switzerland. Pacino, who made this film between The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974), was nominated for an Oscar. Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler were also nominated for their screenplay.

SE7EN (1995). A mixture of the police procedural film and gothic horror, Se7en attracted strong commercial and critical support. Aside from its shocking denouement, the film is characterized by its striking style. Debut director David Fincher sets the film in an unnamed city that is depicted as a hellish metropolis approximating Dante's inferno. Fincher achieves this largely through film noir stylistic devices such as dark shadows, sudden bursts of bright light, rain, seedy rooms, and dark alleys. He also employed an experimental use of film stock, using special re-silvered film that resulted in distinctive colorings that serve to intensify the film's oppressive atmosphere. These visuals reinforce the film's graphic depiction showing the aftermath of each murder.

The human element in this bleak design comes from Brad Pitt as the young hothead Detective Mills and the reflective Morgan Freeman as the about-to-retire Detective Somerset. Both men pursue a serial killer who commits six murders in a single week. Each killing is based on one of the cardinal sins of gluttony, pride, greed, wrath, sloth, and lust. The last sin, envy, provides the motivation for the film's painful closure when the killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) provokes Mills into shooting him after beheading Mills's pregnant wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow). Doe's motivation for this action involves envy, his determination to destroy the detective's happy marriage. Unknown to him, Tracy was unhappy and scared of living in the city.

The partnership between the two detectives is, at times, a troubled one. Mills is an impulsive man who does not hesitate to take shortcuts. His partner is older and philosophical. Both men are united by their determination to stop the killings, which they achieve but at a terrible cost. The film concludes with Somerset quoting a line from Ernest Hemingway—that the "world's a fine place and worth fighting for." Somerset's final comment is that he agrees with the second part of this statement.

SEWELL, VERNON (1903–2001). Born in London, Vernon Sewell's film career began as a camera operator in 1930. He directed his first film, The Medium, in 1934. Sewell's first major film, The Silver Fleet (1943), was produced by Michael Powell. The low-budget crime film, as well as films involving horror and supernatural themes, such as Ghost Ship (1952), The House of Mystery (1961), and Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), dominated his career. Radio Cab Murder (1954) is a typical example as it involves the repercussions on a taxi driver (Jimmy Hanley) following a bank robbery by a woman (Sonia Holm). One of Sewell's best crime films was the bleak thriller Strongroom (1962), involving a bank robbery and the race against time to release bank employees trapped in a bank vault over a weekend. Similarly, Sewell's Soho Incident (1956) was a strong British film noir starring Lee Patterson as a Canadian boxer seduced into a criminal gang by a femme fatale, played by American actor Faith Domergue.

SHALLOW GRAVE (1994). Shallow Grave was Great Britain's most commercially successful film of 1995 and was celebrated by British critics for its effective use of local settings (in Edinburgh and Glasgow) and its clever plot. It traces the effects of sudden wealth on two young men, accountant David (Christopher Eccleston) and journalist Alex (Ewan McGregor), and a woman, Juliet (Kerry Fox), living together in an apartment. After another boarder, Hugo, dies in his bedroom leaving behind a large suitcase of money, David, Alex, and Juliet are faced with a moral quandary—whether to keep the money or notify the police. After they retain the money and mutilate Hugo's body in a vain effort to prevent recognition, they embark upon a dark journey leading to madness, betrayal, and death. The initial skirmishes for power within the group soon blossom into full-blown paranoia.

The film walks a fine line between cynicism and contrivance, combining Grand Guignol moments, film noir sensibilities, and director Danny Boyle's arresting visual style. The film won the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film at the 1995 BAFTA Film Awards, and Boyle won the Best Newcomer Award from the 1996 London Film Critics Circle.

SHAYNE, MICHAEL. The series of seven Mike Shayne films produced and released by 20th Century-Fox between December 1940 and December 1942 are one of the best, if not the best, crime series in the 1940s. The Shayne films, beginning with Michael Shayne: Private Detective and ending with Time to Kill, maintained strong production values, above-average plots, and fine acting for the entire series.

Hard-boiled private detective Mike Shayne was created by author Brett Halliday, the pseudonym of David Dresser, following an incident in a waterfront bar in Tampico, Mexico. Dresser, who was working on an oil tanker, went ashore with sailors and observed a redheaded Irishman drinking alone in the bar. After a fight broke out with the locals, Dresser and the sailors were rescued by the Irishman. Some years later, Dresser encountered the Irishman in a bar in New Orleans and discovered that the man was a private detective. Dresser (Halliday) began writing in 1927, but he had little success until 1939 with Dividend on Death, his first Mike Shayne novel. He continued to publish Shayne novels until 1958's Murder and the Wanton Bride, although the series continued for another 20 years with other writers. Halliday also initiated the Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and in the 1940s and the early 1950s, various radio series based on Halliday's character were broadcast throughout the United States. This included a two-year run featuring Jeff Chandler as Shayne in the New Adventures of Mike Shayne, which began in July 1948. Richard Denning starred as Shayne in a television series in 1960.

In the novels, magazine stories, and radio series, Shayne is presented as a tall, tough, two-fisted Irishman. However, when 20th Century-Fox initiated its film series in 1940, it ignored Halliday's conception and cast stocky character actor Lloyd Nolan as Shayne. Seeking a replacement for the Mr. Moto series, producer Sol Wurtzel based the first Shayne film on Halliday's first novel, Dividend on Death, with a screenplay by Stanley Rauh and Manning O'Connor. The film is a clever amalgam of comedy and mystery that includes a gentle spoof of classical detective fiction via Elizabeth Patterson as Aunt Olivia, a wealthy matriarch who, with the family butler Ponsby (Charles Coleman), delights in investigating convoluted mysteries. The series, however, represented a move away from the gentleman sleuths, such as the Saint and the Falcon, toward the hard-boiled world of Raymond Chandler.

The first film, Michael Shayne: Private Detective, has echoes of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, with Shayne employed by a wealthy father, Hiram P. Brighton (Clarence Kolb), to control the gambling addiction of his daughter Phyllis (Marjorie Weaver). When one of Phyllis's crooked companions is murdered, the police suspect Shayne, who exposes an elaborate horseracing scam. This was the only film in the series based on a Halliday story. The remaining films inserted Shayne into plots devised by other mystery writers.

The second film, Sleepers West (1941), was based on the novel Sleepers East by one-time Black Mask author Frederick Nebel, which had already been filmed by Fox in 1934. The script by Stanley Rauh and Lou Breslow is reminiscent of RKO's 1952 train drama Narrow Margin, with Shayne trying to protect a female witness, Helen Carlsen (Mary Beth Hughes), from hit man Carl Izard (Don Costello) on a train heading from Denver to San Francisco. Lynn Bari costarred as female reporter, and Shayne's former lover, Kay Bentley, in this taut crime drama that slackens off only in the final reel when Shayne, Carlsen, and Bentley abandon the train after a rail accident.

Hughes returned as Shayne's fiancée, with different names, in the next two films, Dressed to Kill (1941) and Blue White and Perfect (1941). The former was based on a novel by Richard Burke (The Dead Take No Bows) and scripted by Rauh and O'Connor. The latter, released in January 1942, one month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was a topical film about Nazi spies attempting to smuggle industrial diamonds out of the United States on a ship bound for Honolulu. George Reeves costarred as an American agent, with German actor Henry Victor leading the villains as a Nazi spy under the leadership of Curt Bois.

Director Herbert Leeds replaced Eugene Ford for the remaining films, beginning with the best film in the series, The Man Who Wouldn't Die (1942). Based on Clayton Rawson's novel No Coffin for the Corpse, scriptwriter Arnaud d'Usseau replaced Rawson's sleuth, magician Merlini the Great, with Mike Shayne. The film does, however, include a brief scene where Merlini (Charles Irwin) explains the art of shallow breathing to Shayne. The production values for the film were enhanced by the use of the set built for the 1939 large-scale production The Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes. The set served to reinforce the gothic element. This is noticeable from the opening scene when, on a dark windy night, three men carry a body from the Wolfe mansion to a car while an attractive woman, Anna Wolfe (Helene Reynolds), watches from the doorway. Although the men bury the body in the woods, the man (Zorah Bey) returns to the mansion late at night and terrorizes Catherine Wolfe (Marjorie Weaver), Anna's stepdaughter. Catherine asks Shayne to investigate, and to hide his identity from her father, Shayne pretends to be Roger Blake, Catherine's newlywed husband. This sets up a comedy sequence when the real Roger (Richard Derr) appears and Shayne is forced to explain how he spent his night with Catherine. Aside from the comedy, The Man Who Wouldn't Die moves the series closer to film noir with the duplicitous femme fatale Anna Wolfe and a bizarre story of jilted love.

Time to Kill, which followed Just off Broadway (1942), was also suitably hard-boiled, as it was the first screen version of Raymond Chandler's 1942 novel The High Window with Shayne replacing Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe. In 1947, 20th Century-Fox reinstated Marlowe (played by George Montgomery) for its higher budgeted but inferior remake, The Brasher Doubloon. After Chandler's agent Sydney Sanders sold the film rights to Fox for $3,500, screenwriter Clarence Upson Young was given the difficult task of compressing Chandler's novel into the short running time (61 minutes) for the Shayne series. The plot involves a missing coin—the Brasher Doubloon—and a domineering matriarch, Elizabeth Murdock (Ethel Griffies), who hires Shayne. Shayne traces the theft to Leslie Murdock (James Seay) and his scheme to counterfeit the coin. However, Shayne's investigation also leads to amateur photographer, and blackmailer, Louis Venter (Ralph Byrd) who has an incriminating photograph showing Murdock pushing her husband out the window of a tall building.

After seven films, Fox terminated the series, and Mike Shayne remained off-screen for four years until poverty row studio Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), through producer Sig Neufeld, acquired the rights. Over a two-year period, PRC churned out five low-budget films featuring Hugh Beaumont as Shayne. These films, beginning with Murder Is My Business (1946), failed to match the quality of the Fox series, and when PRC encountered financial problems, it ended the series with Too Many Winners in 1947.

SIEGEL, DON (1912–1991). Although Don Siegel had been working in Hollywood since the 1930s (directing his first film in 1946), his contribution was only noticed by critics and scholars in the late 1960s. Born in Chicago and educated at Jesus College in Cambridge, England, Siegel in 1983 arrived back in the United States, where family connections secured him a position in the Warner Bros. film library. After a short period in the editing department, he found his niche working on inserts and montages, which gave him access to his own camera so that he could film nondialogue insert shots and time-lapse sequences. His montages include impressive segments in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), and Casablanca (1942). Overworked and underpaid, he was finally allowed to direct a couple of short films, Star in the Night (1945) and Hitler Lives (1945) for Warner Bros.; both films won Oscars.

Siegel followed with his first feature film, The Verdict (1946), a relatively low-budget Victorian thriller starring Sydney Greenstreet as a disgraced former Scotland Yard superintendent who teams up with Peter Lorre to investigate a locked-door mystery to enact revenge against his successor at Scotland Yard. This superb crime film, based on Israel Zangwill's novel The Big Bow Mystery, should have established Siegel's credentials in Hollywood. Instead, the studio required him to work on Phillip Wylie's overly melodramatic novel Night unto Night (1948), starring Ronald Reagan as a scientist suffering from epilepsy who meets a widow (Viveca Lindfors) haunted by the voice of her dead husband. Even Siegel's skill could not salvage this film, and he left Warner for RKO and The Big Steal (1949), starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and William Bendix in a chase thriller filmed on location in Mexico.

After his first color film, Duel at Silver Creek (1952), a western starring Audie Murphy, and the comedy No Time for Flowers (1952), filmed in Vienna and starring his wife, Viveca Lindfors, Siegel directed Count the Hours (1953), his best film since The Verdict. This seemingly simple tale of an innocent migrant worker, George Braden (John Craven), accused and convicted of a double murder, is transformed by the combined talents of Siegel and cinematographer John Alton into a tense crime film with a strong social conscience. The film details the frustrations of lawyer Doug Madison (Macdonald Carey) and Braden's wife, Ellen (Teresa Wright), as they explore every avenue of the legal system in a desperate effort to prevent Braden's execution. Siegel highlights the arbitrary nature of a punitive justice system, ably assisted by Alton's expert lighting and stark compositions.

China Venture (1953) preceded Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), a tough prison film shot in a gritty, semidocumentary style at California's Folsom State Prison for producer Walter Wanger who, having been released from prison after shooting his wife Joan Bennett's agent, was determined to emphasize the need for prison reform. Siegel followed with Private Hell 36, a film noir for Ida Lupino's film company, the Filmakers. The film stars Steve Cochran and Howard Duff as two cops who misappropriate stolen money after a thief is killed in a car crash. This film, largely due to off-screen politics, represented a lost opportunity for Siegel, as its basic premise offered the basis for an excellent crime thriller involving guilt, redemption, and two contrasting women—a mercenary singer (Lupino) and a caring wife (Dorothy Malone).

Siegel's science-fiction masterpiece Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) captures the paranoia and anxieties of the Cold War period as well as functioning as a comment on the destructive effects of the blacklist. Its tale of alien pods from outer space replacing the inhabitants of a small California town was scripted by Daniel Mainwaring, a victim of Hollywood's "greylist" because of his left-wing views in the 1940s. Mainwaring also scripted The Big Steal and Siegel's next film, Baby Face Nelson (1957), a gangster film starring Mickey Rooney as Lester Gillis who takes the name "Baby Face" Nelson. He joins the Dillinger gang, finally taking over when Dillinger is killed. With a very small budget, Siegel injects energy, pace, and style into this gangster biopic. Siegel returned to his television roots for The Lineup (1958), which took its characters from the CBS television series of the same name; in 1954, Siegel had directed the pilot episode for that long-running police series.

Hound Dog Man (1959), in color and Cinemascope and starring singer Fabian, was followed by an Elvis Presley vehicle, Flaming Star (1960), with the singer cast as a Native American. Siegel was also brought in just prior to the start of filming of the Steve McQueen war film Hell Is for Heroes (1962) after its initial director (Robert Pirosh) clashed with McQueen. This tough war movie with its downbeat ending is among Siegel's best films.

Despite the evident skills displayed by Siegel in his crime and war films, the Hollywood system paid little attention to low-budget genre films. His status in the film industry was so marginal in the late 1950s and early 1960s that he returned to television for employment, working on such series as Twilight Zone. One such television project was a made-for-television film called The Killers (1964), a remake of Robert Siodmak's 1946 film noir. Siegel's film, however, focused not on the insurance investigator (Edmond O'Brien) as in the earlier film but on the two contract killers (Lee Marvin and John Cassavetes). However, the film's amoral point of view, often articulated in the dialogue exchanges between the two killers, and the level of violence in the film, resulted in the television network rejecting the film. It was subsequently released in the cinema and marked the last screen appearance of Ronald Reagan, who was cast as a gangster.

In 1967, Siegel returned to feature films with Madigan (1968), starring Richard Widmark as a New York police detective with domestic problems trying to recapture an escaped killer. This film provided a perfect segue to Siegel's subsequent films with Clint Eastwood, beginning with Coogan's Bluff (1968), with Eastwood as a rural cop who goes to New York City to recapture an escaped prisoner. Dirty Harry followed in 1972, also starring Eastwood, only this time he is a big-city cop turned vigilante in his pursuit of a serial killer in San Francisco. Unlike the moralistic Coogan, Harry Callahan moves easily outside the law in his pursuit for justice. This was Eastwood's biggest hit up to that time and Siegel's most commercially successful film. Between Coogan and Dirty Harry, Siegel directed Eastwood in the playful western Two Mules for Sister Sara (1969) and the more challenging gothic Civil War drama The Beguiled (1970), with Eastwood as a Union soldier who suffers after hiding out in a school in the South for girls. Eastwood falls victim to the jealousy and repressed desires that permeate the school.

Siegel returned to the crime genre with the caper film Charlie Varrick in 1973, featuring a relaxed performance by Walter Matthau as the shrewd criminal who outwits the Mob. He followed with the London-based thriller The Black Windmill (1974), starring Michael Caine as an espionage agent pursuing the people who have kidnapped his son. Siegel also directed John Wayne's last film, the western The Shootist (1975), followed by the excellent prison film Escape from Alcatraz (1979), which reunited Eastwood with Siegel for the last time. Siegel's final film, the appropriately titled Jinxed (1982), was marred by conflict between the director and the film's star, Bette Midler.

SIM, ALASTAIR (1900–1976). A memorable British character actor who specialized in playing eccentric authority figures, including policemen, Alastair Sim was born in Edinburgh and made his stage debut in 1930 and his film debut in 1935. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, he had perfected a distinctive film persona—the seemingly distracted policeman. This image began with his 1930s role as the comic sergeant in the Inspector Hornleigh series. Gradually Sim developed a more complex persona in such films as Cottage to Let (1941), in which he played undercover policeman Charles Dimble. In 1946, he starred as another policeman, Inspector Cockrill, in Green for Danger, based on Christianna Brand's 1944 novel. This is one of Sim's most skillful performances, as Cockrill's bumbling traits are eventually revealed to be merely a façade for a sharp, penetrating mind. He repeated variations of this character throughout the 1950s, including the hard-boiled detective writer in Laughter in Paradise (1951) and the bogus Inspector Poole in An Inspector Calls (1954). He was also the seemingly inoffensive professional assassin in The Green Man (1956).

SIMENON, GEORGES (1903–1989). Belgian novelist and short story writer Georges Simenon was born in Liège of Flemish Catholic parents. He left school at 15 and after some temporary jobs became a crime reporter with the Gazette de Liège. Simenon published his first novel, Au Pont des Arches, in 1921. He moved to Paris in 1923 and wrote pulp fiction under various names, including Georges Sim, Christian Brulls, and Jean du Perry.

In 1929, while in Holland, Simenon began writing his first novel centered on the Parisian detective Jules Maigret. In 1931, he and his publishers financed a ball in Paris to publicize the launch of the first two books in the series, M. Gallet, décéde (The Death of Monsieur) and Le pendu de Saint-Pholien (The Crime of Inspector Maigret). The fifth book, Pietr-le-Letton (The Strange Case of Peter the Lett), which was also published in 1931, was actually the first book that Simenon wrote. From 1931 to 1934, he wrote 19 novels and then abandoned the character until 1942. The Maigret series would ultimately extend to 75 books.

In the 19th book, Maigret (1934), Simenon presents his detective as living in retirement in a country house in Meung-sur-Loire with Madame Maigret. Unlike other fictional detectives of that period, Maigret does not employ the methods of ratiocination, favoring instead his intuition. Simenon also ignored the puzzles and locked-room mysteries associated with the classical detective and focused on the psychological motivation of characters who exhibited criminal and neurotic tendencies. Simenon, like the hard-boiled writers, perceived crime as a pervasive manifestation of a corrupt society, not the actions of one or two aberrant individuals. He placed his characters in realistic settings so that he could explore their psychological state, as he was primarily interested in their anxieties and guilt, not descriptions of action, suspense, or violence.

In the 1940s, Simenon alternated Maigret novels with non-Maigret fiction that extended his fascination with the psychology of aberrant characters. He referred to these books as romans durs. In 1946, he moved to North America and, after a short period in Canada, lived in the United States until 1955. During this period, he wrote one of his best novels, Red Lights (1955). It concerns a bickering couple driving from New York City to Maine and the wife's disappearance along the way. This became the basis of the 2004 French film Feux rouges (Red Lights), directed by Cédric Kahn and starring Jean-Pierre Darrousin as the husband Antoine and Carol Bouquet as his wife, Hélène. Kahn shifted the setting from the United States to the south of France and presented this area as a kind of rural nightmare that matches Antoine's troubled state of mind. This film remains one of the finest adaptations of Simenon's fiction. He wrote his last psychological novel in 1971, Les innocents (1972), followed by his last Maigret novel, Maigret et M. Charles (Maigret and Monsieur Charles, 1972). Simenon wrote nearly 200 novels overall and was among the best-selling authors of all time, with sales at an estimated half a billion copies.

There were three film adaptations of Maigret novels in 1932: Jean Renoir's La nuit du carrefour (Night at the Crossroads), Julien Duvivier's La tête d'un homme (A Man's Neck), and Jean Tarride's Le chien jaune (The Yellow Dog). Les inconnus dans la maison (Strangers in the House) was released in 1942 and remade in Great Britain in 1967 as Stranger in the House. Michel Simon starred as a pathetic loner suspected of murder in Panique (Panic, 1947), and this film was remade by Patrice Leconte as Monsieur Hire in 1989. Le chat (The Cat) appeared in 1971, followed soon after by Simone Signoret and Alain Delon in La Veuve Couderc (The Widow Couderc, 1971). Bertrand Tavernier's L'horloger de Saint-Paul (The Watchmaker of St. Paul, 1973) depicts a father's attempt to understand why his son committed a murder.

Lance Comfort adapted Simenon's novella Newhaven–Dieppe for his downbeat British film noir Temptation Harbour (1947), starring Robert Newton as the railroad worker who finds a suitcase full of money and decides to keep it. Simenon's 1938 novel Monsieur La Souris became the basis for the 1950 British film Midnight Episode, starring Stanley Holloway. Claude Rains starred as a trusted clerk who steals money from his employer and flees on the Paris Express in The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (U.S. title Paris Express, 1953), based on Simenon's 1938 novel. The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), an English-language film shot in Paris and starring Burgess Meredith, was a commercial failure.

Phil Karlson's adaptation of The Brothers Rico (1957) gave Richard Conte one of his best roles as an ex-criminal who inadvertently causes the death of his younger brother. This followed two indifferent mid-1950s Hollywood films, A Life in the Balance (1955), involving a 10-year-old boy who is taken hostage while celebrating Mexico City's Independence Day, and The Bottom of the Bottle (1956), which concerns an escaped convict (Van Johnson) who hides out on the property of his wealthy brother (Joseph Cotten) in Arizona. The latter was based on Simenon's 1949 novel Le fond de la bouteille. Other film adaptations include La neige était sale (The Snow Was Black, 1952); En cas de malheur (Love Is My Profession, 1958), starring Jean Gabin and Brigitte Bardot; La mort de Belle (The Passion of Slow Fire, 1961); and L'homme de Londres (The Man from London, 2007).

SIODMAK, ROBERT (1900–1973). Robert Siodmak was born in Memphis, Tennessee, while his German parents were on a business trip in the United States, but he was raised in Leipzig and Dresden. He codirected his first film, Menschen am Sontag, with future Hollywood directors Fred Zinnemann and Edgar Ulmer in Berlin. Siodmak, a Jew, left Germany for Paris in 1934 because of the rise of the Nazis. He directed films in France until the German occupation in 1940, then left for the United States. His first Hollywood film was the domestic drama West Point Widow for Paramount in 1941. However, it was at Universal in 1944 that Siodmak made his mark, with his adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's thriller Phantom Lady (1944). This film preceded Double Indemnity (1944) into release by seven months.

A series of dark, fatalistic dramas, often with a tinge of aberrant sexuality, made Siodmak the preeminent film noir director in the 1940s with such films as The Spiral Staircase (1946), The Killers (1946), Cry of the City (1948), and Criss Cross (1949). Siodmak's characteristic use of low-key lighting, dramatic camera compositions, and dark, threatening locations epitomized the formal shift in the crime film in the 1940s, together with its thematic change involving alienation, entrapment, and moral disintegration. The Killers opens with the murder of Burt Lancaster by two hit men. The Spiral Staircase was based on Ethel Lina White's novel Some Must Watch with Dorothy McGuire, a mute companion-servant to bedridden Ethel Barrymore, locked in a house with a psychotic killer, while The Dark Mirror (1946) cast Olivia de Havilland in two roles as sisters, one sane and responsible, the other a ruthless killer. Cry of the City (1948), Siodmak's bleak variation of an oft-used gangster formula (as seen, for example, in Manhattan Melodrama, 1934) involves two men raised in the same neighborhood, one a killer (Richard Conte), the other a policeman (Victor Mature).

Before he returned to Germany in 1951, Siodmak directed his most fatalistic crime film, Criss Cross, based on Don Tracy's 1934 novel. The film concludes with the death of Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo, murdered by Dan Duryea just before the police arrive. The File on Thelma Jordan (also released as Thelma Jordan, 1949) features Barbara Stanwyck as the murderess Thelma Jordan who destroys the career and marriage of gullible district attorney Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey). This bleak film ended Siodmak's remarkable series of Hollywood crime films that include Christmas Holiday (1944), The Suspect (1945), The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (also released as Uncle Harry, 1945), Deported (1950), Le grand jeu (aka Flesh and the Woman, 1958), and Portrait of a Sinner (1961).

Back in Germany he directed Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (1957), which was based on the actual case of Bruno Luedke (Mario Adorf), a man who murdered more than 50 women between 1928 and his arrest in 1943. Siodmak's film, however, was more interested in presenting Luedke as representative of the sickness of the Third Reich, which exploited Luedke to encourage public support for its policy of exterminating the mentally ill.

SO EVIL MY LOVE (1948). This British period crime film, filmed at D&P Studios in Buckinghamshire, was produced by veteran Hollywood producer Hal Wallis for Paramount-British. British-born Hollywood actor Ray Milland returned to England for the lead role as Mark Bellis, as did the film's director, Lewis Allan, a British-born director who had established a career in Hollywood. However, the real focus of the film was Olivia Harwood, played by British actress Ann Todd. So Evil My Love gave Todd another opportunity to portray a repressed heroine capable of extreme actions when provoked by love or rejection. Harwood, as played by Todd, undergoes a profound moral transformation during the film, from the uncertain widow of a missionary to the sensual, conniving mistress of a thief and murderer. This transformation is complex as Harwood's carnal desire for Bellis requires her to subjugate the strict moral code that governed her earlier life.

On a boat returning to England from Jamaica, Harwood meets Bellis, a typhoid victim, and nurses him back to health. Bellis, who is in a sexual relationship with another woman, Kitty Feathers (Moira Lister), exploits Harwood's desire for love and sexual satisfaction. When a school friend, Susan Courtney (Geraldine Fitzgerald), contacts Harwood, Bellis encourages Olivia to insinuate herself into the Courtney household so that she can rob her friend. Susan, married to tyrannical, impotent barrister Henry Courtney (Raymond Huntley), becomes increasingly dependent on Harwood. After Henry exposes Bellis's criminal past, Harwood poisons him. When Susan is sentenced to death, Harwood agonizes over the prospect that her friend will hang. However, after Bellis returns to England from France, lust soon displaces her guilt. Harwood's plans to leave the country with Bellis are shattered when she discovers that he was also sharing his bed with Kitty. Harwood then kills Bellis and gives herself up to the police.

So Evil My Love, based on the novel For Her to See, was one of four films produced in the 1940s based on the novels of Joseph Shearing, the pseudonym of Gabrielle Margaret Vere Long. The other British films were Blanche Fury (1947) and The Mark of Cain (1948), while Moss Rose (1947) was produced in Hollywood. See also FILM NOIR.

SPILLANE, MICKEY (1918–2006). Unlike those of hard-boiled writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, the fictional world created by Mickey Spillane is one where good and evil are sharply delineated. His fiction is permeated by a rigid code of self-righteous morality. Spillane's stories certainly struck a chord with the American public in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s as, at one time, his books occupied seven of the top 10 spots among best-sellers in American fiction.

Born Frank Morrison Spillane in Brooklyn, New York, he grew up in the tough area around Elizabeth, New Jersey, where his father was a bartender. After a brief time at Kansas State College, he returned to New York and, as a teenager, began submitting stories to the pulp magazines. He also wrote for the comic books and in 1946 created his own comic-book private eye, Mike Danger.

After Mike Danger did not catch on, Spillane reworked the character—and changed the name to Mike Hammer—for his first novel, I, the Jury, which was published in 1947. This novel went on to sell 6 million copies. In the novel, Hammer is a war veteran who sets out to avenge the death of a man who saved his life. He is assisted by Velda, his loyal and sexy secretary. This novel contains many of the elements that came to define Spillane's fiction, including strong, literal descriptions of violence, a duplicitous and sexy female villain, and a punitive tone where Spillane lectures the reader on his right-wing values. In his 1951 novel One Lonely Night, Spillane develops a scenario where Hammer confronts a liberal judge, thereby providing the author with an opportunity to directly register his disgust with liberal values. Spillane also expresses a xenophobic hatred of Communists in his fiction. The main appeal for his readers was his hero—a tough, belligerent, hard-drinking detective who willingly jettisons the restraints of the legal system to act as a vigilante. I, the Jury, for example, ends with Hammer executing the person (a woman) responsible for his friend's death. Hammer also never hesitated in inflicting pain—whether a kick to the groin, a broken arm or leg, or a bullet in the stomach.

Spillane's writing style was a form of staccato prose characterized by its pervasive sense of anger and belligerence, a quality encapsulated in his book titles: I, the Jury, My Gun Is Quick (1950), Vengeance Is Mine (1950), The Big Kill (1952), and The Girl Hunters (1962), through to his final novels featuring Hammer, The Killing Man (1989) and Black Alley (1996). His writing is also punctuated by lurid descriptions of the voluptuous women who inhabit his fiction, and this may, to some degree, account for the popularity of his books. Only Erle Stanley Gardner surpassed Spillane in sales. Spillane's popularity was a crucial factor in the boom in the paperback original market in the 1950s.

Spillane interrupted his career in 1952 after he became a Jehovah's Witness. In the 1960s, as a reaction to the popularity of James Bond, he introduced Tiger Mann, a freelance spy for a private organization owned by a right-wing millionaire. Mann featured in four books but failed to catch on.

The first Mike Hammer film was the 1953 low-budget I, the Jury, starring Biff Elliot as Hammer in a film produced by Englishman Victor Saville. The film's major attribute was John Alton's expert cinematography. In 1957, Saville returned with another low-budget Spillane adaptation, My Gun Is Quick, featuring journeyman actor Robert Bray as Hammer. Saville also coproduced the best film based on Spillane's fiction, Robert Aldrich's 1955 version of Spillane's 1952 novel Kiss Me Deadly—the first mystery novel ever to appear on the New York Times best-seller list. However, Aldrich and his screenwriter, A. I. Bezzerides, disliked Spillane's fiction, and they reworked the story to expose Hammer's sadism and chauvinistic treatment of women. They also had little regard for the role of the private eye in popular culture, regarding Spillane's fiction as quasi-fascist.

Adaptations of Spillane's non–Mike Hammer fiction include The Long Wait (1954), directed by Victor Saville and featuring Anthony Quinn as an amnesia victim searching for clues to his identity, and Ring of Fear (1954), starring Spillane as himself. In the latter, he goes after a homicidal maniac terrorizing the Clyde Beatty Circus. Christopher George starred as Morgan, an international privateer, recruited by the CIA to rescue a scientist held on a remote Caribbean island in The Delta Factor (1970).

In 1963, Spillane was cast as Mike Hammer in The Girl Hunters, which was filmed at MGM's British studios despite the fact that it is set in New York. The film begins with Hammer binge-drinking following the possible death of his secretary Velda; Shirley Eaton played the femme fatale. I, the Jury was remade in 1982 with Armand Assante as Hammer and Barbara Carrera as the femme fatale. Mike Hammer was also featured in a number of television series, including Darren McGavin as Hammer from 1958 to 1959 and Stacy Keach as Hammer from 1984 to 1987.

SQUARE, THE (2008). The narrative premise of this Australian crime film follows the pattern established by James M. Cain in the 1930s with The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. It opens with a simple case of adultery in a parked car in a remote area, with married man Raymond Yale (David Roberts) engaged in a sexual act with a married woman, Carla Smith (Claire van der Boom). Their sexual activities in the front seat of his car arouse the curiosity of two dogs sitting in Carla's car. This rather ordinary act sets the tone for the film, as the relationship between Yale and Smith quickly turns sour. Their first mistake—one of many—occurs when Carla convinces Raymond to steal the proceeds of a robbery committed by her husband Greg (Anthony Hayes). To achieve this, Raymond hires an arsonist, Billy, to burn Carla's house to hide the fact that they have stolen Greg's money. However, Billy is unaware that Greg's mother is sleeping in the house.

This standard film noir premise is transformed into a distinctly Australian film by writers Joel Edgerton, who also plays the arsonist Billy, and Matthew Dabner. The cool, detached direction by Joel's brother Nash eschews the typically expressive style favored by this genre, as this is a naturalistic drama peopled by ordinary, otherwise average characters who make the mistake of opening Pandora's Box, only to discover that they cannot control the events that follow.

The clever script keeps two steps ahead of the viewer, and the film includes a number of atypical characters such as the local cop, Sergeant Miles (Paul Caesar), who is excited that, finally, there is something to investigate. The Square was rewarded with seven nominations at the 2008 Australian Film Institute Awards, including Best Film, Best Direction, Best Screenplay, and Best Lead Actor. Joel Edgerton and Dabner won the Best Screenplay Award at the 2008 Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards.

STANWYCK, BARBARA (1907–1990). Barbara Stanwyck was born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn. Her early life was tough, and by the age of 15 she was dancing in speakeasies. Her stage break came when she was 19 and changed her name to Barbara Stanwyck. She married vaudeville star Frank Fay and accompanied him to Hollywood in 1928. While his career declined, Stanwyck enjoyed continuing success throughout the 1930s. During this phase in her career, especially prior to 1934 and the changes to the Production Code, she specialized in tough, sometimes promiscuous, women in such films as Baby Face (1933), which was banned in some U.S. states and overseas countries, and Ladies They Talk About (1933), with Stanwyck as a criminal sent to the women's division at San Quentin prison.

When Stanwyck was offered the role of Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944), she was at the top of her profession (that year, she was listed as the highest-paid woman in the United States). Although she feared the role would damage her career, director Billy Wilder convinced her to accept it, and she delivered a chilling portrayal of the femme fatale Dietrichson. Her performance created a prototype for this figure in the 1940s and 1950s. Thereafter, she was first choice when producers wanted a woman to play assertive, dangerous characters who often commit murder in such films as The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), The File on Thelma Jordan (1949), No Man of Her Own (1950), Jeopardy (1952), Blowing Wild (1953), and Witness to Murder (1954). In Crime of Passion (1957), Stanwyck's last major crime film, she is Kathy Ferguson, a newspaper columnist who marries policeman Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden). In an attempt to gain promotion for her husband, she sleeps with his boss Tony Pope (Raymond Burr). When Pope betrays her and appoints somebody else, Stanwyck kills him. The film ends with Bill Doyle arresting his wife for the murder.

Stanwyck's other crime films include Night Nurse (1930), Gambling Lady (1934), The Mad Miss Manton (1938), Lady of Burlesque (1943), The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), Cry Wolf (1947), The Lady Gambles (1949), and The Night Walker (1965). See also FILM NOIR.

SUN TAAM (2007). This Hong Kong police film begins with Insp. Chan Kwai-Bun (Lau Ching-Wan) ordering a subordinate to place him in a suitcase and throw him down a flight of stairs a number of times. Chan emerges proudly from the suitcase to announce that he knows the identity of the man who killed a young woman. However, at a retirement ceremony for a superior officer, Chan cuts off his ear as a present for the departing officer—because the officer lacks an inner soul. Forced into retirement, Chan is thereby unable to deploy his special gift, the ability to expose the inner personalities, or what he describes as "hidden ghosts," of people.

Five years later, an ambitious young policeman, Insp. Ho Ka-On (Andy On), invites Chan to help him investigate the mystery of officer Wong Kwok-Chu (Lee Kwok-Lun), who disappeared in a nearby forest while working on a stakeout with his partner, officer Ko Chi-Wai (Ka Tung Lam). Chan discovers that Ko's gun was stolen by an Indian thief and that Ko subsequently killed Wong for his gun. He then covered his tracks by changing the serial numbers in the police records. Importantly, Chan exposes the fact that Ko has seven personalities, headed by an officious young woman who determines his behavior. Directors Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai (who coscripted the film) treat this situation literally by showing Wong's different personalities, via different actors, simultaneously on-screen. From the moment this is evident in the film, following a disquieting scene in a restaurant urinal, the directors force the viewer to process all information through their understanding of Chan's visions. This process is reinforced in a subsequent scene involving Chan's imaginary wife, Mary Chueng (Kelly Lin).

Sun taam was nominated for seven awards, including Best Picture, at the 27th Hong Kong Film Awards. It was one of Hong Kong's highest grossing films in 2008 despite a restrictive censorship rating caused by the graphic scene involving Chan slicing off his ear, a scene the directors deemed necessary for an understanding of Chan. The film was released internationally as Mad Detective.
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TAKAKURA, KEN (1931– ). Born in Fukuoka, Japan, Ken Takakura graduated from Meiji University before auditioning at the Toei Film Company in the mid-1950s. He was in the right place at the right time, as this was the start of the yakuza boom and Toei was one of the major film companies specializing in this genre. He made his debut in Denko karate in 1956. With his stoic persona and brooding presence, Takakura was the perfect yakuza hero during this period, epitomizing the qualities that defined the yakuza.

Japan in the 1950s and 1960s was experiencing rapid modernization and Westernization, and the culture was torn between a desire to retain its prewar values and the need to embrace the emerging corporate culture. Modernization was a direct threat to many people trying to hold onto values from the past, and the yakuza films in the 1950s and 1960s dramatized this cultural clash. The yakuza was a romantic figure who embraced the code of giri-ninjo, roughly translated as a mixture of loyalty and duty balanced by compassion and a sense of humanity. A favorite plot was to establish two gangs, one representing traditional values, and the other—the "false" gang—symbolizing corporate culture. The films would often conclude with the "true" representative of feudal Japan, the lone yakuza armed only with a sword, killing members of the false gang before dying. Hundreds of these films were released during this period, and when Takakura left Toei in 1976 he had appeared in more than 180.

One major series for the actor was the Abashiri series (named after a well-known prison in Japan), which started in 1965. Takakura appeared as a tough, sentimental gangster in 20 films in this series, which often mixed different genres. For example, Abashiri Bangaichi: Koya no taiketsu (1966) includes a western setting with a range war. In Abashiri Bangaichi: Hokkai-hen (1965) Takakura drives a truck containing drugs across Japan. Abashiri Bangaichi: Fubuki no toso (1967) sees Takakura serving time as a multiple murderer-arsonist, embezzler, and spy who escapes to seek revenge on the man responsible for driving his father to suicide. This plot was used again and again in the series with minor variations. For example, in Shin Abashiri Bangaichi (1968) Takakura searches for his mother after his release from jail. However, she is dead, and his sister has been forced into prostitution to survive the tough economic situation in postwar Japan. The villain, as in most yakuza films in the 1950s and 1960s, is a businessman who kills the hero's best friend. The film ends in a conventional manner with the yakuza (Takakura) killing his enemy and returning to jail.

Takakura also costarred with Robert Mitchum in The Yakuza (1975), a Hollywood-produced film that was filmed mostly in Japan (Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo). In The Yakuza, screenwriters Paul Schrader and Robert Towne present a romanticized vision of the yakuza warrior as he appeared in the 1960s and early 1970s before a tougher, less idealized interpretation took over. Takakura also appeared in other Hollywood films, including the 1970 war film Too Late the Hero, directed by Robert Aldrich, as a Japanese officer trying to prevent the return of Cliff Robertson and Michael Caine to their base in the Philippines. Takakura plays a Japanese detective, Mashahiro Matsumoto, who lives by a strict code of honor in Black Rain (1989); he assists an American (Michael Douglas) in this film that was partly shot on location in Osaka. Both men are caught up in a war between yakuza gangs. Takakura also starred in the 1992 comedy Mr. Baseball.

TANNÖD (2009). Tannöd, released overseas as The Murder Farm, is based on the best-selling novel by Andrea Maria Schenkel, which in turn drew its inspiration from actual events that took place in the small Bavarian village of Hof Hinterkaifeck. On a winter's night in March 1922, a farmer, his wife, their widowed daughter, her son and daughter, and the family maid were murdered by someone with a pickax. The case was never solved. The notoriety of the event was enhanced by village gossip surrounding the sexual activities on the farm, as the father and daughter had been convicted of an incestuous relationship in 1915. He went to jail for a year and the daughter for one month.

Schenkel re-created the crime in her novel, although she changed the setting to the period after World War II. The story is told through an unnamed narrator. The film keeps the setting of the novel, but invents a different central character, the young nurse Kathrin (Julia Jentsch), who returns to the village two years after the killings for her mother's funeral. Memories of the event are still vivid in the village, and Kathrin's return serves to stir up the past. As she moves among the villagers, the film crosscuts between her experiences and the events leading up to the extermination of the Danner family on the Tannöd farm two years earlier.

The creative personnel behind this atmospheric film are mostly women. Director Bettina Oberli, from Switzerland, cowrote the script with Petra Lüschow from Schenkel's novel. The result is a complex crime that, on one level, resembles Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, where everybody has a reason to commit the murder. In Tannöd, however, the killings on the farm serve as a pretext to expose the villagers' dark secrets and repressed desires, which are represented metaphorically by the dark forest surrounding the village. This point is reinforced in a visually spectacular scene when the entire village emerges out of the dark forest to stare at the Tannöd farm. To this end, the script assimilates themes involving religious guilt, incestuous sex, betrayal, and family loyalty within a crime format. Director Oberli emphasizes the inner darkness of the story by shooting many scenes with a handheld camera utilizing only available light, and the oppressive atmosphere is reinforced by Johan Söderqvist's score.

Tannöd is a disturbing film that refuses to polarize guilt. Everyone in the village, except Kathrin, is guilty of something. The head of the Danner family (Vitus Zeplichal) is the obvious villain, as he continues to sexually abuse his grown-up daughter Barbara (Brigitte Hobmeier) after fathering her two children. However, the film refuses to present Barbara only as a victim, because she exploits her father's vice, as well as the sexual desires of other men in the village, for her own mercenary ends. Kathrin is drawn into this corrupt milieu when she attempts to rekindle a childhood romance with Johann Hauer (Volker Bruch), the son of the family living opposite the Danner farm. The film ends with a terrible revelation, and Kathrin leaves the village. The final scene shows her walking through the dark forest. See also GERMAN CRIME FILMS.

TARANTINO, QUENTIN (1963– ). Quentin Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but raised in Los Angeles. With little formal education (Tarantino dropped out of high school when he was 16), he acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of films, film style, and film history over the next few years. His films demonstrate this knowledge. Examples from low-budget Hollywood crime films, Hong Kong action films, Italian westerns and horror films, and various examples from the French New Wave can be found in his films. These influences are assimilated into his characteristic style marked by expressive virtuosity, clever dialogue, and sudden bursts of violence. Stanley Kubrick's narrative complexity in his caper film The Killing (1956), for example, is found in Reservoir Dogs (1992). Pulp Fiction (1994), with its fragmented narrative, can be traced back to Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave.

Tarantino took the 1990s by storm with two films: his debut film Reservoir Dogs and, two years later, Pulp Fiction. The latter won the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes, followed by Oscar nominations for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. Jackie Brown (1997), based on Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch, was more conventional. It restored the career of African-American actor Pam Grier after her peak years in the early to mid-1970s, casting her as a flight attendant who tries to avoid jail after she is caught with stolen money.

Tarantino's Kill Bill was initially planned as one film, but was released in two separate "volumes" in 2003 and 2004. The simple storyline was pure Tarantino with its roots in the low-budget action cinema that the director admires. A young woman (Uma Thurman) called simply "the Bride," a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, leaves the squad after getting pregnant. On her wedding day, she is gunned down and wakes up from a coma four years later seeking revenge. Tarantino's execution is less simple, in his mix of conventions from various genres—including Hong Kong martial arts films, westerns, and samurai films. He also reworks the narrative premise of François Truffaut's La mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black, 1968).

In 2007, Tarantino directed the deliberately tacky revenge thriller Death Proof, which was initially an episode in the 192-minute Grindhouse project with director Robert Rodriguez. Grindhouse contains two action-exploitation feature films released on one program. Ultimately, Tarantino's film, which depicts the revenge of four women against a sadistic stunt driver (Kurt Russell), was expanded and released separately.

THIN MAN, THE. Following the publication of Dashiell Hammett's novel The Thin Man in 1934, MGM purchased the film rights, and under the efficient direction of Woody Van Dyke, The Thin Man (1934) was filmed in 18 days. This film generated a profit of $729,000 and initiated a highly popular series of films. William Powell, who played Philo Vance in an earlier series of crime films, was cast as Nick Charles, and—against the advice of studio head Louis B. Mayer—Van Dyke selected Myrna Loy as Nick's wife, Nora. Mayer believed that she was more suited to Oriental roles, such as her evil Fah Lo See in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1933). In The Thin Man, Nora is a California heiress and Nick a suave former private detective who prefers drinking, partying, and spending Nora's money to actually working for a living. In the first two films, they do not have children, only a terrier called Asta. In The Thin Man, they come to New York to celebrate New Year's Eve, and following Nora's request, Nick investigates the disappearance of a scientist—the "thin man" of the title.

MGM knew it had a valuable property and wisely limited the number of films to six over a 13-year period. The studio also provided a generous budget for the series, and it never degenerated into the low-budget formula that came to characterize other series films such as the Lone Wolf, the Saint, the Falcon, and Sherlock Holmes. The popularity of The Thin Man resulted in a brief cycle of husband-and-wife detective teams, including Errol Flynn as Francis Monroe Warren and Brenda Marshall as his wife, Rita, in Footsteps in the Dark (1941) as well as Loretta Young and Brian Aherne in A Night to Remember (1942).

The Thin Man is a hybrid crime film that emphasizes comedy, especially domestic screwball comedy, as much as crime and mystery. Van Dyke returned to direct the second film, After the Thin Man (1936), and the studio hired Hammett himself to provide a story outline. The film ends with Nick exposing the murderer, a seemingly mild-mannered man played by James Stewart, and Nora announcing that she is pregnant. Three years later, Another Thin Man (1939) continued this emphasis on domestic comedy, especially the interplay between Nick and Nora, and focused less on crime, although the plot centered on the murder of an elderly munitions manufacturer. Hammett also provided the story outline for this film. For the next two films, Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) and The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), the studio intensified the domestic aspect with Nick, Nora, and their son, Nick Jr., in the first film, while Nick's mother and father are introduced in the latter.

After the first three films, director Van Dyke, who died in 1943, and Hammett were not involved. Throughout the 1940s, Myrna Loy became increasingly disenchanted with her role, and when William Powell stated that he was equally bored with the films, the studio ended the series with The Song of the Thin Man (1947). This film returned to at least a modicum of crime, with Nick investigating a murder on a gambling ship that, in turn, provides the pretext for him to visit a number of late-night clubs in search of a missing band member. Dean Stockwell was Nick Jr., who, by 1947, had grown into a young man. See also HARD-BOILED FILMS.

THIRD MAN, THE (1949). Graham Greene never intended his screenplay for The Third Man to be a "serious" film, yet it remains one of the great movies. There are numerous highlights, including the memorable first shot of Orson Welles, as Harry Lime, exposed in a doorway by an overhead light, together with the famous climax in the sewers beneath Vienna. But the film is also notable for its clever reworking of familiar narrative conventions to form a coherent, fatalistic mosaic that captures the despair, pain, and corruption of postwar Europe. The genesis for the film came from Greene's experiences in Vienna in the winter of 1948. He was told of the large system of sewers beneath the city that breached the tightly sequestered national zones because the Russians refused to lock the thinly disguised advertisement kiosks that covered the various entrances.

As the film begins, American pulp author Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in Vienna at the invitation of Lime, only to find that his friend has been killed in an automobile accident. Once Martins discovers discrepancies in the eyewitness accounts, he behaves in a manner similar to the simple-minded heroes of his own western novels in their search for the truth. Martins blunders toward the revelation that Lime is not dead and that, even more shockingly, his friend is living off the proceeds of his penicillin racket in the Russian sector—at the expense of children and adults deformed by his criminally adulterated medicine. Martins gradually realizes that the moral complexities of postwar Vienna cannot be equated to the simplicities of his pulp stories, so he agrees to participate in a plan by a British officer, Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), to lure Lime from the Russian zone, after which they trap and kill him in the sewers under Vienna.

The two American characters in the story occupy different positions in the film's moral spectrum—Lime, the callous black-market racketeer, and Martins, the naïve "hero." The characterization of Martins as gullible and out of his depth provides an indication of Greene's low opinion of postwar America and its tendency to reduce complex world problems to simplistic platitudes. Major Calloway has a more pragmatic view of the world that includes dealing with the Russians. He, unlike Martins, is aware of the ramifications of Lime's coldhearted disregard for humanity.

The other major figure in the film, and perhaps the most enigmatic character of all, is Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli). The film does not romanticize her, but emphasizes her loyalty to Lime, whatever the cost. Even when she discovers the horrific nature of Lime's crimes, she cannot reject her former lover. Nor can she forgive Martins (she tells him that Holly is such a "silly name"). Schmidt cannot bring herself to betray Lime, even after she agrees to participate in Calloway's plan so that she will not be transported back to the Russian sector. Schmidt not only rejects Martins in the film's famous last scene, where she walks past the American, but also refuses to avail herself of the protection of the British authorities, as she associates them with Lime's death. Instead, she faces the prospect of deportation and her own probable death.

Robert Krasker won the 1950 Academy Award for his black-and-white cinematography, Carol Reed was nominated for Best Director, and Oswald Hafenrichter was nominated for Best Film Editing. The film also won Best British Film at the 1950 BAFTA Awards, and Reed won the Grand Prize at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival. The memorable zither score of Anton Karas, whom Reed noticed playing in a Vienna club, was a sensation at the time of the film's release (the theme from the film was a major hit in the early 1950s). It added another original touch to a film that benefited from the collaboration of many artists, including Welles, who wrote his own dialogue for the Ferris wheel scene in which he tries to rationalize Lime's uncaring behavior: "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!"

Although some critics attribute the great qualities of the film to Welles, it was a collaborative effort with many talented people involved. This included director Reed, who opposed Selznick's attempt to shoot the film in the studio and also opposed the casting of Noel Coward as Lime. Reed further rejected Selznick's plan for a more upbeat, conventional story. It was Reed who insisted on the despairing tone of the film's last scene and devised its memorable, long-held shot showing Schmidt's lengthy walk past Martins in the avenue near the cemetery while the remaining leaves fall from the almost-barren trees.

36 QUAI DES ORFÈVRES (2004). This celebrated French police film received eight nominations at the 2005 César Awards, including Best Actor for Daniel Auteuil, Best Director for Olivier Marchal (who also coscripted the film), and Best Film. Marchal's script was inspired by true events as well as aspects of Alexandre Dumas's story The Count of Monte Cristo—including the moral and judicial consequences of a decision taken by policeman Léo Vrinks (Auteuil) to hide a crime. By not exposing an informer who has murdered a gangster in the interest of solving a more significant crime, the consequences for Vrinks, his family, and colleagues are profound.

The film begins with the retirement celebrations for Vrinks's close friend and fellow policeman Eddy Valence (Daniel Duval). This boisterous, drunken event provides the only uplifting moment in the film, as it establishes the close bond between Vrinks and the men and women in his unit, the Search and Action Squad. From this high point, the unit is systematically dismantled throughout the film, and by the end most members are either dead or dispersed to other police units. This is due to a combination of factors—especially the consequences of Vrinks's decision to protect his informer and the poisonous internal politics within the force. Jealously opposing Vrinks is former friend Denis Klein (Gérard Depardieu), who leads a competing anticrime unit. Both Vrinks and Klein are in line for a top position, and both are in love with Camille (Valéria Golino), who is married to Vrinks. When Klein discovers that Vrinks is shielding the informer, he seizes the opportunity to investigate and imprison his rival. Klein is rewarded with promotion, although his own demons eventually surface.

This dark, despairing crime film utilizes the genre to provide a powerful study in ambition and revenge. It emphasizes that the moral line in the murky world of crime is often difficult to discern, and while Vrinks transgresses, he does so in the interest of what he considers to be the greater good. Klein, on the other hand, has no such limitations, and his only motivations are a desire for power and his obsession to destroy Vrinks.

Director Marchal, himself a former policeman, appears well versed in the destructive ramifications of internal politics within the Paris police force (whose address provides the title of the film). His bleak tale is suitably reinforced by an effective selection of settings—especially an industrial location for a disastrous shootout when Klein, jealous of Vrinks's authority, sabotages the raid, leading to the death of Vrinks's friend Valence. Marchal ensures that the dominant colors throughout the film are various shadings of black, gray, and blue. The only virtue endorsed by the film is loyalty to family, colleagues, and friends, such as former prostitute Manou Berliner (Myléne Demongeot). The police force as an institution is depicted as little better than the criminals it pursues. It is shown to be opportunistic and bereft of moral principles. Marchal elicits fine performances from Auteuil as the tormented Vrinks, who is first seen in the film sobbing in a prison cell, and Depardieu as the conflicted Klein.

THOMPSON, JIM (1906–1977). The author of paperback originals, mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, Jim Thompson was a relatively obscure writer until the early 1980s. In 1977, when he died, few, if any, of his novels were in print. Since that time, most have been republished—especially his most disturbing stories involving unreliable narrators and sociopathic protagonists—and filmmakers began adapting them.

Thompson was born in Oklahoma. His father was a sheriff and local political figure who had to flee to Mexico following accusations involving the fraudulent use of public funds. Thompson reworked this material into novels such as The Killer inside Me (1954) and Pop. 1280 (1964; filmed in 1981 by French director Bertrand Tavernier, who changed the setting to French Africa).

Thompson was fascinated with characters who, if not psychotic, are clearly disturbed. The Grifters, published in 1963, presents a universe that is cruel and amoral. Even more unsettling is the first-person narration from the psychotic Sheriff Lou Ford in The Killer inside Me as he murders friends and lovers. While Burt Kennedy's 1976 film, which stars Stacy Keach as Ford, is troubling, British director Michael Winterbottom's 2010 version goes even further and fully captures the surreal madness of Thompson's novel, with Casey Affleck outstanding as Ford. Stephen Frear's 1990 adaptation of The Grifters, scripted by crime novelist Donald Westlake, features Anjelica Huston as a mother who accepts her son (John Cusack) into her world of crime until expediency leads to his violent demise. Thompson's 1959 novel The Getaway was filmed twice—in 1972 by Sam Peckinpah starring Steve McQueen, and in 1994 by Roger Donaldson with Alec Baldwin. Both films sanitized the material in the novel.

Other film adaptations of Thompson's work include his 1955 novel After Dark, My Sweet, filmed in 1990 starring Jason Patric as the drifter who makes the mistake of falling for a beautiful woman (Rachel Ward). Thompson coscripted with Stanley Kubrick the screenplay for the caper film The Killing (1956), and he also scripted Kubrick's acclaimed antiwar film Paths of Glory (1957). As his problems with alcohol intensified in the 1970s, Thompson's output and income declined. As a favor, he was cast in the small role as the cuckolded Judge Grayle opposite Robert Mitchum in the 1974 remake of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. See also HARD-BOILED FILMS.

THOMPSON, J. LEE (1914–2002). British-born director, producer, and screenwriter J. Lee Thompson, like Alfred Hitchcock and John Guillermin, worked in the British film industry for the first half of his career and then left for Hollywood, where he specialized in crime films, mostly starring Charles Bronson. The late 1930s was an important training period for the Bristol-born Thompson because he worked as dialogue director on Hitchcock's 1939 film Jamaica Inn. During World War II, when he served in the Royal Air Force, Thompson wrote for the theater. In 1950, one of his plays that had been staged in 1942, Murder without Crime, was adapted to the screen with Thompson as director. However, it was his second film, The Yellow Balloon (1953), a thriller concerning the threat to a young boy after he has witnessed a murder, that established his status in the industry, even after the British censors classified the film with the highly restrictive X classification.

In 1956, Thompson directed the socially conscious crime film Yield to the Night (1956), the story of a woman sentenced to death for killing her boyfriend. The film was released only one year after the real-life hanging of Ruth Ellis for the murder of her lover. A poster promoting the film asked "Would You Hang Mary Hilton?" The film was coscripted by Thompson's wife, Joan Henry, based on her book. It was remade in 1985 as Dance with a Stranger with the actual names (Ellis and Blakeley) used.

After the success of The Guns of Navarone in 1961, Thompson moved to the United States. Cape Fear (1962), an adaptation of John D. MacDonald's novel The Executioners, was Thompson's first and best Hollywood film. It stars Robert Mitchum as a sadistic villain who torments a lawyer (Gregory Peck) and his family. Thompson worked steadily in America for another 28 years, and from the 1970s, his crime films often starred Charles Bronson. These include St. Ives (1976), with Bronson as a writer who becomes involved with murder and a beautiful woman; Ten to Midnight (1983), with Bronson as a police detective after a serial killer who threatens his daughter; The Evil That Men Do (1984), with Bronson as a hit man pursuing an evil British doctor; Murphy's Law (1986), with Bronson a policeman framed for murder by a female psychopath; Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987), with Bronson reprising his role as a vigilante who goes after drug dealers; and Messenger of Death (1988), with Bronson as a reporter investigating a murder within a Mormon community.

THUNDERHEART (1992). In mid-1992, two films directed by British director Michael Apted were released in the United States. The first, in April, was the fictional film Thunderheart. It was based on the confrontation between the FBI and Native American activists (the American Indian Movement) on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the early 1970s. A month later came the release of his documentary Incident at Oglala, which focuses on the same events.

Thunderheart is a polemical film with a strong social agenda. It traces the regeneration of FBI agent Ray Levoi (Val Kilmer) and his assimilation back into his community. Levoi begins by denying his Native American background, notably that his father was Sioux. At the close of the film, his commitment is complete. He sacrifices his career and places his life in jeopardy by confronting his corrupt partner, Frank Coutelle (Sam Shepard). John Fusco's script often pushes the crime conventions into the background, allowing the film to focus on reservation life. Scenes of abject poverty are juxtaposed against the stunning landscape of the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. Graham Greene as Walter Crow Horse and Sheila Tousey as Maggie Eagle Bear assist Levoi's transformation.

TIERNEY, GENE (1920–1991). Gene Tierney brought a kind of ethereal quality to many films in the 1940s, including significant crime films such as Laura (1944) and Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Tierney was born into an affluent family in Brooklyn and attended a Swiss finishing school before gaining employment as a model in New York. Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at 20th Century-Fox, saw her on stage in The Male Animal, and the studio cast her in a succession of supporting roles in 1940–41.

In The Shanghai Gesture (1941), Tierney costarred as Poppy, a promiscuous socialite who embarks on a decadent lifestyle in a Shanghai gambling den, resulting in her murder (by her mother). This film showcases the "dreamlike" qualities that she repeated as Laura Hunt in Laura, a woman who enchants two men—one a murderer and the other a police detective (Dana Andrews). A year later, Leave Her to Heaven gave Tierney her most challenging role as Ellen Berent, a psychotic woman who is insanely possessive of her husband. Following the death of her father, Berent's mental condition deteriorates, and she engineers the death of her husband's young brother and her own unborn baby before committing suicide in such a way as to incriminate her husband. In 1950, Tierney, Andrews, and director Otto Preminger were reunited for Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), with Tierney in a more supportive role to Andrews's obsessive cop. Other crime films in which Tierney starred include Whirlpool (1949), Secret of Convict Lake (1951), and Black Widow (1954).

Off-screen factors affected Tierney's career, including the fact that she unknowingly contracted German measles from a fan during an appearance at the Hollywood canteen during World War II, which had severe consequences for her daughter Daria. In 1949, Zanuck requested that director Jules Dassin strengthen the female role in the London-based crime film Night and the City (1950), so that Tierney could leave Los Angeles. Her mental condition deteriorated in the 1950s, and her career collapsed, although she returned for a supporting role in Preminger's Advise and Consent in 1962. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

Born to Kill (1947) directed by Robert Wise. Shown: Isabel Jewell and Lawrence Tierney

TIERNEY, LAWRENCE (1919–2002). Lawrence Tierney was born in Brooklyn, the older brother of actor Scott Brady. After a brief period on the stage, he was offered a contract by RKO in 1943. Beginning with small roles in such films as Val Lewton's The Ghost Ship (1943) and The Falcon Out West (1943), he received a major break when he was cast in the title role of the low-budget gangster film Dillinger (1945). The film, made by independent producers the King Brothers for Monogram, was a surprising box-office success and elevated Tierney to starring roles at RKO. He was cast as a convict (San Quentin, 1946), an unstable killer (The Devil Thumbs a Ride, 1947), and other assorted thugs and men involved in murder, even innocently (as in Step by Step, 1946, and Bodyguard, 1948). His best role was the dangerous psychopath Sam Wild in Robert Wise's film noir Born to Kill (1947), a man who forms a sexually perverse relationship with divorcee Helen Brent (Claire Trevor).

In 1951, Tierney had one of his last starring roles as Vincent Lubeck in The Hoodlum. Lubeck, an ex-convict working at the gas station of his brother Johnny (real-life brother Edward Tierney), seduces Johnny's girlfriend Rosa (Allene Roberts). She commits suicide after becoming pregnant by Vincent. He then masterminds the robbery of an armored car after romancing a bank employee, but is double-crossed by his colleagues and dies in a garbage dump. This film is typical of Tierney's career—and his off-screen behavior. Tierney was frequently arrested for brawling, drunkenness, and assorted crimes. He was, however, an imposing presence on screen.

By 1951, Tierney's brief period as a star was over, and his destructive off-screen behavior relegated him to the margins of the film industry for nearly four decades. Tierney lived in France for a period and made a comeback in the 1980s with roles in John Huston's Prizzi's Honor (1985), Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, and 2 Days in the Valley (1996). He also featured in a number of television programs, including the role of a sheriff in the made-for-television film Dillinger (1991), starring Mark Harmon.

TODD, ANN (1909–1993). Ann Todd was born in Hartford, Cheshire, England, and had her first screen appearance in 1931. She had roles in the crime films The Return of Bulldog Drummond (1934) and The Squeaker (1937). In the 1940s, Todd often portrayed neurotic, vulnerable women in British films. The most successful manifestation of this persona was as the masochistic, tormented pianist Francesca Cunningham in Compton Bennett's The Seventh Veil (1946), the most popular British film in the mid-1940s. This film was Todd's breakthrough role after 15 years of largely nondescript and supporting film roles.

Following the success of The Seventh Veil, Todd was regularly cast as emotionally disturbed or morally problematic women unable to sustain relationships with husbands or lovers. In Bennett's bleak drama Daybreak (1947), Todd is Eric Portman's vulnerable wife who betrays her husband, leading to suicide and murder. In Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947), Todd is betrayed by her lawyer husband (Gregory Peck), who is infatuated by a murderess. In The Passionate Friends (1949), directed by third husband, David Lean, she is trapped in a compassionate but dull marriage to Claude Rains. Lean also directed her next film, Madeleine (1950), with Todd as Madeleine Smith, a woman accused of poisoning her lover.

Todd's best role in a crime film was in the Paramount-British production So Evil My Love (1948), playing Olivia Harwood, the sexually repressed widow of a missionary. Seduced by Mark Bellis (Ray Milland), she betrays a vulnerable friend, Susan Courtney (Geraldine Fitzgerald), and participates in a scheme to defraud Courtney's wealthy husband. Humiliation and murder follow this action, and Todd, with her classical beauty and tightly held blonde hair, perfectly conveyed Harwood's moral transformation when her sexual desire for a thief and murderer finally destroys her.

The 1950s was a less rewarding period for Todd, although she starred in The Green Scarf (1954), a courtroom thriller set in Paris, and Joseph Losey's Time without Pity (1957). She also starred in Seth Holt's convoluted psychological thriller Taste of Fear (1960), 90 Degrees in the Shade (1965), and The McGuffin (1985).

TODD, RICHARD (1919–2009). A versatile British actor, Todd was often typecast as policemen and military officers, although he was, for a period in the early 1950s, Great Britain's highest-earning matinee idol following three films for Walt Disney. Born in Dublin, Todd appeared in stage productions at the Dundee Repertory Company in the late 1930s. As an officer in a parachute battalion during World War II, he was one of the first men to land in Normandy and among the first to link up with the glider force commanded by Maj. John Howard. This incident was re-created in The Longest Day (1962) where Todd, cast as Major Howard, plays a scene with an actor who is playing Todd. After the war, he attracted attention in London with his stage performance as Lachie, the prickly Scot who learns that he is dying, in The Hasty Heart. His reputation was enhanced when he replaced Richard Basehart in the role on Broadway.

On returning to Britain, his first film role was as an unjustly convicted criminal in For Them That Trespass (1948), followed by the Warner Bros. film adaptation of The Hasty Heart (1949), in which he repeated his stage role as Lachie. In the clever crime film The Interrupted Journey (1949), Todd plays John North, a weak, unfaithful married man whose plans to run away with his mistress are disrupted by a train wreck near his home; after his mistress is found murdered in the wreckage, North becomes the prime suspect. Alfred Hitchcock cast him as the murderer in Stage Fright (1950) before Disney transformed Todd's image by starring him in three very profitable swashbuckling films in the early 1950s: The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), The Sword and the Rose (1953), and Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue (1954).

More mature roles followed, including his best-known performance as Wing Cdr. Guy Gibson in The Dam Busters (1955). This film began a productive collaboration with director Michael Anderson, who cast Todd in Yangtse Incident (1956) and as the mysterious stranger who brings Ann Baxter to justice in the ingenious cat-and-mouse thriller Chase a Crooked Shadow (1957). Todd's last film for Anderson was as a wing commander in Operation Crossbow (1965). In 1960, he was a perfume salesman who seeks justice after his new car is stolen in Never Let Go, directed by John Guillermin. He also starred as Harry Sanders in Death Drums along the River (1963), a character made famous by Leslie Banks in Sanders of the River (1935). Todd returned as Sanders in Coast of Skeletons (1964). Todd was Commander Barker in the British remake of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1978) and, in one of his final roles, was Lord Roberts in the made-for-television film Incident at Victoria Falls (1992) with Christopher Lee as Sherlock Holmes.

TOTTER, AUDREY (1918– ). Audrey Totter was born in Joliet, Illinois, and her Swedish mother provided her with striking blonde hair and classical features. MGM offered Totter a contract and cast her in Main Street after Dark (1944), with Edward Arnold as a police lieutenant who investigates a family of pickpockets. In 1946, she was Madge Gorland, who lures John Garfield away from Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice. In the same year, she was offered two other roles. At Universal, producer Mark Hellinger selected Totter for the key role of Kitty in The Killers (1946). However, MGM, her home studio, cast her as Adrienne Fromsett in its adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake (1947). As the filming schedules overlapped, Totter selected The Lady in the Lake. This film was a box-office flop, while Ava Gardner's career received a major boost from her performance as Kitty in The Killers.

Totter costarred in the stylish mystery The Unsuspected (1947), followed by the film noir The High Wall (1947), playing psychiatrist Ann Lorison who helps an amnesiac (Robert Taylor) find the man who killed his wife. Her last major crime film for MGM was as the femme fatale and killer Clare Quimby in Tension (1950). Her best role during this period was boxer Stoker Thompson's (Robert Ryan) wife in The Set-Up (1949).

Totter missed another opportunity when MGM would not release her for the award-winning role (which went to Shelley Winters) of Montgomery Clift's pregnant girlfriend in George Stevens's A Place in the Sun (1951). She left MGM soon afterward and worked as a freelance actor in the 1950s. Her roles in the 1950s, including nightclub singer Ruth Williams, who befriends gangster Bert Galvin (Richard Conte) in Under the Gun (1951), failed to match her 1940s films. Totter's other crime films include Dangerous Partners (1945), Alias Nick Beal (1949), FBI Girl (1951), The Sellout (1952), Man in the Dark (1953), Women's Prison (1955), and A Bullet for Joey (1955). See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

TOURNEUR, JACQUES (1904–1977). Jacques Tourneur's films are characterized by their intelligence and subtlety. The son of legendary silent film director Maurice Tourneur, he was born in Paris and came to the United States with his father in 1914. After his initial education in New York, he joined his father in California in 1918, where he attended Hollywood High School. There he befriended actor Joel McCrea, who would make three westerns with him in the 1950s. It was in high school that Tourneur decided to follow his father into the film industry, beginning by working as a script clerk on a number of his father's films. After his father returned to Europe, Jacques remained in Hollywood and supported himself with small acting parts and other odd jobs. However, as his acting failed to garner much attention, he rejoined his father in Berlin in 1928, where Maurice was directing Das Schiff der verlorenen Menschen. From 1930 to 1934, Jacques worked as assistant director and editor on several of his father's films before graduating to the director's chair in 1931. He made four films in Paris before returning to MGM in Hollywood in 1934.

Tourneur remained at MGM from 1934 to 1939 as a second-unit director on feature films and director of short subjects, such as Romance of Radium (1937), which was nominated for an Academy Award. After the head of the studio, Louis B. Mayer, viewed one of Tourneur's Crime Doesn't Pay shorts, the studio decided to shoot additional footage, and it became his first Hollywood feature film as They All Come Out (1939). He directed two more feature films at MGM as part of the studio's short-lived Nick Carter series: Nick Carter, Master Detective (1939) and Phantom Raiders (1940). Both stars Walter Pidgeon as Carter. This was followed by a low-budget melodrama at Republic, Doctors Don't Tell (1941).

Tourneur received a major break when was invited to join producer Val Lewton's unit at RKO. The relationship between the Russian-born Lewton and the visually literate French director was productive from the start, as both men agreed to break away from the clichés of the horror genre. Their films represents a delicate balance between the sexual and vocational pressures of ordinary life and psychological terrors that could not be eradicated by rational behavior. Lewton and Tourneur were assisted on the first film, Cat People, by cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, who intensified the film's morbid atmosphere with his dramatic, low-key photographic effects.

After the box-office success of Cat People, Tourneur was promoted by the studio to A-budgeted films and left the Lewton unit—a move Tourneur later regretted. In 1944, he directed Experiment Perilous, a gothic melodrama, before directing the film noir Out of the Past, starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. This quality film benefits from the photography by cinematographer Musuraca and the script by Daniel Mainwaring and Frank Fenton. In 1951, Tourneur went to Great Britain for the crime film Circle of Danger (1951), starring Ray Milland as a man who returns to the United Kingdom to find his brother's killer. His most significant crime film in the 1950s was Nightfall (1957), based on the novel by David Goodis. This film stars Aldo Ray as a man trapped between killers, who believe that he has a satchel full of money in his possession, and the police, who suspect that he killed his partner. In 1956, Tourneur directed the offbeat western Great Day in the Morning (1956), starring Robert Stack, which, to some degree, replicates the irony and sense of melancholy and fatalism in Out of the Past.

With the disappearance of the medium-budget genre film in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Tourneur's film career came to a premature end. His final films were low-budget exploitation productions. This included La battaglia di Maratona (The Giant of Marathon, 1959), an MGM "sword and sandal" coproduction starring Steve Reeves, filmed in Italy and Yugoslavia. He followed with The Comedy of Terrors (1963), a horror spoof for American International Pictures starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, and Boris Karloff. His career ended on a sour note with War-Gods of the Deep (British title City under the Sea, 1965), also for American International, filmed in England and starring Price and Tab Hunter.

TRACY, DICK. In 1931, Chester Gould, the creator of Dick Tracy, submitted more than 60 ideas for a comic strip to Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson of the Chicago Tribune–New York News syndicate. Patterson accepted Gould's idea for "Plain Clothes Tracy" and then changed the title to "Dick Tracy" so that the comic could exploit the underworld vernacular for "detective." Patterson also suggested the initial plotline involving Tracy's investigation of the murder of the father of his girlfriend, Tess Trueheart. Dick Tracy made his debut in the Sunday comic pages of the Detroit Mirror on 4 October 1931, followed by the New York Daily News eight days later and the Chicago Tribune on 22 March 1932. The comic strip was extremely popular and was soon appearing in 700 newspapers. Gould's image of Tracy, with his square jaw and hawklike nose, was influenced by Sherlock Holmes. The comic strip also presents Tracy as a scientific criminologist. His readiness to resort to violence to eradicate an assortment of colorful master criminals (often characterized by their physical deformities such as Flattop, the Mole, and Pruneface) established him as a unique American institution.

Chicago's Famous Artists Syndicate, which represented Gould, sold the film rights to Republic Pictures in June 1936, and the studio cast Ralph Byrd in Dick Tracy (1937). Thereafter, due to his physical similarities to Gould's comic-strip detective, Byrd crafted a career based on Tracy, appearing in four serials, two feature films, and a television series. The first serial, directed by Ray Taylor and Alan James, was a popular success, with Tracy confronting a mysterious villain (known as both the Spider and the Lame One) who tries to destroy the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The second serial, Dick Tracy Returns (1938), was even better due to the expertise of Republic's top serial directors, William Witney and John English. In this serial, Tracy tries to stop the criminal activities of Pa Stark (Charles Middleton) and his five sons. Witney and English also directed Dick Tracy's G-Men (1939) and Dick Tracy vs. Crime Inc. (1941).

In 1946, RKO secured the rights to Gould's character for four feature films that included characters from the comic strip, including Tracy's fiancée Tess (who did not appear in the serials) and Vitamin Flintheart, as well as an array of villains. Morgan Conway played Tracy in Dick Tracy (1945) and Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946), while Byrd returned as the detective in Dick Tracy's Dilemma (1947) and Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947), with Boris Karloff as the disfigured convict Gruesome, who acquires a gas that induces temporary paralysis.

Tracy featured in two long-running radio series (1935–39 and 1943–48) and a television series (1950–51) that ended when its star, Byrd, died from cancer at the age of 43. There was little further film interest in the character until the 1990's large-budget feature Dick Tracy with Warren Beatty as Gould's detective. In this homage, the detective confronts an assortment of grotesque villains, including Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino), Pruneface (R. G. Armstrong), and Mumbles (Dustin Hoffman), plus Madonna as Breathless Mahoney, who sings a few songs by Stephen Sondheim. This visually striking film tried to capture the surreal quality of Gould's comic strip by restricting the settings, props, and costumes to seven basic colors. Tracy appears in a bright yellow coat and hat.

TREVOR, CLAIRE (1910–2000). Claire Trevor, born Claire Wemlinger in Bensonhurst, New York, attended the University of Michigan and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She appeared in a succession of low-budget films until her Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in Dead End (1937), playing the abused ex-girlfriend of gangster Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart). She went on to appear in many important crime films—notably as Gaye Dawn, the pathetic alcoholic mistress of a gangster (Edward G. Robinson) in John Huston's gangster film Key Largo (1948). Trevor won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this role.

Her other roles included newspaper columnist Terry Cordeau, who assists Pat O'Brien expose an art forgery racket in Crack-Up (1946); an undercover Los Angeles policewoman in Borderline (1950); a duplicitous femme fatale (Velma/Mrs. Grayle) in Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet (1944); the murderess Ruth Dillon who falls in love with amnesiac Burgess Meredith in The Street of Chance (1942); the sexually perverse Helen Trent, who is attracted to psychotic killer Lawrence Tierney in Robert Wise's Born to Kill (1947); and the love-stricken Pat Regan who tries, unsuccessfully, to regain the affection of her criminal boyfriend (Dennis O'Keefe) in Anthony Mann's Raw Deal (1948).

Trevor's status in the film industry declined in the early 1950s, although she continued in supporting roles in such films as How to Murder Your Wife (1965) and the South Africa–based crime film The Cape Town Affair (1967). Her other crime films include Dante's Inferno (1935), King of Gamblers (1937), I Stole a Million (1939), Crossroads (1942), Johnny Angel (1945), The Velvet Touch (1948), Hoodlum Empire (1952), and Stop, You're Killing Me (1952). See also FILM NOIR; WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

TRUANDS (2007). Director and coscriptwriter Frédéric Schoendoerffer strips away any semblance of psychological complexity in this violent French gangster film. Virtually every action is motivated by greed or revenge, and often these two desires are closely linked. The film's opening section introduces three interconnected plot strands and characters: the aging gangster Claude Corti (Philippe Caubère), who holds his crime empire together by brutality and intimidation; the suave contract killer Franck (Benoît Magimel), who, with friend Jean-Guy (Olivier Marchal), maintains his independence, although he occasionally accepts a contract from Corti; and the Moroccan cousins Hicham (Mehdi Nebbou) and Larbi (Tomer Sisley), who covet Corti's crime operations after he is sent to jail.

The film's use of similar locations, such as tawdry strip clubs and expensive apartments where criminals plot against other criminals, followed by violence and then more plotting, is used by Schoendoerffer to convey an ugly world of primal male desires based on material greed and sexual power. The virtual absence of police, except when Corti is arrested, heightens this focus. With the exception of a few brief scenes involving Corti and Béatrice (Béatrice Dalle), the woman he is trying to impregnate to get a son, female characters are largely absent. Potentially interesting subplots, including Larbi's conversion to Islam and Jean-Guy's unfaithful wife, are overwhelmed by the film's determination to present a repetitive cycle of betrayal and retribution.

TRUE CONFESSIONS (1981). A film that was largely overlooked at the time of its release, True Confessions is a unique Hollywood crime film as its dramatic structure owes more to classical tragedy than to melodrama. It is primarily concerned with the moral dividedness confronting the film's two main characters, Catholic priest Des Spellacy (Robert De Niro) and his brother Tom (Robert Duvall), a struggling policeman. The dilemma that permeates most of the film concerns Des's desire to become a bishop and his realization that to achieve this he must work with corrupt men, such as businessman Jack Amsterdam (Charles Durning). Tom's quandary, on the other hand, revolves around his former life as a bagman for men such as Amsterdam and his awareness of the hypocrisy in both the Church and the government that turns a blind eye to these men.

The film, adapted by John Gregory Dunne (and assisted by his novelist wife, Joan Didion) from his novel, begins in 1963 in a remote desert church where Father Des tells Tom that he is dying. Des, now a humble pastor to an impoverished Hispanic community, recounts the events that began 15 years earlier when he was the right-hand man of Cardinal Danaher (Cyril Cusack). His responsibilities included the protection of the Church from scandals while executing financial deals with Amsterdam and other businessmen that enrich the Church and legitimize Amsterdam and his colleagues. A lavish nuptial Mass for Amsterdam's daughter, with Des officiating, establishes the close association between the Church and corrupt forces in the city. The film crosscuts between the Mass and Tom's visit to a brothel where a priest has died during sexual intercourse. Tom covers up the details of the death. However, a subsequent crime, the vicious murder of a young singer, provokes a different response from Tom, and his investigation forces Des to examine his conscience. Although the low-key ending harmed its box-office appeal, the film refused to be sidetracked into melodrama and remained steadfastly focused on the moral troubles facing Des and his brother.

TRUFFAUT, FRANÇOIS (1932–1984). Actor (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977), producer, screenwriter, film critic, essayist, magazine editor, celebrated director, and lifelong cinephile François Truffaut was born in Paris. A dedicated and obsessed film viewer from an early age, films represented his most frequent escape from an unhappy childhood. In 1948, he started a film club, where he met the influential critic André Bazin who became an important friend and supporter. Truffaut was fascinated by the American cinema and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and in 1967 he published a book-length interview with the director (Hitchcock/Truffaut). Truffaut also played a significant part in the development of the Auteur Theory, which promotes the view that directors with a consistent style or thematic approach should be elevated above more journeyman filmmakers. As a critic and, subsequently, editor of the influential French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma and director of films such as Les quatre cent coups (The 400 Blows, 1959), Truffaut, together with Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and others, was instrumental in the development of the French New Wave.

In 1960, Truffaut wrote the screenplay for Godard's celebrated New Wave film, À bout de souffle (Breathless), followed by his second feature film as a director, Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), an adaptation of the David Goodis novel Down There. While Goodis's novel belongs to the hard-boiled tradition, Truffaut—through the use of irony, complex flashbacks, humor, and a self-reflexive tone—transformed the story into a representative example of the French New Wave. He also shifted the location of Goodis's novel from Philadelphia and New Jersey to Paris and surrounding areas.

Truffaut's subsequent excursions into the crime genre were less idiosyncratic and more faithful to the conventions of the American noir, especially his adaptations of two novels by Cornell Woolrich: La mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black, 1967) and La sirène du Mississippi (Mississippi Mermaid, 1969). However, both films were ultimately reluctant to traverse the dark path set out by Woolrich and both pulled back from the nihilistic abyss that underpins Woolrich's fiction. Truffaut's final film, Confidentially Yours (1983), was an adaptation of Charles William's hard-boiled novel The Long Saturday Night. See also FILM NOIR.

TULLY, MONTGOMERY (1904–1988). A prolific director of British crime films, Montgomery Tully began his career directing documentaries and worked on many short films during World War II. After the war, he began his long career as a director of low-budget crime films. One of the first of these was Murder in Reverse (1945). In 1949, he directed the social-problem prison film Boys in Brown, costarring Jack Warner and Dirk Bogarde. Throughout the 1950s, Tully often worked with imported Hollywood actors. In 1954, for example, he directed Dane Clark in the efficient thriller Five Days (U.S. title Paid to Kill) for Hammer. It concerned a failed businessman who hires an ex-friend (Canadian actor Paul Carpenter) to kill him so as to provide insurance money for his wife. Next came 36 Hours (U.S. title Terror Street), with Dan Duryea as an American pilot forced to flee when his wife is murdered. In 1955, John Ireland starred in The Glass Cage (U.S. title The Glass Tomb) as a circus promoter who devises a new act that leads to murder and kidnapping.

Tully directed five British films in 1957, mostly with American actors, including one of his best films, Escapement (1957). It costars Americans Rod Cameron and Mary Murphy in a devious plot involving mind control in a sinister clinic located in the south of France. American Zachary Scott starred in two 1957 films, Man in the Shadow and The Counterfeit Plan. More interesting was Strange Awakening (1958) with Lex Barker (who played Tarzan in the late 1940s and early 1950s), Carole Mathews, and Lisa Gastoni. This strange film, scripted by J. McLaren Ross, has Barker suffering from amnesia as the result of an assault. He is then, as part of an elaborate scam, confronted by a wife he cannot remember. In addition to Strange Awakening, Tully had four more low-budget films released in 1958—Escapement with Rod Cameron, The Diplomatic Corpse with Robin Bailey, The Long Knife with Joan Rice, and Man with a Gun with Lee Patterson—plus the comedy I Only Arsked! and three short crime films.

In the early 1960s, Tully directed a number of low-budget crime films for a relatively short-lived production company called Eternal, including Jackpot (1960), which focused on a man who kills a policeman, and The Third Alibi (1961), involving murder and domestic conflict. Tully continued directing genre films throughout the 1960s, but after 1962 his speciality, the low- to medium-budget crime film, began to disappear from British screens.

25 KILATES (2008). Directed by Patxi Amezcua, 25 Kilates (U.S. title 25 Carats) is a Spanish caper film presenting a world where betrayal and self-interest dominate. Young car thief Kay (Aida Folch) lives with her father Sebas (Manual Morón), an inept thief. Abel (Francesco Garrido), a former boxer turned debt collector, lives with his young son after his wife died in a car accident due to Abel's drunken driving. Abel and Kay meet when Kay, attempting to steal a car, is cornered by a policeman. Abel, who has no reason to help the women, helps her escape from the cop. This sad, middle-aged man and the female thief subsequently form a bond. However, this is threatened when Sebas implements a scam to rob corrupt cops by exposing them to the media while keeping the proceeds of a robbery. When this goes wrong, Kay turns to Abel. Abel, however, has his own problems—a jilted woman convinces her husband, Abel's employer, that Abel is secretly keeping some of the money he recovers from debt defaulters. The employer hires a hit man to kill Abel.

Amezcua's direction, often with a handheld camera, imbues this conventional story with real energy. The pace never slackens, and the film makes even Barcelona look seedy. He presents a world that is absolutely corrupt. Only family, the film suggests, offers hope, as betrayal is the film's dominant motif. The film won awards for Best Film, Best Actress (Folch), and Best Actor (Morón) at the 2009 Málaga Spanish Film Festival.
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ULMER, EDGAR G. (1904–1972). A talented director, Edgar Ulmer spent most of his American career working at Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), the most poorly resourced studio in Hollywood. Born in Czechoslovakia, he was an assistant to F. W. Murnau and codirected Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1929) with Fred Zinnemann and Robert Siodmak. In the early 1930s, he moved to the United States and directed a major Hollywood film, The Black Cat (1934), starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. However, studio politics interrupted his career for some years until he began an association with PRC in 1941, directing 11 films in five years, including Bluebeard (1944), with John Carradine as a painter and puppeteer who strangles young girls in 19th-century Paris. His most significant film during this period was the cult film noir Detour (1945), starring Tom Neal as a man who has the misfortune to meet Ann Savage while traveling to California by car. His other films at PRC included Strange Illusion (1945), the story of a young man, Paul Cartwright, who feigns insanity to prove that his mother's boyfriend murdered his father. He also directed Hedy Lamarr in The Strange Woman (1946) as a femme fatale in early 19th-century Maine who encourages her stepson (Louis Hayward) to kill his father, her husband.

Following the collapse of PRC, Ulmer directed Ruthless (1948), in which he utilized multiple flashbacks to tell a story of a greedy scoundrel (Zachary Scott). The film costarred Sydney Greenstreet and Louis Hayward. Ulmer continued directing low-budget films throughout the 1950s. His last crime film was Murder Is My Beat (1957), starring Paul Langton as a cop who falls for a murderess (Barbara Payton).

USUAL SUSPECTS, THE (1995). A convoluted variation of the caper film, The Usual Suspects begins at night on a ship in San Pedro Harbor in California. Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), badly wounded, watches the approach of a shadowy figure who fires two bullets into him. Keaton expresses shock and then defeat when he recognizes the face of the killer and dies uttering the name "Keyser." The killer then ignites an explosion on the ship, and when the police arrive, they discover more than 20 bodies. They also capture two men, the crippled con artist "Verbal" Kint (Kevin Spacey) and a badly wounded Hungarian. Kint, after receiving immunity in exchange for providing information, is interrogated by U.S. Customs agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), and Kint's narration, broken up into a series of flashbacks, occupies the remainder of the film.

Kint describes the events over a six-week period, leading to the massacre in San Pedro. This includes the formation of a makeshift gang comprising ex-cop-turned-criminal Keaton, hotheaded entry man Michael McManus (Stephen Baldwin), his eccentric partner Fred Fenster (Benicio Del Toro), hard-boiled hardware man Todd Hockney (Kevin Pollak), and Kint. They participate in two successful robberies before a Japanese lawyer, Kobayashi (Pete Postelthwaite), approaches them with an offer from the elusive Hungarian master criminal Keyser Soze to prevent a $91 million drug deal on board the ship in San Pedro. The men refuse the offer, but after Fenster is murdered and Keaton's girlfriend is targeted, they reluctantly agree. However, no drugs are found on the ship, and every member of the gang, except Kint, is killed. Kujan doubts the validity of Kint's tale including the existence of Soze. However, after the con man is released, a fax sent to Kujan identifies Kint as Soze.

Bryan Singer, working from Christopher McQuarrie's clever script, frequently deceives the viewer in this elaborate interplay between reality and fabrication. The final version of the truth—if it is the truth—is revealed only in the last minutes of the film. Kint, however, is an unreliable narrator, and there are many deliberate inconsistencies in his story, including his claim that he participates only in crimes that do not involve violence—even though he cold-bloodedly kills a hood when Keaton hesitates. Hence, the viewer cannot trust anything they see during the flashbacks. The Japanese-named lawyer Kobayashi, for example, is played by British actor Pete Postelthwaite with an Oxford-educated accent. McQuarrie's screenplay was rewarded with an Oscar in 1996, and Spacey's multilayered performance elevated him to stardom as he received the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
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VANCE, PHILO. Philo Vance, the archetypal gentleman detective—aristocratic, aloof, and superior—was the creation of author Willard Huntington Wright, who wrote the Vance novels under his pseudonym S. S. Van Dine. Wright turned to detective fiction even though he held a low opinion of the genre. He studied existing novels and produced multiple drafts before completing his first Philo Vance novel, The Benson Murder Case, in 1926. The book was an immediate success, and the first edition sold out in the first week. His next novel, The Canary Murder Case, serialized in Scribner's Magazine in 1927, was even more successful, and Vance became the most popular literary detective in the late 1920s and early 1930s. By 1930, it was estimated that Van Dine had sold a million copies.

Vance represented an American counterpart to the British gentleman detective Lord Peter Wimsey, created by Dorothy L. Sayers in the early 1920s. Van Dine's Vance was a dilettante with a fine knowledge of art, philosophy, music, and murder. His superiority was constantly on display, especially through his ability to outsmart his best friend, District Attorney Markham. Vance featured in 12 novels between 1926 and 1939, although his popularity began to decline in the mid-1930s as the more morally problematic, streetwise detective associated with hard-boiled fiction replaced the genteel, sophisticated classical detective sleuth of the 1920s.

In 1928, Paramount purchased the rights to Van Dine's first novel, The Benson Murder Case, as well as The Canary Murder Case and The Greene Murder Case. William Powell was cast as Vance in the first film, The Canary Murder Case (1929), and although it began production as a silent film, the studio inserted a few brief talkie scenes and some sound effects. Louise Brooks, as Broadway performer Margaret Odell, was the victim, while Vance employs a card game to isolate the suspects and solve the case. Jean Arthur was Vance's love interest, Alice La Fosse. However, in the next film, The Greene Murder Case, Arthur was the killer, Ada Greene, in this variation on a locked-room mystery.

In 1930, Van Dine sold The Bishop Murder Case to MGM, which cast Basil Rathbone as Vance for a stilted crime drama wherein Vance tracks down a killer known as "the Bishop" who murders according to the story outlined in a Mother Goose nursery rhyme. In 1930, Paramount resumed its Vance series with The Benson Murder Case, which begins in a hunting lodge with Anthony Benson (Richard Tucker) falling down a flight of stairs after being shot through the heart. Powell again played Vance.

Van Dine then spent two years writing his best novel, The Kennel Murder Case, which was published in 1933. He also joined Warner Bros. as a scriptwriter, and the studio hired Powell to star as Vance in a film version of The Kennel Murder Case (1933), the best film adaptation of a Van Dine novel. Both the film and novel were situated at the Long Island Kennel Club, where the killing of a dog is followed by the murder of the dog's killer, Archie Coe (Robert Barrat). This locked-room mystery also contains a lengthy flashback in which Vance exposes the murderer.

Powell left the studio when his salary was reduced during the Depression, and Warren William was then cast as Vance for The Dragon Murder Case (1934). This film was successful at the box office. MGM made another Vance film with The Casino Murder Case (1935) with Paul Lukas as Vance. He was replaced by Edmund Lowe for The Garden Murder Case (1937).

Meanwhile, Paramount reworked The Greene Murder Case for a Night of Mystery (1937), with Grant Richards as Vance, and in Great Britain, Wilfred Hyde-White was cast as Vance in The Scarab Murder Case (1936). The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939) was developed after a Paramount executive suggested to Van Dine that he prepare a detailed treatment for a film involving the highly popular radio comedienne Gracie Allen. The emphasis was on comedy rather than crime, however, with Vance (William) assisting Allen after she becomes involved in the death of a convict. This was the last Vance film with an A budget.

Warner Bros. updated the character for a low-budget mystery that combined the plot of The Kennel Murder Case with topical elements involving espionage during the early years of World War II in Calling Philo Vance (1940). James Stephenson played Vance, although his profession changed from amateur sleuth to federal agent investigating the death of a plane manufacturer.

The final transformation of the Vance character took place in the late 1940s when poverty row studio Producers Releasing Corporation made three Philo Vance films. In these low-budget pictures, Vance resembles the hard-boiled detective in vogue during the 1940s, not the debonair gentleman sleuth of the 1920s and early 1930s. Alan Curtis was cast as Vance in Philo Vance's Secret Mission (1947), the first film to be shot but the last released. He returned for Philo Vance's Gamble (1947), the second to be shot and the first released. Curtis was replaced by William Wright for the final film, Philo Vance Returns (1947), which was the second film to be released but the last one to be filmed in this three-film series.

VAN DINE, S. S. (1887–1939). The pseudonym of Williard Huntington Wright, S. S. Van Dine was the most popular crime writer in the United States in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, and educated at Pomona College in California before entering Harvard University—from which he was expelled for bringing a glass of absinthe to lectures. Wright wanted to be a poet and literary scholar and worked as a literary critic for the Los Angeles Times, where he was dismissive of crime and detective novels. His appointment as editor of the upmarket literary magazine Smart Set did not work out, and his books on aesthetics failed to generate very much income. Broke and addicted to opium, his mother sent him to Paris for treatment. While in solitary confinement for six months, he read detective novels.

To bolster his income, Wright adopted the pseudonym S. S. Van Dine, based on steamship initials, and published The Benson Murder Case in 1926, which sold out within a week. It also marked the first appearance of his debonair, aristocratic detective Philo Vance. Vance, like many British detectives during this period, such as Reggie Fortune (created by H. C. Bailey) and Lord Peter Wimsey (created by Dorothy Sayers), was a dilettante and aesthete who often brought his wide knowledge of art, music, and philosophy to the investigations.

Van Dine emphasized Vance's superior intellect rather than violence, and his detective relied on psychological insights instead of the traditional inductive method employed by Sherlock Holmes, Miss Jane Marple, and other classical detectives who normally isolated the key clues during their investigation. Van Dine's second Vance novel, The Canary Murder Case (1927), was also successful, and The Greene Murder Case and The Bishop Murder Case followed in 1928 and 1929. The latter novel was symptomatic of Van Dine's approach to crime fiction, which was based on a highly stylized world where reality rarely intrudes. In The Bishop Murder Case, Vance investigates a series of murders based on nursery rhymes (the original title was The Mother Goose Murder Case). By 1930, Van Dine had sold more than a million copies of his crime novels and, after the success of the first two novels, Hollywood began adapting his work to the screen.

Van Dine followed with The Scarab Murder Case (1930), The Kennel Murder Case (1931)—which provided the basis of the best screen adaptation of a Van Dine novel, released by Warner Bros. in 1933 with William Powell as Vance—The Dragon Murder Case (1933), The Casino Murder Case (1934), The Kidnap Murder Case (1936), The Garden Murder Case (1937), and The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1938). When he died in 1939, Van Dine left behind a 30,000-word synopsis for a film to be made by 20th Century-Fox. The studio did not take up the script, but Scribner's published it as Van Dine's last novel The Winter Murder Case (1939). With growth in the popularity of hard-boiled fiction throughout the 1930s, there was a corresponding decline in support for Van Dine's fiction. He was unable, and unwilling, to adapt to the mean streets and earthy characters that emerged from the novels and short stories by Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and others.

VAN UPP, VIRGINIA (1902–1970). Virginia Van Upp was born in Chicago and entered the film industry as a child actor. Her mother was a title writer and editor. Van Upp worked her way up through the industry from casting director to the position of a major screenwriter. At Paramount, she scripted You and Me (1938) for director Fritz Lang. This bizarre gangster film concerns a department store owner who hires two ex-convicts (George Raft and Sylvia Sidney). The ex-convicts marry, but after they have a falling out, Raft decides to rob the store. This odd mixture of crime and romance even includes songs from Kurt Weill.

In January 1945, Van Upp achieved the rare distinction of promotion to the position of executive producer at Columbia Studios. This meant that she was second in command to the head of the studio, Harry Cohn. Columbia, like most of the other major Hollywood studios at that time, rarely promoted women to such a powerful position. Her role as executive producer was to supervise the preparation and production of 12 to 14 high-budgeted films each year.

After her promotion, she was assigned to produce one of Columbia's most expensive postwar films, Gilda (1946). She not only supervised various drafts of the script, written by Jo Eisinger, Marion Parsonnet, and, uncredited, Ben Hecht, but also wrote, uncredited, part of it herself. Obtaining approval from the censors at the Production Code Administration (PCA) was a lengthy process. The first draft, submitted on 16 November 1944, was rejected because of its illicit sex, adultery, and an absence of compensating moral values. After numerous drafts, the PCA approved the shooting script on 11 September 1945, and when filming concluded, the PCA gave Gilda a seal of approval (on 25 February 1946). This was surprising because of the film's constant references to sex, either direct—such as Rita Hayworth's quasi striptease and dialogue such as "If I were a ranch, they would call me the Bar Nothing"—or indirect. Van Upp also accepted responsibility for mentoring the film's star, as Hayworth's marriage to Orson Welles was in trouble at the time. It was Van Upp's decision to impose a happy ending on the film, a difficult task considering the sadomasochistic themes and activities that permeate the narrative. Nevertheless, the film was a critical and commercial success and established Hayworth as one of the screen's most popular actresses, a legendary femme fatale able to incite disturbing desires from George Macready and Glenn Ford.

Prior to her resignation as an executive producer, Cohn requested that Van Upp salvage the Welles production of The Lady from Shanghai (1948). Uncredited, she contributed additional script material and worked with Welles to try to impose some kind of coherence on the material. However, Cohn hated the film and eliminated nearly 60 minutes from the initial cut. He withheld distribution for more than 12 months and finally released it as part of a double feature.

Van Upp resigned her executive position in 1947 because of family pressures—primarily to support her husband Ralph Nelson, also a producer, who had returned from military duties to resume his career. Although Van Upp's career never reached such heights again, she continued to write and produce, including the Glenn Ford–Rita Hayworth crime film Affair in Trinidad (1952).

VICTIM (1961). Directed by Basil Dearden and produced by Michael Relph and working from a script by Janet Green and John McCormick, Victim utilizes a relatively conventional crime narrative involving blackmailers to point to the negative social consequences of the law used to criminalize male homosexuality. This followed the same approach Dearden and Relph had used two years earlier, in Sapphire (1959), when the conventions of the crime film were employed to expose racial prejudice. The message in Victim is articulated when Detective Inspector Harris (John Barrie) tells lawyer Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde) that the British law criminalizing male homosexuality is known as the "blackmailer's charter." The film's conventional crime structure concerns the investigation by Farr into the death of a young man, Jack Barrett (Peter McEnery). The film's unconventional aspect, however, emanates from the fact that not only was Barrett infatuated with Farr but that Farr, a married nonpracticing homosexual, also desired Barrett. But, as Farr admits to his wife, Laura (Sylvia Syms), late in the film, he did not act upon his feelings for the young man. This admission creates the possibility of reconciliation between Melville and Laura.

This is a brave film, as it was produced at a time when there was a prohibition on depicting openly gay characters in popular culture, especially in the cinema. In Victim, Farr's heroic status is enhanced by his decision to destroy his legal career by testifying against the blackmail ring operated by the psychotic Sandy Youth (Derren Nesbit) and the severely repressed Miss Benham (who is described in the film as "half avenging angel and half Peeping Tom"). Youth and Benham are presented as demented grotesques, and this intensifies the film's central discourse. The film represented a turning point in Bogarde's career. As Melville Farr, his admission (in dialogue written for the film by Bogarde) that he desired another man represented a first for the British screen. This marked his transition from matinee idol and movie star to serious actor. Although the film was denied a certificate by the Production Code Administration in the United States, Victim paved the way for more forthright presentations of homosexuality in the cinema.
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WALLACE, EDGAR (1875–1932). Prolific British author, playwright, journalist, and screenwriter Edgar Wallace was known as the "King of Thrillers." Born in Greenwich, England, Wallace worked as a crime reporter after serving in the military. He was unable to find a publisher for his first novel The Four Just Men, a locked-room mystery, so he self-published it in 1905. He ultimately wrote more than 170 novels, including 90 crime novels and 24 plays. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, he was Great Britain's most commercially successful novelist; his publisher claimed that a quarter of all books sold in Britain were written by Wallace.

His first novel was filmed twice in Britain, in 1921 and 1939. Beginning with The Man Who Bought London in 1916, there were literally hundreds of film adaptations of his stories over the next 25 years. Wallace created a number of detectives, including J. G. Reeder, who appeared in four films: Red Aces (1929), which Wallace also scripted and directed; Mr. Reeder in Room 13 (1938); The Mind of Mr. Reeder (1939); and The Missing People (1939). Other novels that were filmed, sometimes several times, included The Crimson Circle (1922, 1936) and The Flying Squad (1929, 1932, 1940). There were also film adaptations of plays such as The Case of the Frightened Lady (1932, 1940), The Calendar (1931, 1948), and The Ringer (1928, 1931, 1953). His most commercially successful adaptations included The Green Archer (1925), starring Allene Ray and Walter Miller; The Terror (1928), with Louise Fazenda and Edward Everett Horton; and The Menace (1932), featuring Bette Davis in an early role.

Wallace, ever in need of money because of his gambling on horse racing, began directing films based on his novels, such as The Squeaker in 1931. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1931 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first talkie Sherlock Holmes film, with Robert Rendel as Holmes. Wallace was contracted by RKO for King Kong (1933), and although he received the screen credit for the original story, it is doubtful that he contributed very much, as he died in 1932.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the German film industry also adapted stories by Wallace. Five were produced between 1927 and 1934 before the Nazis terminated the production of crime films. Production resumed in 1959, with 32 film adaptations in the next decade. These films, mainly police procedurals set in Great Britain, were characterized by Wallace's bizarre plots and idiosyncratic elements. The series, which began with Der Frosch mit der Maske (1959), included a number of films directed by Alfred Vohrer such as Die toten Augen von London (1961), a remake of the 1939 British film The Dark Eyes of London starring Bela Lugosi. Horst Tappert as Inspector Perkins also featured in a number of the films directed by Vohrer, including Der Gorilla von Soho (1968) and Der Mann mit dem Glasange (1969). Christopher Lee traveled to Germany for the role of an FBI agent in Das Rätsel der rotten Orchidee (1962).

Other films adapted from Wallace's novels or plays, or scripted by him, include Pallard the Punter (1919), The Valley of Ghosts (1928), The Terror (1928), The Yellow Mask (1930), The Jewel (1933), The Feathered Serpent (1934), The Clairvoyant (1935), The Lad (1935), Sanders of the River (1935), The Frog (1937), The Terror (1938), The Door with the Seven Locks (1940), Marriage of Convenience (1960), Attempt to Kill (1961), and Accidental Death (1963). See also CLASSICAL DETECTIVE FILMS; GERMAN CRIME FILMS.

WANTED (2008). This film grafts a revenge plot onto a story involving superheroes. Its basic premise involves a thousand-year-old secret society of assassins, the Fraternity, who possess uncanny abilities for killing (undesirable) people. Emanating from a clandestine fraternity of weavers who have maintained order by weeding out criminals, the names of the people to be killed appear in coded fabric. Wanted and superhero films such as Spider-Man (2002) and its sequels (2004 and 2007), Iron Man (2008), and The Incredible Hulk (2009) are adaptations of comic books, and these films share the same narrative pattern as the comics. Wanted was adapted by screenwriters Michael Brandt, Derek Haas, and Chris Morgan from the Mark Millar–J. G. Jones series of comic books. It shares many characteristics with serials such as The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), The Masked Marvel (1943), Captain America (1944), and The Crimson Ghost (1946). However, Wanted, unlike the serials of the 1940s, enjoyed a lavish budget for its special effects.

The plot shares many similarities with the serials of the 1940s. A weak, puny young man Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is recruited by the Fraternity and undergoes extensive training in how to kill. The Fraternity includes Sloan (Morgan Freeman), Fox (Angelina Jolie), and the Repairman (Marc Warren). Gibson emerges from his training as an efficient killer. He is then directed by the society to track down Cross (Thomas Kretschmann), the man who (supposedly) killed Gibson's father. While there are a couple of plot twists late in the film, the revenge story provides a pretext for a series of action sequences where the laws of physics and logic are suspended in the interest of vicarious visual thrills.

WARNER, JACK (1896–1981). British character actor Jack Warner was usually cast as a working man or an authority figure, especially a policeman. He was not averse, on occasion, to playing villains, and this change often provoked a surprise in audiences familiar with his normal jovial screen presence. Born Horace John Waters in Bromley, near London, he made his film debut in the mystery The Dummy Talks (1943). In 1947, he was a Covent Garden vegetable wholesaler and criminal mastermind in Hue and Cry. In Dear Murderer (1947), Warner was Inspector Penbury, who traps Greta Gynt after she has murdered her husband. My Brother's Keeper (1948), on the other hand, gave Warner one of his best, if atypical, roles as the hardened convict, George Martin, who callously exploits everybody he can, including his wife, his mistress, and fellow escapee Willie Stannard (George Cole). At one point in the film, Martin tells Stannard, "There is no such thing as friends. People are either useful or useless. You're useless!"

Warner costarred in six films in 1948, including It Always Rains on Sunday. As Detective Sergeant Fothergill, he captures escaped convict Tommy Swann (John McCallum), who is causing sexual turmoil in the home of his ex-lover, Rose Sandigate (Googie Withers). In 1949, Warner was a stern but fair prison governor in The Boys in Brown (1949). The next year, he had his most popular role as a policeman, Police Constable (P.C.) George Dixon in The Blue Lamp. Although Dixon dies in the film, his character was resurrected for television for the long-running (1955–76) police series Dixon of Dock Green. Warner was 80 when the series finished. After 1955, he returned to the screen only occasionally, including his role as Detective Inspector Fellows in Val Guest's police film Jigsaw (1962).

WASHINGTON, DENZEL (1954– ). Born in Mount Vernon, New York, Denzel Washington graduated with a degree in journalism from Fordham University, but decided to embark on an acting career. His first role was as George Segal's illegitimate 17-year-old son in Carbon Copy (1981). He gained public exposure as Dr. Phillip Chandler in the award-winning medical television series St. Elsewhere. Washington remained with the series for its entire run from 1982 to 1988.

His breakthrough film role was as anti-apartheid campaigner Steve Biko in Richard Attenborough's award-winning film Cry Freedom (1987). Washington won an Academy Award for his role as an ex-slave soldier in Glory (1989). He was Nick Styles, an ex-cop turned assistant district attorney in Ricochet (1991), which follows the disintegration of his career through the actions of a vengeful man (John Lithgow) he sent to prison. In 1995, Washington had one of his best roles as World War II veteran and private detective Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins in Carl Franklin's elegiac, atmospheric adaptation of Walter Mosley's novel, Devil in a Blue Dress. It was unfortunate that the film did not generate sufficient returns at the box office to ensure more films with Washington as Rawlins. He was another police detective, this time based in Philadelphia, in Fallen (1998), Gregory Hoblit's noir-supernatural hybrid. He enjoyed greater success at the box office as the quadriplegic forensic expert who teams up with a reluctant cop (Angelina Jolie) to catch a serial killer in Philip Noyce's adaptation of Jeffrey Deaver's best-selling novel The Bone Collector (1999).

In 2001, Washington had a more complex role in his Academy Award–winning performance as Det. Alonzo Harris, a highly decorated but corrupt narcotics detective in Training Day. In this film, Washington attempts to imbue a rookie cop (Ethan Hawke) with his unorthodox, and illegal, practices in South Central Los Angeles. Thereafter his crime roles were more formulaic, especially Creasy, the ex-CIA hit man in Tony Scott's simplistic redemption tale Man on Fire (2004). Creasy is employed as a bodyguard for young Dakota Fanning, and the film, set amid the Mexican underworld, gives Creasy a license to act as a violent vigilante. In Jonathan Demme's 2004 remake of the 1962 paranoid thriller The Manchurian Candidate, updated from the post-Korean conflict to Operation Desert Storm. Washington plays a military survivor who begins to distrust his memory as he gradually learns of a plot to take over the White House.

Washington played real-life character Frank Harris, a gangster who controlled the distribution of drugs in Harlem for many years, in Ridley Scott's American Gangster (2007). Harris's battle with cop Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) provides the focus of the film, and Washington delivers another powerful performance as a complex, corrupt, but not unlikable character. More routine was Washington's role as a railway dispatcher battling a ruthless criminal who attempts to hold New York City to ransom after he hijacks a subway train in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009); Tony Scott's version, the fifth Scott-Washington film, was an inferior remake of Joseph Sargent's 1974 film starring Walther Matthau and Robert Shaw. Another train thriller followed, Unstoppable (2010), with Washington as a railroad engineer, assisted by a young conductor (Chris Pine), who prevents a major catastrophe when an unmanned runaway train loaded with toxic chemicals threatens a town in its path.

WELLES, ORSON (1915–1985). Often stereotyped as an unfulfilled genius, actor, producer, writer, and director, the contribution of Orson Welles to the cinema was significant, even though it was confined to only a small number of films, plus many unfinished and compromised projects. Born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Welles began as a teenage actor in Dublin. After returning to New York, he made a name for himself in the mid- and late 1930s as an actor and director on Broadway as well as writer, producer, and actor on radio—particularly with the infamous 1938 radio production of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. In 1937, he formed the Mercury Theatre in partnership with producer John Houseman.

After securing a film contract with RKO, Welles, determined to make his immediate mark in the medium, acquired a story by scriptwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. This became his first film, Citizen Kane (1941), a perfect vehicle for the iconoclast Welles. This brilliant film, both on narrative and stylistic levels, is loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst. The film, with its deep-focus photography, multiple flashbacks, chiaroscuro high-contrast lighting, and point-of-view shots, changed the Hollywood system and contributed to the development of a style of movie in the 1940s that became known as film noir. Citizen Kane also marked the beginning of the end for Welles in Hollywood. Its release was delayed by a threatened lawsuit from Hearst, the owner of major media interests in the United States, and his newspapers boycotted the film and the studio. This resulted in only a limited release and disappointing box-office earnings. Nevertheless, it received the New York Film Critics award as well as Oscar nominations for Welles for Best Picture, Actor, and Director, plus a number of technical nominations.

His next film project, The Magnificent Ambersons (1941), was equally challenging. RKO recut the film, destroying many of the director's ambitions for his adaptation of Booth Tarkington's novel. While working on The Magnificent Ambersons during the day, he was also acting at night as the mysterious Colonel Haki, the head of the Turkish secret police, in the Mercury Production Journey into Fear (1943), an adaptation of Eric Ambler's novel. After completing both films, Welles left for Brazil to direct It's All True. RKO, however, canceled the production, and Welles was ejected from the studio. It also shelved Journey into Fear until February 1943.

Welles starred as Rochester opposite Joan Fontaine in Jane Eyre (1943) for 20th Century-Fox. He followed with the thriller The Stranger (1946), a film he both directed and took the lead role in as Prof. Charles Rankin, a Nazi who marries an American woman (Loretta Young). When Rankin settles down in a small Connecticut town, he attracts the attention of a government agent (Edward G. Robinson). The Lady from Shanghai (1948), a film noir, came about because Welles needed funds for his stage version of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days, so he agreed to direct and star in a film for Columbia. The film contains one of the most celebrated visual sequences of the 1940s, the bravura hall-of-mirrors ending with the femme fatale (Rita Hayworth) and her husband locked in a deadly gunfight amid multiple images. However, despite the best efforts of Virginia Van Upp to salvage the film and impose some coherence on the material shot by Welles, studio head Harry Cohn hated the film. He reedited it, cutting out more than 60 minutes of footage, and released the film 12 months later on a double bill. Meanwhile, Welles directed and produced Macbeth (1948) for Republic.

Welles went to Great Britain for the role of the charismatic but corrupt Harry Lime in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). Thereafter he wandered Europe, and elsewhere, trying to raise financing for his numerous projects. He wrote, directed, and starred in Mr. Arkadin (1955), a Spanish production, before making Touch of Evil (1958), his final major Hollywood project for which Welles wrote the screenplay and acted in the key role of the corrupt cop Hank Quinlan, as well as directing the film. He also directed and narrated The Trial (1962), an adaptation of the Franz Kafka novel, filmed in Yugoslavia and France. He was Falstaff in his production of Chimes at Midnight (1966) and was awarded a special Oscar in 1970.

WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS (1950). Where the Sidewalk Ends is an excellent example of the rogue- or maladjusted-cop cycle of the early 1950s, which included such films as Detective Story (1951), On Dangerous Ground (1952), and The Big Heat (1953). Dana Andrews starred as Mark Dixon, a violent New York police detective who accidentally kills a man, Ken Paine (Craig Stevens), while interrogating him. Dixon, who has a history of physically assaulting criminals, decides to hide the crime and dispose of Paine's body in the nearby Hudson River. However, after he is assigned to the case, Dixon, like many film noir protagonists (for example, in The Big Clock, 1948), is forced to investigate a crime in which he is directly involved. The investigation is complicated by the fact that Paine, the estranged husband of Morgan Taylor (Gene Tierney), was a war hero with a metal plate in his head. Morgan's father, Jiggs Taylor (Tom Tully), becomes the prime suspect because he had in the past objected to Paine's treatment of his daughter. Dixon, who is attracted to Morgan, tries to protect Jiggs by diverting suspicion toward his nemesis, the corrupt gangster Scalise (Gary Merrill). When this fails, Dixon decides to sacrifice himself by provoking Scalise into killing him. When Dixon survives this showdown with Scalise in an East Side parking garage, he forces his superior, Lieutenant Thomas, to read his (Dixon's) confession concerning the Paine killing.

Where the Sidewalk Ends is a stylish crime film. Director Otto Preminger filmed many scenes with a minimum of cuts, allowing his fluid camera and clever compositions to avoid the traditional Hollywood system of filming scenes primarily via shot/reverse shot. Preminger and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle exploit Dixon's troubled mind through low-key lighting, and Andrews's minimalist style of acting captures the masochistic, tormented cop who suffers a pervasive sense of guilt concerning his father who was a criminal. Dixon, finally, is redeemed through his love for Morgan—although he loses his career and his freedom in the process.

WIDMARK, RICHARD (1914–2008). Born in Sunrise, Minnesota, Richard Widmark was president of his senior class at Illinois's Lake Forest College, and after graduating he taught speech and drama at the college before leaving for New York in 1942. His debut film as the giggling, leering psychotic gangster Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947) made him an instant star and created a screen persona that took some years for Widmark to leave behind. Following the success of this film, 20th Century-Fox cast him in similar roles—as "Jefty" Robbins, who lusts after a nightclub singer (Ida Lupino) in Road House (1948); gangster Alec Stiles in Street with No Name (1948); a small-time hustler with futile dreams of making it big as a wrestling promoter in Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950); and a bigot who incites a race riot in No Way Out (1950). These hateful, sometimes psychologically disturbed characters were at odds with Widmark's solid, middle-class upbringing.

In 1950, Widmark starred in Panic in the Streets as a heroic health inspector, Dr. Clinton Reed, who seeks the gangster responsible for the death of a man with a deadly communicable disease. Don't Bother to Knock (1952) gave Widmark a more complex role as a man who tries to seduce, and then save, a psychologically disturbed babysitter (Marilyn Monroe). In Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953), Widmark, as pickpocket Skip McCoy, redeems himself after inadvertently stealing a purse containing a microfilm. He also redeems himself in The Trap (1959) as the mob lawyer who changes sides after his father, a sheriff, is murdered. Madigan, in 1968, gave Widmark one of his best roles as the veteran cop battling the criminals and his own police department after his gun is stolen by a killer.

Widmark's other crime films include O. Henry's Full House (1952), Run for the Sun (1956), The Moonshine War (1970), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Domino Principle (1977), and Coma (1978). Widmark continued in supporting roles until 1991, including the villain in Against All Odds, the 1984 remake of Out of the Past.

WILDE, CORNEL (1915–1989). Cornelius Louis Wilde was born in New York and educated in Hungary. His third screen appearance was as the jittery inside man in High Sierra (1941), a key gangster film that starred Humphrey Bogart as aging gangster Roy Earle. Wilde gained stardom as the object of Gene Tierney's obsession in Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and successfully competed for Ida Lupino's affection in Road House (1948). A less conventional role for Wilde was the morally compromised parole officer in Douglas Sirk's Shockproof (1949) who falls in love with a parolee (Shirley Knight) who murdered her husband. However, the high point of Wilde's career was Joseph H. Lewis's The Big Combo (1955) as the obsessive Lt. Leonard Diamond, who is determined to arrest local mobster Mr. Brown (Richard Conte).

Wilde began directing with Storm Fear in 1955, a crime film in which he also starred as a gangster who takes refuge in a New England farmhouse. His most famous film as a director is The Naked Prey (1966), with Wilde as a big-game guide who is pursued, naked, across the South African veldt by an African tribe.

WILDER, BILLY (1906–2002). Born Samuel Wilder in Austria-Hungary, Wilder worked as a journalist in Vienna before moving to Berlin in 1927. He supplemented his income by writing film scripts, but when Hitler consolidated his power in 1933, Wilder left Germany for France and, eventually, the United States, where he developed a writing partnership with Charles Brackett at Paramount. He wanted to be a writer-director, and although his first two films were successful, he searched for a film that would make a strong impact in Hollywood. When producer Joseph Sistrom suggested Double Indemnity (1944), which was previously considered off-limits by the Production Code Administration, Wilder accepted it after learning that MGM owned the film rights to James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). As Cain was unavailable to coscript the film, Sistrom suggested Raymond Chandler. Although Wilder and Chandler found working with each other difficult, their script was nominated for an Academy Award.

Double Indemnity had a strong impact and established a narrative prototype for this type of crime film involving a murderous triangle consisting of two men and a sensual woman. The success of the film also convinced the major studios that big-budget crime films with flawed characters and downbeat endings were commercially viable.

Wilder followed with The Lost Weekend (1945), the story of an alcoholic who descends into delirium tremens. In 1950, he directed Sunset Boulevard (1950), starring William Holden as the screenwriter who falls victim to an aging silent film star (Gloria Swanson). Wilder directed many successful films throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including the memorable gangster comedy Some Like It Hot (1959), starring Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as two musicians forced to dress as women to avoid gangsters involved in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. See also FILM NOIR; MACMURRAY, FRED; STANWYCK, BARBARA.

WINDSOR, MARIE (1922–2000). Marie Windsor was typecast as a tough, sometimes dangerous, woman throughout her career. Born Emily Marie Bertelsen in the small town of Marysvale, Utah, she appeared in supporting roles in the early 1940s, including a small role in Eyes in the Night (1942), starring Edward Arnold as blind detective Duncan Maclain. Windsor made little impact until 1948, when she appeared as Edna Tucker, the unfaithful wife of mob boss Ben Tucker, who tries to seduce John Garfield in Force of Evil.

Windsor followed with two excellent crime films. The first was Richard Fleischer's The Narrow Margin (1952), in which Windsor had her best role as "Mrs. Neil," supposedly a racketeer's widow who travels on a crowded train to provide evidence against a crime syndicate. After she is murdered, it is revealed that she is a policewoman posing as a gangster's widow to deflect the criminals away from the real widow. Charles McGraw costarred as the cop sent to protect her. However, Windsor's performance went unnoticed, as the film was poorly promoted by RKO.

The Killing (1956) directed by Stanley Kubrick. Shown: Elisha Cook Jr. and Marie Windsor.

Four years later, Windsor costarred as the duplicitous femme fatale Sheree Peatty in Stanley Kubrick's caper film The Killing (1956). She betrays her husband George (Elisha Cook Jr.) and sabotages the robbery. Look magazine selected her performance in the film for its Best Supporting Actress Award for 1956, but the studio, United Artists, disliked the film and released it with little publicity at the bottom half of a double bill.

Windsor was also the blowsy entertainer who arouses the twisted passion of a sociopath in Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper (1952) and the unfaithful wife who romances a gangster in City That Never Sleeps (1953). Her other crime films include Song of the Thin Man (1947), Hell's Half Acre (1954), No Man's Woman (1955), The Unholy Wife (1957), and The Girl in Black Stockings (1957).

WINSTONE, RAY (1957– ). A powerfully built British actor able to project a strong sense of intense violence, Ray Winstone was born in London and studied drama as a teenager before his expulsion. He returned to acting when director Alan Clarke cast him in the lead role in Scum (1979), a television drama focusing on violence in a reform school. However, the abrasive nature of the program caused the BBC to shelve it for two years before it was released as a feature film. Winstone's film career resumed in 1997 with a series of roles as a tough man—Dave, the criminal who betrays fellow crook Robert Carlyle in Face (1997); the wife-bashing thug in Nil by Mouth (1997); and a gangster opposite Jude Law in Love, Honour and Obey (2000). In Sexy Beast (2000), Winstone had one of his best roles as a retired thief living in Spain until a vicious criminal intrudes upon his tranquil life. Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006) allowed Winstone to play a more characteristic role as a vicious gangster. In Ripley's Game (2002), the Italian-British sequel to The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), he was another tough criminal.

WISE, ROBERT (1914–2005). A talented, disciplined director able to work effectively across different genres, Robert Wise was born in Winchester, Indiana. He worked his way up through the film industry, starting at the bottom as a shipping room clerk at RKO in 1933. He moved from assistant sound effects cutter to assistant editor, and by 1939 he was coeditor, soon to gain full editor status on major films, including Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). Wise was forced by the studio to reedit Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons after Welles was removed from the film and ejected from the studio.

Wise joined Val Lewton's B unit at RKO and worked on films such as The Cat People (1942). Lewton elevated him into the director's chair for The Curse of the Cat People (1943) after the director (Gunther von Fritsch) was removed after falling behind schedule. Wise directed more films for Lewton, including Mademoiselle Fifi (1944) and The Body Snatcher (1945). This unit provided an ideal training ground as the producer insisted on expressive camera compositions, dramatic lighting, and tight editing to maximize atmosphere and drama within the limited budgets he was allocated.

The late 1940s was a strong period for Wise with a number of exemplary crime films, including Born to Kill (1947), starring Claire Trevor as a troubled woman drawn to the sadistic charms of a killer (Lawrence Tierney). He followed with one of the best noir westerns, Blood on the Moon (1948), starring Robert Mitchum as a drifter forced to confront a former friend (Robert Preston) when he gets drawn into his crooked schemes. Wise's finest film, however, was the crime-and-boxing drama The Set-Up (1949), starring Robert Ryan as the aging boxer Stoker Thompson. Thompson is betrayed by his manager, who accepts a bribe leading to a brutal beating for the boxer when he refuses to take a dive.

Wise left RKO for 20th Century-Fox and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), a superior science-fiction film that sparked the science-fiction craze that dominated much of the 1950s. His only non-Fox film during this period was the crime drama The Captive City (1952), which was also instrumental in initiating the city exposé films shot in a semidocumentary style in the early 1950s. Wise gave Susan Hayward one of her best roles as Barbara Graham, a woman executed for murder, in I Want to Live! (1958), based on a true story. He also directed one of the best caper films, Odds against Tomorrow (1959), an adaptation of William McGivern's novel that deviated from the conventions of this subgenre by emphasizing the racial tension between Robert Ryan's embittered racist and Harry Belafonte's reluctant criminal. Wise's film career also included a number of highly successful noncrime films, such as Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), West Side Story (1961), The Haunting (1963), The Sound of Music (1965), The Sand Pebbles (1966), and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

WITHERS, GOOGIE (1917–2011). Born Georgette Lizette Withers in Karachi, India (now Pakistan), Googie Withers began as a dancer with little formal theatrical training. Her first film was Michael Powell's The Girl in the Crowd (1934), followed by a succession of low-budget "quota quickies." She had a small part in Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938) and was Robert Newton's girlfriend in Busman's Honeymoon (1940).

Withers's film breakthrough came with One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), followed by The Silver Fleet (1942). However, she came into her own in the period from 1945 to 1950 with a succession of strong performances as flawed characters in noir-influenced films. This rich period began with the "Haunted Mirror" episode in Dead of Night (1945), in which Withers presents her husband (Ralph Michael) with a mirror that threatens their marriage and nearly causes her death.

She followed with a series of strong, sensual performances for director Robert Hamer at Ealing, including her two best film roles. The first was in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) as Edward Chapman's wife, Rose, a woman who betrays her husband when her convict ex-boyfriend escapes jail and reenters her life. Then in Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), Withers plays Pearl Bond, a wife who tries to escape an abusive relationship by poisoning her husband and seducing a young man. The film concludes with a moving sequence involving her suicide.

Night and the City (1950) directed by Jules Dassin. Shown: Francis L. Sullivan and Googie Withers.

As Joanna Godden in The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947), Withers had a more sympathetic role as a strong, independent woman who inherits a sheep farm on Romney Marsh. In Jules Dassin's powerful film noir Night and the City (1950), Withers is femme fatale Helen Nosseross, the calculating, adulterous wife of Phillip Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan) who sabotages Richard Widmark's dream to move beyond his status as a small-time crook. In the mid-1950s, Withers and her husband, actor John McCallum, moved to Australia, where they became formidable figures on the Australian stage with an occasional sojourn into Australian feature films. Withers alternated between the British and Australian stage and film with some British television roles. She was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2001. See also WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM.

WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, THE (1944). This film begins with Professor Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) delivering a lecture to his students. His topic, concerning the likelihood that a "normal" person can transgress and commit a murder, anticipates the film's plot based on the repercussions of Wanley's repressed desire for illicit sex. When he succumbs, guilt, murder, and, seemingly, suicide follow. After bidding farewell to his wife and children at a railway station in New York, Wanley goes to his all-male club for a drink with friends, District Attorney Frank Lalor (Raymond Massey) and surgeon Dr. Barkstane (Edmond Breon). Both Lalor and Barkstane jokingly tease Wanley about living a bachelor's life while his family is away. After they leave, he goes into the club's library and falls asleep reading a sensual book.

The Woman in the Window (1944) directed by Fritz Lang. Shown: Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett

On the way home, he stops in front of an art gallery window to admire the portrait of a beautiful woman, an action that he has done many times before. On this occasion, however, the woman who posed for the painting, Alice Reed (Joan Bennett), appears next to him dressed in dark feathers and a black dress. After Wanley accepts an invitation to go to Reed's apartment, their intimacy is suddenly violated by a jealous lover who attacks him. To protect himself, Wanley accepts a pair of scissors handed to him by Alice and stabs the intruder. His decision to dump the body, which is revealed as Reed's benefactor, the wealthy businessman Claude Mazard, in parkland near one of the exits outside Manhattan has dire consequences for both Wanley and Reed.

Mazard's death is investigated by Lalor, and when he insists that Wanley accompany him to the place where the body was found, the professor makes a number of mistakes. However, his "respectable" status protects him. Facing threats from a blackmailer named Heidt (Dan Duryea), Wanley devises a plan for Reed to poison Heidt. When this fails, Wanley commits suicide by taking an overdose of tablets. His death is shown via a slow track-in of the camera—immediately followed by a slow track-out of the camera to reveal that Mazard's killing, and everything that happened after Wanley fell asleep at the club, was just a dream.

While this trick ending may have been devised to overcome the objections of the Production Code Administration, it is a clever resolution as it enables the film to enjoy the dual response of presenting itself as a conservative morality play while simultaneously permitting the vicarious pleasure of watching the punishment of a professional man who acted upon his desire for sex outside marriage. The film's conservative ideological message is reinforced in the epilogue. After waking up, Wanley leaves the club and, as he passes the gallery window, is approached by another woman, dressed in a provocative costume, who asks him for a match for her cigarette. Wanley's response is to run away.

Director Fritz Lang's next film, Scarlet Street, which also stars Robinson, Bennett, and Duryea, continues this exploration of the fragile demarcation between morality and criminality. See also HOUSE BY THE RIVER.

WOMEN AND THE CRIME FILM. In January 1947, Virginia Van Upp was appointed executive producer at Columbia Studios. This meant that Van Upp was second in command to Harry Cohn. Although Van Upp resigned little more than two years later, her appointment was highly significant, because few women held such positions in the major Hollywood studios. During her tenure, Van Upp had a profound effect at the studio, most notably with regard to the production of Gilda (1946), one of Columbia's greatest critical and commercial successes.

Another influential woman was British-born Joan Harrison, who worked closely with Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s and early 1940s, even accompanying him to Hollywood in 1939 where she cowrote Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941). Harrison also cowrote Dark Waters (1944), while producing Phantom Lady (1944), The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), Nocturne (1946), They Won't Believe Me (1947), and Ride the Pink Horse (1947). In 1951, she returned to Britain to produce the crime film Circle of Danger for director Jacques Tourneur. In the 1950s and 1960s, she worked with Hitchcock on his television programs.

Unfortunately, Van Upp and Harrison were the exceptions. Women were, mostly, employed as writers—like Charlotte Armstrong, Leigh Brackett, Vera Caspary, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Craig Rice (aka Georgiana Ann Randolph)—or actors. Only one female director worked in the crime genre during the 1950s: Ida Lupino. Yet on screen there was a succession of powerful women, including Lauren Bacall, Joan Bennett, Joan Crawford, Peggy Cummins, Ava Gardner, Gloria Grahame, Sally Gray, Jane Greer, Greta Gynt, Rita Hayworth, Veronica Lake, Dorothy Malone, Ella Raines, Ann Savage, Lizabeth Scott, Barbara Stanwyck, Gene Tierney, Ann Todd, Audrey Totter, Claire Trevor, Marie Windsor, and Googie Withers. Sometimes they performed the function of the femme fatale, but mostly they were independent women matching wits with their male counterparts. With the proliferation of neo-noir films after the commercial success of Body Heat in 1981, the femme fatale returned with a vengeance, with Linda Fiorentino a standout in John Dahl's The Last Seduction (1994).

Women were not, however, always in control. Crawford in Humoresque (1946) and Sudden Fear (1952); Bennett in Secret beyond the Door (1948); Grahame in Crossfire (1947) and In a Lonely Place (1950); Greer in Run for the Sun (1956); Stanwyck in The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), Cry Wolf (1947), and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948); Tierney in Dragonwyck (1946), Night and the City (1950), and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950); Todd in The Seventh Veil (1945); Totter in The Set-Up (1949); and Trevor in Raw Deal (1948) and Key Largo (1948) moved easily between playing dangerous women and women who were in danger from dangerous men. See also BIG SLEEP, THE; BLOOD MONEY; BRIGHTON ROCK; COSH BOY; CENSORSHIP; CHRISTIE, AGATHA; DANCE WITH A STRANGER; DANGEROUS CROSSING; FENG SHENG; FILM NOIR; GASLIGHT; GLASS KEY, THE; GUN CRAZY; HIGHSMITH, PATRICIA; HOUSE ACROSS THE LAKE, THE; KISS OR KILL; LA SCONOSCIUTA; MALTESE FALCON, THE; MÄN SOM HATAR KVINNOR AND FLICKAN SOM LEKTE MED ELDEN; MARPLE, MISS JANE; MASK OF FU MANCHU, THE; NEW ZEALAND NOIR; PINK STRING AND SEALING WAX; PRIZZI'S HONOR; PROSTITUTION; RUTHERFORD, MARGARET; SAN QIANG PAI'AN JINGQI; SO EVIL MY LOVE; SQUARE, THE; TANNÖD; WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, THE.

WONTNER, ARTHUR (1875–1960). Born in London, Arthur Wontner was on the stage from 1897. He is best known for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in the 1930s. He first played Holmes in The Sleeping Cardinal in 1931, when he was in his mid-50s, with Ian Fleming as Dr. Watson. Wontner's interpretation of Holmes was thoughtful and dignified. He followed with four more Sherlock Holmes films: The Missing Rembrandt (1932), The Sign of the Four (1932), The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935), and Silver Blaze (1937). Arthur Conan Doyle's widow once said that Wontner gave the most faithful rendition of her husband's character. Wontner also appeared in other crime films, including Condemned to Death (1932).

WOOLRICH, CORNELL (1903–1968). Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was born in New York and spent much of his youth with his father in Mexico after his parents separated in 1907. He enrolled at Columbia University in 1921 but abandoned his studies after the success of his first novel, Cover Charge, in 1926. When his second novel, Children of the Ritz (1927), was purchased by First National Pictures, Woolrich went to Hollywood to work on its adaptation. He remained as a staff writer for a few years without much success. After Woolrich's marriage failed (it was never consummated), he returned to New York and lived with his mother in a series of apartments in various New York hotels from the early 1930s until her death in 1957. During this period, especially from the mid-1930s until the late1940s, he did little except write. From 1934 to 1948, he published more than 200 short stories and, from 1940 to 1948, 11 novels. In these stories, Woolrich returned again and again to the same theme—a sense of individual powerlessness against overwhelming hostile forces. While his plots sometimes contain implausible events and coincidences, his sense of dread was ideal material for film noir in the 1940s.

Woolrich's stories provided the basis for more films than any other American novelist in the 1940s. He was so prolific that he created two pseudonyms, William Irish and George Hopley. In 1938, Columbia paid Woolrich $448.75 for the rights to his short story "Face Work," which had been published in Black Mask in October 1937. The resultant film was titled Convicted (1938) and starred Rita Hayworth. This low-budget film, filmed at Columbia's studio at Victoria, British Columbia, had little impact.

His status in Hollywood improved in the early and mid-1940s, beginning with Street of Chance (1942), based on his 1941 novel The Black Curtain. This was followed by The Leopard Man (based on his 1942 novel Black Alibi) in 1943, Phantom Lady (based on his 1942 novel) in 1944, The Mark of the Whistler (based on his May 1942 Black Mask story "Dormant Account") in 1944, Deadline at Dawn (based on his 1944 novel) in 1946, Black Angel (based on his 1943 novel) in 1946, The Chase (based on his 1944 novel The Black Path of Fear) in 1946, Fall Guy (based on his October 1940 Black Mask story "C-Jag") in 1947, The Guilty (based on his short story "He Looked Like Murder" in the February 1941 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly) in 1947, Fear in the Night (based on his March 1941 Argosy story "And So to Death") in 1947, Return of the Whistler (based on his March 1940 Argosy story "All at Once, No Alice") in 1948, I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (based on a short story published in the March 1938 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly) in 1948, Night Has a Thousand Eyes (based on his 1945 novel) in 1948, and The Window (based on his short story "The Boy Cried Murder" in the March 1947 issue of Mystery Book Magazine) in 1949. This last film was remade in 1966 as The Boy Cried Murder and again as Cloak and Dagger in 1984.

Woolrich's creative period was over by the late 1940s, and he published only a few new short stories and novels in the 1950s and 1960s. His last significant novels were Waltz into Darkness, published in 1947, and 1948's I Married a Dead Man. Paramount bought the rights to the latter, and in 1950 it was released as No Man of Her Own starring Barbara Stanwyck. It was remade in France in 1982 as J'ai épousé une ombre (U.S. title I Married a Dead Man) and was remade again in 1996 as Mrs. Winterbourne, starring Shirley MacLaine and Ricki Lake.

In the 1960s, French director François Truffaut adapted Woolrich's first novel The Bride Wore Black, published in 1940; it was released as La mariée était en noir, starring Jeanne Moreau, in 1968 (U.S. title The Bride Wore Black). The success of this film encouraged Truffaut to adapt a difficult Woolrich novel, Waltz into Darkness, which was released in 1969 as La sirène du Mississippi (U.S. title Mississippi Mermaid) starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve. It was remade as an American-French coproduction in 2001 as Original Sin, starring Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas. In 1954, screenwriter John Michael Hayes and director Alfred Hitchcock expanded Woolrich's short story "It Had to Be Murder" (published in Dime Detective magazine in February 1942) for the film Rear Window, while in 1980 Woolrich's bizarre tale of guilt and punishment The Corpse Next Door (published in Detective Fiction Weekly in January 1937) was adapted for Union City starring Deborah Harry. See also HARD-BOILED FILMS.
Y

YAKUZA. The yakuza is a criminal who belongs to a major crime syndicate in Japan. As a genre, the yakuza has been central to the Japanese film industry since the 1950s. At best, it addresses problems of social dislocation through the conventions developed by the genre. At worst, the films are predictable exercises in violence and sadism. The genre was a response to the rapid modernization and Westernization in Japan after World War II. This created an ideological impasse between the past and the present. The yakuza originated as "chivalrous outlaws," epitomizing traditional values such as loyalty, honor, and courage in a highly stratified feudal society. Their enemies were the agents of modernity—most notably businessmen.

The genre can be traced back to the middle of the 18th century and a strict code of chivalry known as jingi. As a film genre, it goes back to the 1920s when actor-producer Tsumasaburô Bandô made a series of films depicting roving outlaws alienated from society. The resultant "Robin Hood" motif became a central theme in the genre, which had a political edge from the start. In the 1930s, screenwriter Shintarô Mimura exploited the genre to comment on the repressed political situation imposed by the military. Later, in the postwar period, nationalist commentators celebrated the anti-Western, antimodernization bias of the genre. Although the American occupation after World War II placed a prohibition on historical films, Daisuke Uto's 1947 film Surônin Makaritôru reiterated the code of the yakuza. When the occupation ended in 1952, the yakuza film emerged as a major genre.

The yakuza were primarily dispossessed farmers and alienated craftsmen who embraced the yakuza code of giri-ninjo. These concepts are difficult to translate literally into English, although they involve a mixture of loyalty and duty, balanced by compassion and a sense of humanity. The yakuza films became the most important Japanese genre in the 1960s. A favorite plot was to establish two gangs. One gang represented traditional values, while the other, the "false" gang, epitomized corporate culture. The films usually concluded with the "true" representative of feudal Japan, a lone yakuza armed only with a sword, killing members of the false gang before dying. Hundreds of yakuza films were churned out by studios such as Nikkatsu and Toei—Toei released 37 in 1967 alone. Most were highly formulaic. The dominant figure at Toei was producer Koji Shundo and his daughter Junko Fuji, who became a major star in the genre along with Ken Takakura and Koji Tsuruta.

A small number of directors, such as Seijun Suzuki, challenged the romantic basis of the genre in the 1960s. Suzuki portrayed the yakuza and its rigid codes as absurd, beginning in 1963 with Yaju no seishun. This film, based on a novel by Harumiko Oyabu, opens with the discovery of two corpses—a policeman in the arms of a woman—in a cheap hotel. A yakuza (Jo Shishido) learns, after numerous battles, that the wife of the policeman arranged the killing because her husband was about to discover that she was the head of the local drug ring. Suzuki further developed his absurdist universe in Tôkyô Nagaremono (1966), which features Tetsuya Watari as a yakuza sent to the country after falling out with his gang. Thereafter, he is hunted by the police and a rival gang. This plot, however, is merely a pretext for a series of visually stunning set pieces including a shoot-out in a nightclub while the yakuza's wife (Chieko Matsubara) is singing behind a stylized set. Suzuki's tendency toward the absurd intensified in Koroshi no rakuin (1967). The plot follows the tribulations of a gangster (Shishodo) hired to protect a gang boss. After he fails to carry out a hit, he is pursued by another gangster (Koji Nambara), and both men die in a bizarre sequence set in a boxing stadium.

There were a few other innovative directors working in the genre. Nagisa Oshima's Taiyo no hakaba (1962) shows the yakuza gang engaging in rape, operating a blood-bank racket, and trading in birth certificates as the film strips away much of the romanticism of the genre. On the other hand, films such as Sochu tobaku (1968), directed by Kosaka Yamashita, endorsed the myth and, as a consequence, were celebrated by political interests for their defiant stand against the modernization and Westernization of Japan.

Sochu tobaku divides the code of giri and ninyo into two characters, Nakai (Koji Tsuruta) and Matsuda (Tomisaburo Wakayama). The former is quiet and loyal, while the other is less reliable. Nakai is loyal to a corrupt godfather and eventually kills Matsuda. When he kills a businessman, which is allowed since he is not a yakuza, Nakai is sent to jail for life, and the film endorses his actions as being consistent with the code. Loyalty and duty take precedence over everything else. The only true path, the film suggests, is adherence to feudal values and a strict hierarchy. Most yakuza films repeat this theme over and over.

The golden period of the genre was over by the mid-1970s, and the romanticized image of the yakuza largely disappeared with a new cycle of "realist" films characterized by the intensity of their violence. Kinji Fukasaku emerged as a major director in the genre and presided over a major ideological shift as the long-standing code of chivalry was abandoned. The yakuza were redefined as ruthless gangsters.

This is particularly evident in Fukasaku's immensely popular Jingi naki tatakai series, based on stories by journalist Koichi Iiboshi that, in turn, were derived from material supplied by real-life yakuza Kozo Mino. These films star Bunta Sugawara, and the first (Jingi naki tatakai) was released in 1973. The series focuses on the gang wars that occurred in Hiroshima between 1945 and the mid-1960s. Iiboshi's character becomes Shozo Hirono (Sugawara), a gangster who is expert in inflicting pain. The series, which includes Jingi naki tatakai: Chojo sakusen (1974), ran until 1976.

In 1974, Toei Studio released Jitsuroku Ando-gumi, an autobiographical film based on the life of its star, Noboru Ando, a major yakuza actor in the 1960s and early 1970s and an advisor on the Jingi naki tatakai series. Directed by Junya Sato, Jitsuroku Ando-gumi, based on Ando's recollections, celebrates his life as a real-life yakuza boss turned actor. As a university student, he eliminates a gang boss before manipulating rival gangsters into killing each other. After his mistress is murdered, he organizes a gang to enact revenge on the killers. His story is also retold in Sadao Nakajima's Ando-gumi gaiden (1974). The major difference between the two films concerns the ending. In the 1974 film, he does not take revenge but leaves behind his criminal life—to become an actor and star of yakuza films.

The yakuza genre was largely dead in the 1980s as the Japanese studio system collapsed. Studios such as Nikkatsu turned to sex movies, and yakuza films went straight to video. However in the late 1980s, Beat Takeshi, an actor and comedian, revived the genre. As Takeshi Kitano, he took directorial control of Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki (1989) after the original director, Kinji Fukasuka, left the film due to illness. Over the next 20 years, Kitano redefined the yakuza film almost single-handedly and transformed it from a predictable, formulaic yakuza to the realm of the art cinema. Kitano, who had been brought up among the gangsters of South Tokyo, achieved success with Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki, which was released overseas as Violent Cop, by ramping up the violence. It marked the birth of a major new director who increasingly transformed the yakuza into a playful, stylized, minimalist genre. Kitano not only retained the violence, but also intensified it. However, like Fukasaku in the 1970s, he was not interested in reviving its romanticism. In Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki, he takes the lead role as a cop out to wreak violence on everyone around him. He followed with 3–4 x jugatsu (1990), the story of a baseball fanatic (Ono Masahito) who assaults a local yakuza member after his baseball coach is threatened. This film, like Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki, is violent and bleak. Kitano's Sonatine (1993) attracted attention overseas for its ability to break free of the genre with its leisurely pace and lyrical imagery. Nevertheless, the film ends with a bloody battle followed by the suicide of the main protagonist.

Kitano followed with Kids Return (1996) and Hana-bi (1997). The first is a part-boxing and part-yakuza film. Hana-bi is a more substantial film involving a serious examination of alienation within Japanese society. In 2000, Kitano filmed Brothers in Los Angeles, but it was not a financial success. Autoreiji (2010), released overseas as Outrage, restored his status at the box office. This film marked a return to the genre after directing a number of noncrime films (such as the farce Akiresu to kame, 2008). In Autoreiji, Kitano retains the highly formal style of his earlier films, where violence is sudden and brutal as it presents a world where yakuza codes of honor are nonexistent and the dominant motif is betrayal. The plot concerns a struggle for control among Tokyo's yakuza clans. Sekiuchi (Kitamura Sôichirô), the criminal boss of a large syndicate, incites an incident between two subordinate families under his control, the Murase (headed by Renji Ishibashi), whose chief (Jun Kunimura) delegates the job to Ôtomo (Kitano, credited as Beat Takeshi). Ôtomo carries out the job with violent precision with a dental drill, guns, and an X-acto knife.

YORDAN, PHILIP (1914–2003). A fascinating writer-producer-hustler in Hollywood for more than three decades, Philip Yordan was raised on the West Side of Chicago, and after earning a law degree, moved to Hollywood in the late 1930s to establish himself as a screenwriter. He befriended director William Dieterle and received his first writing credit on Dieterle's musical Syncopation (1942). During World War II, Yordan became closely associated with the King Brothers, the tight-fisted producers making low-budget crime films at Monogram. Working for Frank, Maurice, and Herman King proved to be a valuable training ground for Yordan, as he learned the value of keeping within tight budgets and completing films on schedule. His first film for the brothers was the murder-mystery The Unknown Guest (1943), starring Victor Jory and Pamela Blake. In keeping with the tight budgets at Monogram, most of the film was shot on one set. In his third film for the brothers, the film noir When Strangers Marry (1944) featuring Robert Mitchum, Yordan began his practice of paying someone else to draft the script. This practice makes it virtually impossible to accurately assess Yordan's overall contribution to the crime genre.

His next film, the gangster film Dillinger (1945), provided his breakthrough in Hollywood, and although Yordan received sole screenwriting credit and the Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, the film was actually cowritten with William Castle and Robert Tasker. This practice of appropriating sole credit for coauthored scripts was a recurring aspect of Yordan's career.

Yordan wrote Monogram's first million-dollar film, Suspense (1946), a bizarre mixture of murder, marital infidelity, and ice skating. He formed Nero Productions with producer Seymour Nebenzal and lawyer Herbert T. Silverberg for Whistle Stop (1946), costarring George Raft and Ava Gardner. Yordan then followed with another bizarre crime film, The Chase (1946), based on Cornell Woolrich's 1944 novel The Black Path of Fear. While his script jettisoned much of Woolrich's masochistic tale of thwarted love, he replaced it with an audacious narrative twist whereby most of the story in the second half of the film is revealed to be part of a malaria-induced nightmare that did not take place.

Yordan was paid $10,000 by producer Walter Wanger to adapt Aeneas Mackenzie's story The Bastille for a film about the French Revolution. Retitled Reign of Terror (1949) and directed by Anthony Mann, the film benefited from John Alton's cinematography, which transformed a period film into a brutal film noir. Yordan also contributed to Joseph L. Mankiewicz's crime melodrama House of Strangers (1949) after the film's producer Sol Siegel invited Yordan to adapt Jerome Weidman's novel I'll Never Go There Again. The film initially involves the conflict between Italian-American patriarch Gino Monetti (Edward G. Robinson) and his sons Max (Richard Conte), Joe (Luther Adler), and Pietro (Paul Valentine) and, following Gino's death, the conflict between Max and his brothers. After working on the script for a substantial period, Yordan was dismissed by director Mankiewicz, who proceeded to rewrite the script. When arbitration determined that the screen credit should be shared between Yordan and Mankiewicz, the director refused to accept the ruling. This resulted in Yordan receiving the sole writing credit for the film. Although House of Strangers was not a major success at the box office, the western remake five years later (Broken Lance, 1954) was, and Yordan, due his work on House of Strangers, received an Oscar for Best Story—much to Mankiewicz's disgust.

Throughout the 1950s, Yordan was extremely prolific—at least in terms of his on-screen credits. However, many of his films were written by blacklisted writers. Yordan often acted as a front for 50 percent of the fee. The best documented example was fronting for blacklisted writer Ben Maddow, with Yordan receiving sole screen credit for Man Crazy (1953), The Naked Jungle (1954), Men in War (1957), No Down Payment (1957), and God's Little Acre (1958).

Aside from acting as a front, Yordan scripted the gangster film The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1959). This, together with his screenplay for Detective Story (1951), his adaptation of Budd Schulberg's novel for The Harder They Fall (1956), as well as his original screenplay for The Big Combo (1955), is evidence of his contribution to the crime genre. Yordan's reputation in Hollywood, however, was always problematic even after he enjoyed a brief resurrection in the 1960s when he attached himself to producer Samuel Bronston in Spain. Here Yordan worked on large-scale epics such as King of Kings (1961); El Cid (1961), although most of the film was written by blacklisted writer Ben Barzman; Fifty-Five Days at Peking (1963); and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).
Bibliography

Introduction

In the transition from the sensational stage melodramas of the late 19th century to the early films of the 20th century, stories involving crime and adventure were common. This transformation intensified during the nickelodeon boom from 1907 to 1909, a period when mass entertainment largely moved from the stage to the moving picture. With the advent of the episodic serial in France, especially Fantômas (1913), and the serial and series film in the United States, especially The Hazards of Helen that ran for 119 episodes from 1914 to 1917, the shift from stage to cinema in terms of mass entertainment was complete.

There was not, however, just one kind of crime film, as the genre soon splintered into numerous subgenres. While films featuring detectives such as Sherlock Holmes were numerous, a popular series such as The Hazards of Helen did not focus on detectives but adventurous women and men reacting to a criminal act. By the 1940s, the crime genre included a range of subgenres—the classical detective film, the hard-boiled detective film, the gangster film, film noir, the prison film, and films about locked rooms or "impossible" crimes. In the next decade, the caper film appeared in Hollywood and France, while the yakuza cycle emerged in Japan. Later came the Mafia film and the Hong Kong "heroic bloodshed" cycle, as well as many different cultural inflections from many countries and regions—notably Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Latin America, New Zealand, Scandinavia, and Spain. The bibliography that follows reflects this diversity.

It begins with a general section that includes texts that do not directly address the crime film but provide a cultural, aesthetic, or formal context to understand the genre. This context includes discussions on genre, film theory, aesthetics, and film history. The transition of the theatrical melodrama to the moving picture is described by Ben Singer in his groundbreaking study Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (2001). Other influential general texts include The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (1995) by Peter Brooks, John Orr's Cinema and Modernity (1993), Robert Kolker's A Cinema of Loneliness (2000), and Kristin Thompson's Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (1988). Thompson highlights an important aesthetic device used by all classical detective films: a narrative technique involving retardation. In her close study of the Sherlock Holmes film Terror by Night (1946), she demonstrates the role of strategically placed digressions as a key motif in the classical detective film. This section also includes Steve Neale's Genre and Hollywood (2000) and his differentiation between the three main types of crime film: the detective film, the gangster film, and the suspense thriller.

The second section, "Detective Films," includes Jon Tuska's The Detective in Hollywood (1978). While Tuska covers both the classical and the hard-boiled detective, his book is especially valuable with regard to tracing the adaptation from novel to film with classical detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Philo Vance, Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, and Mr. Wong. John Cawelti's Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976) points to the social significance of "formula stories" such as crime literature and crime films. He outlines the characteristics of both the classical detective story and the hard-boiled detective formula and provides case studies of Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane.

In the next subsection on hard-boiled crime is Frank Krutnik's book In a Lonely Place: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (1991), which argues that the shift from the classical detective film to the hard-boiled film involved less emphasis on ratiocination—a key attribute of the puzzle-centered films—and more emphasis on violence, action, sex, and suspense. This section not only includes studies of Hammett and Chandler but also books on James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich. Woolrich's fiction is especially important to the crime film, because his stories provided more film adaptations than any other hard-boiled writer. And, thanks to the efforts of Francis M. Nevins Jr. in recovering and publishing the "lost" stories by Woolrich, we are able to assess his influence.

The film noir section is divided into early studies, general studies, edited collections, and neo-noir. The early studies include Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton's Panorama du film noir américain, 1941–1953, first published in 1955, as well as Paul Schrader's "Notes on Film Noir," first published in Film Comment in 1972. The general studies include Andrew Spicer's Historical Dictionary of Film Noir (2010) and James Naremore's 1998 book More than Night: Film Noir in Its Various Contexts (reissued in 2008 with an additional chapter).

Film noir cannot be contained to a single period (such as the period from 1940 to 1959) or a single film culture (such as Hollywood). Many texts, including the edited collection from Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck titled Neo-Noir (2009), demonstrate the diversity of neo-noir. An earlier article (1992) by Leighton Grist, "Moving Targets and Black Widows: Film Noir in Modern Hollywood," distinguishes between the neo-noir films of the early 1970s and those that followed the commercial success of Body Heat in 1981. Richard Martin's Mean Streets and Raging Bulls (1997) also clarifies the parameters of neo-noir.

Robert Warshow's influential essay "The Gangster as Tragic Hero" (1948) focuses on Scarface and Little Caesar, while Jack Shadoian's Dreams and Dead Ends (1977) traces the genre from the early 1930s to the early 1970s. Shadoian highlights the role of society in explaining shifts within the genre. Both Warshow and Shadoian argue that the gangster film is an expression of the contradictions in American society.

The blacklist and the role of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the late 1940s and early 1950s had a profound effect on the American film industry and the crime genre. A valuable history of the American Left in Hollywood from the New Deal in the early 1930s to the Cold War in the 1950s is provided in Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America's Favorite Movies (2002) by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner. A comprehensive overview of this period is also found in "Un-American" Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (2007), edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield. Censorship also played its part in shaping the crime film, especially the gangster film. Lea Jacobs's Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942 (1991) provides a detailed account of the development of the 1930s Production Code and the changes introduced by Joseph Breen in 1934. Thomas Doherty's Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (1999) covers similar terrain while including a chapter on the gangster film. Mark A. Vieira's Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood concentrates on censorship in the early 1930s and his subchapters, such as "Bullets and Box Office" and "Blood in the Gutter," examine the censorship problems faced by gangster films such as Little Caesar, Public Enemy, and Scarface.

The section titled "Cities" includes Edward Dimendberg's Film Noir and the Space of Modernity (2004), which details the transformation that occurred in film noir between the 1940s and 1950s as well as the significance of the urban landscape. With regard to studies of gender in the crime film, Elizabeth Cowie provides an excellent overview in "Film Noir and Women." Similarly, E. Ann Kaplan's 1978 book (revised in 1998), Women in Film Noir, is a key text in this field. Dan Flory's Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir (2008) is an important study of ethnicity in the crime film and is included in the "African-American Crime Films" listing. The seminal article written in 1974 by Janey Place and Lowell Peterson, "Some Visual Motifs in Film Noir," remains an excellent introduction to the visual changes that defined film noir compared to the crime films of the 1930s, while David Butler's book Jazz Noir: Listening to Music from "Phantom Lady" to "The Last Seduction" (2002) draws attention to a neglected area.

In-depth studies of the reception and production of crime films are rare. Some of the best ones in this field focus on individual films, such as Mary Beth Haralovich's chapter "Selling Mildred Pierce: A Case Study in Movie Promotion" in Thomas Schatz's edited collection Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (1997). Allen Eyles's article on the Enterprise Studio, "Films of Enterprise," in the April 1980 edition of the film journal Focus on Film examines the financial and production details of the studio, including its birth and death. The most comprehensive overview of a film studio is Jack Mathis's Republic Confidential, volume 1, The Studio (1999).

While there are no shortage of studies of directors and actors, and sometimes producers such as Val Lewton, most focus on the person not the genre. Chris Fujiwara's study of Jacques Tourneur, The Cinema of Nightfall: Jacques Tourneur (1998), is one of the best auteur studies that also provides a generic context for the artist's films, such as Tourneur's The Leopard Man (1943), Out of the Past (1947), Circle of Danger (1951), and Nightfall (1957). Australian director David Michôd provides valuable insights into the development and production of the award-winning Australian crime film Animal Kingdom in an interview with Cynthia Karena in "Making Crime Pay: David Michôd on Animal Kingdom" (2010).

Tony Williams in his chapter "British Film Noir" (1999), Robert Murphy in Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939–49 (1989), and Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane in The British "B" Film (2009) establish that noir is not just an American phenomenon. David Desser's "Global Noir: Genre Film in the Age of Transformation" (2003), with his focus on Asian films, reiterates this point, as do Thomas Elsaesser's Weimar Cinema and After (2000) and Ginette Vincendeau's 1992 article "Noir Is Also a French Word: The French Antecedents of Film Noir." Brian McFarlane and Geoff Mayer in New Australian Cinema (1992) trace the similarities, and differences, between the Australian cinema and Hollywood and British cinemas.

The bibliography concludes with a list of online sites. These include general sites that cover all genres, all filmmakers, and all film cultures, such as the Internet Movie Database, film reviewers such as James Berardinelli, and generalist film journals such as Senses of Cinema as well as specialist sites such as Noir of the Week.

General Studies

Alloway, Lawrence. Violent America: The Movies, 1946–1964. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971.

Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999.

Bade, Patrick. Femmes Fatales: Images of Evil and Fascinating Women. London: Ash & Grant, 1979.

Barefoot, Guy. Gaslight Melodrama: From Victorian London to 1940s Hollywood. New York: Continuum, 2001.

Basinger, Jeanine. A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993.

Belton, John. American Cinema/American Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.

Bergfelder, Tim. "The Nation Vanishes: European Co-productions and Popular Genre Formulae in the 1950s and 1960s." In Cinema and Nation, edited by Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 139–52. London: Routledge, 2000.

Beverly, William. On the Lam: Narratives of Flight in J. Edgar Hoover's America. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003.

Bondella, Peter. Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys and Sopranos. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Bordwell, David. Narration and the Fiction Film. London: Methuen, 1985.

———. Planet Hong Kong. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, 1985.

Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.

Browne, Nick, ed. Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Brownlow, Kevin. Behind the Mask of Innocence. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Cameron, Ian. A Pictorial History of Crime Films. London: Hamlyn, 1975.

Chibnall, Steve, and Brian McFarlane. The British "B" Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Chibnall, Steve, and Robert Murphy, eds. British Crime Cinema. London: Routledge, 1999.

Clarens, Carlos. Crime Movies. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997.

Cormack, Michael. Ideology and Cinematography in Hollywood. London: Macmillan, 1994.

Deming, Barbara. Running Away from Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn from the Films of the Forties. New York: Grossman, 1969.

Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture of America. London: Verso. 1987.

Derry, Charles. The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988.

Diawara, Manthia, ed. Black American Cinema. London: Routledge, 1993.

Diawara, Manthia, and Mia Mask, eds. Black American Cinema Reconsidered. London: Routledge, 2009.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston, ed. American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

Donald, James. Imagining the Modern City. London: Athlone, 1999.

Farber, Manny. Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies. New York: Praeger, 1971.

Friedrich, Otto. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Frisby, David. Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.

Gledhill, Christine, and Linda Williams, eds. Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold, 2000.

Gonthier, David, Jr. The American Prison Film since 1930. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006.

Grindon, Leger. "Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre." Cinema Journal 35, no. 4 (Summer 1996): 54–69.

Halttunen, Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Hardy, Phil, ed. The BFI Companion to Crime Films. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Henriksen, Margot A. Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age. Berkeley: University of California, 1997.

Higham, Charles. Hollywood Cameramen: Sources of Light. London: Thames & Hudson/BFI, 1970.

Higham, Charles, and Joel Greenberg. Hollywood in the Forties. London: Tantivy, 1968.

Hubin, Allen. Crime Fiction 111: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1749–1995 [CD-Rom]. Oakland, CA: Locus Press, 2001.

Hughes, Howard. Crime Wave: The Filmgoers' Guide to the Great Crime Movies. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006.

Keating, Patrick. Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

King, Neal. Heroes in Hard Times: Cop Action Movies in the U.S. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.

Knight, Stephen. Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997.

———. Crime Fiction, 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

———. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1980.

Koepnick, Lutz. The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Kooistra, Paul. Criminals as Heroes: Structure, Power, and Identity. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989.

Langman, Larry. Destination Hollywood: The Influence of Europeans on American Filmmaking. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000.

Langman, Larry, and Daniel Finn, eds. A Guide to American Crime Films of the Forties and Fifties. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Lehman, David. The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection. New York: Macmillan, 1989.

Leitch, Thomas. Crime Films. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Lev, Peter. Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Mann, Denise. Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

May, Lary. The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

———. Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

McArthur, Colin. Underworld USA. London: Secker & Warburg, 1972.

McCarthy, Todd, and Charles Flynn, ed. Kings of the Bs: Working within the Hollywood System. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975.

Morrison, James. Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors. New York: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Munby, Jonathan. "Heimat Hollywood: Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Edgar Ulmer, and the Criminal Cinema of the Austro-Jewish Diaspora." In From World War to Waldheim: Culture and Politics in Austria and the United States, edited by David F. Good and Ruth Wodak, 138–62. New York: Berghahn Books, 1999.

Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge, 2000.

Neale, Steve, and Murray Smith, eds. Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge, 1998.

Neumann, Dietrich, ed. Film Architecture: From "Metropolis" to "Blade Runner." London: Prestel, 1999.

Orr, John. Cinema and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993.

———. Contemporary Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.

Palmer, Jerry. Thrillers. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979.

Phillips, Alastair. City of Darkness, City of Light: Émigré Filmmakers in Paris, 1929–1939. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003.

Polan, Dana. Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Porter, Dennis. The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.

Pratt, Ray. Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001.

Rafter, Nicole. Crime Films and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Rubin, Martin. Thrillers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Saxe, Robert Francis. Settling Down: World War II Veterans' Challenge to the Postwar Consensus. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Schatz, Thomas. Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

———. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

———. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981.

Simpson, Philip L. Psychopaths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.

Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Thompson, Kristin. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. London: Routledge, 1989.

Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card. Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Wilson, Ron. "The Left-Handed Form of Human Endeavor: Crime Films during the 1990s." In Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays, edited by Wheeler W. Dixon, 143–60. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Detective Films

The Classical Detective

Auden, W. H. "The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story by an Addict." In The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1962.

Baker, Michael, ed. The Doyle Diary. New York: Paddington Press, 1978.

Barnard, Robert. A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie. London: Collins, 1980.

Barzun, Jacques. The Delights of Fiction. New York: Criterion, 1961.

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. A Catalogue of Crime. New York: Harper, 1971.

Bell, Ian, and Graham Daldry, eds. Watching the Detectives: Essays on Crime Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1990.

Black, Joel. "(De)feats of Detection: The Spurious Key Text from Poe to Eco." In Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, edited by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, 75–98. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Bleiler, Richard. The Annotated Index to the Thrill Book. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1991.

Borowitz, Albert. Innocence and Arsenic: Studies in Crime and Literature. New York: Harper, 1977.

Bourdier, Jean. Histoire du roman policier. Paris: Editions du Fallois, 1996.

Carr, Wooda N. The Other Detective Pulp Heroes. Chicago: Tattered Pages Press, 1992.

Cawelti, John. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Cobley, Paul. The American Thriller: Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.

Conquest, John. Trouble Is Their Business: Private Eyes in Fiction, Film and Television, 1927–1988. New York: Garland, 1989.

DeAndrea, William L. Encyclopedia Mysteriosa. New York: Prentice Hall, 1997.

Delamater, Jerome H., and Ruth Prigozy, eds. The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Docherty, Brian, ed. American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre. Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1988.

Dooley, Dennis. Dashiell Hammett. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984.

Ellis, S. M. Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu and Others. London: Constable, 1931.

Everson, William K. The Detective in Film. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1972.

Fox, Terry Curtis. "City Knights." Film Comment 20, no. 5 (October 1984): 30–39.

Freeling, Nicholas. Criminal Convictions: From Dickens to Chandler. Boston: Goodine, 1994.

Frieburger, William. "James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, and the Politics of the Los Angeles Crime Novel." Clues 17, no. 2 (1996): 87–104.

Geherin, David. The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985.

Gibson, Walter. The Shadow Scrapbook. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979.

Gill, Gillian. Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries. London: Robson Books, 2000.

Goodstone, Tony, ed. The Pulps. New York: Chelsea House, 1970.

Goorman, Ed, Martin H. Greenburg, and Larry Segree, with Jon L. Breen. The Fine Art of Murder. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993.

Goulart, Ron. Cheap Thrills. New York: Arlington House, 1972.

———. The Dime Detectives. New York: Mysterious Press, 1988.

Grams, Martin. The Green Hornet: A History of Radio, Motion Pictures, Comics and Television. Maryland City, MD: OTR, 2010.

———. The Shadow: The History and Mystery of the Radio Program, 1930–1954. Maryland City, MD: OTR, 2011.

Greene, Hugh, ed. The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. New York: Pantheon, 1976.

Gruber, Frank. The Pulp Jungle. Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1967.

Haining, Peter. The Classic Era of Crime Fiction. London: Prion Books, 2002.

———. The Mammoth Book of Armchair Detectives and Screen Crimes. London: Robinson, 1998.

———. The Penny Dreadful. London: Gollancz, 1975.

Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: The Art and Times of the Detective Story. New York: Appleton Century, 1941.

Herbert, Rosemary, ed. The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hillerman, Tony, and Rosemary Herbert, ed. The New Omnibus of Crime. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Hughes, Dorothy B. Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason. New York: Morrow, 1978.

Keating, H. R. F. Sherlock Holmes: The Man and His World. New York: Scribner, 1979.

Klaus, Gustav, and Stephen Knight. The Art of Murder: New Essays on Detective Fiction. Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1998.

Knox, Ronald. "A Detective Story Decalogue." In The Art of the Mystery Story, edited by Howard Haycraft, 194–96. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1983.

Le Sueur, Mark. "The Private Eye: Second 'Golden Age.'" Journal of Popular Film and Television 7, no. 2 (1979): 181–89.

Lofts, W. O. G., and Derek Adley. The Saint and Leslie Charteris. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972.

Lycett, Andrew. Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes. London: Phoenix, 2008.

Maida, Patricia D., and Nicholas B. Spornick. Murder She Wrote: A Study of Agatha Christie's Detective Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1982.

Marks, Jeffrey. Atomic Renaissance: Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s and 1950s. Lee's Summit, MO: Delphi Books, 2003.

———. Who Was That Lady? The Queen of the Screwball Mystery. Lee's Summit, MO: Delphi Books, 2001.

Marriner, Brian. On Death's Bloody Trail: Murder and the Art of Forensic Science. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.

Miller, Don. "Private Eyes: From Sam Spade to J. J. Gittes." Focus on Film 22 (Autumn 1975): 15–35.

Morgan, Janet. Agatha Christie: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

Mullen, Anne, and Emer O'Beirne, eds. Crime Scenes: Detective Narratives in European Cinema since 1945. Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2002.

Murphy, Bruce F. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery. London: Palgrave, 2001.

Osborne, Charles. The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie. New York: Minotaur Books, 2002.

Ousby, Ian. Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective Novel in English Fiction from Godwin to Conan Doyle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Parish, James Robert. The Great Movie Series. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1971.

Parish, James Robert, and Michael Pitts. The Great Detective Pictures. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990.

Pitts, Michael R. Famous Movie Detectives. 3 vols. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979–2004.

Polito, Robert. The Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996.

Ramsey, G. C. Agatha Christie: Mistress of Mystery. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1967.

Reynolds, Quentin. The Fiction Factory; or, From Pulp Row to Quality Street: The Story of 100 Years of Publishing at Street and Smith. New York: Random House, 1955.

Reynolds, William, and Elizabeth Trembley, eds. It's a Print! Detective Fiction from Page to Screen. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1994.

Robyns, Gwyn. The Mystery of Agatha Christie. New York: Doubleday, 1978.

Roth, Mary. Foul and Fair Play: Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

Rothel, David. The Case Files of the Oriental Sleuths: Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, and Mr. Wong. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media, 2011.

Ruehlmann, William. Saint with a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye. New York: New York University Press, 1974.

Sayers, Dorothy L., ed. The Omnibus of Crime. New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929.

Steinbrunner, Chris, and Otto Penzler. Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1974.

Thomas, Ronald. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Thomson, Brian Lindsay. Graham Greene and the Politics of Popular Fiction and Film. London: BFI, 2009.

Tuska, Jon. The Detective in Hollywood. New York: Doubleday, 1978.

———. In Manors and Alleys: A Casebook of the American Detective Film. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Van Gulik, Robert. The Chinese Bell Murders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

Van Neste, Dan. The Whistler: Stepping into the Shadows. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media, 2011.

Vanth Ash, Cay, and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer. Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1972.

Waller, Gregory A. "Mike Hammer and the Detective Film of the 1980s." Journal of Popular Film and Television 13, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 109–25.

Willett, Ralph. The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the USA. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1996.

Winn, Dilys. Murderess Ink: The Better Half of the Mystery. New York, Workman, 1979.

Hard-Boiled Crime

Abbott, Megan E. The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Bassett, Mark, ed. Blues of a Lifetime: The Autobiography of Cornell Woolrich. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991.

Bruccoli, Matthew. Raymond Chandler: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979.

Chandler, Raymond. "The Simple Art of Murder." Saturday Review of Literature, April 15, 1950. Chandler wrote another essay titled "The Simple Art of Murder." Both essays are reprinted in Raymond Chandler, Pearls Are a Nuisance. Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1973.

Clark, Al. Raymond Chandler in Hollywood. Los Angeles: Stilman-James Press, 1996.

Collins, Max Allan, and James L. Traylor. One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984.

Décharné, Max. Hardboiled Hollywood: The Origins of the Great Crime Films. Harpenden, U.K.: No Exit Press, 2005.

Duncan, Paul. Noir Fiction: Dark Highways. Harpenden, U.K.: Pocket Essentials, 2000.

Durham, Philip. Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go: Raymond Chandler's Knight. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963.

Eaton, Michael. Chinatown. London: BFI, 1997.

Ewert, Jeanne. "Hardboiled (Had I But Known)." Paradoxa 16 (2002): 11–25.

Faison, Stephen. Existentialism, Film Noir, and Hard-Boiled Fiction. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008.

Fox, Terry Curtis. "City Knights." Film Comment 20, no. 5 (October 1984): 30–49.

Garnier, Philippe. Goodis, la vie en noir et blanc: Biographie. Paris: C. Bourgois, 1991.

Geyh, Paula. "Enlightenment Noir: Hammett's Detectives and the Genealogy of the Modern (Private) 'I.'" Paradoxa 16 (2002): 26–47.

Gross, Miriam, ed. The World of Raymond Chandler. New York: A & W, 1978.

Hiney, Tom. Raymond Chandler: A Biography. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

Hoopes, Roy. Cain: The Biography of James M. Cain. 2nd ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Irwin, John T. Unless the Threat of Death Is behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Johnson, Diane. Dashiell Hammett: A Life. New York: Random House, 1983.

Johnson, Kevin. The Dark Page: Books That Inspired American Film Noir, 1940–1949. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2007.

Krutnik, Frank. "Desire, Transgression and James M. Cain." Screen 23 (May–June 1982): 31–44.

———. In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity. London: Routledge, 1991.

Lambert, Gavin. The Dangerous Edge. New York: Grossman, 1976.

Luhr, William. Raymond Chandler and Film. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1991.

Lyons, Donald. "Laws in the Iris: The Private Eye in the Seventies." Film Comment 29, no. 4 (July–August 1993): 44–53.

MacShane, Frank. The Life of Raymond Chandler. New York: Dutton, 1976.

———, ed. Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.

Madden, David. "James M. Cain and the Movies of the Thirties and Forties." Film Heritage 2, no. 4 (1967): 9–25.

———, ed. Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968.

Margolies, Edward. Which Way Did He Go? The Private Eye in Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes and Ross MacDonald. New York: Holmes Meier, 1982.

Marling, William. "On the Relation between American Roman-Noir and Film-Noir." Literature/Film Quarterly 21, no. 3 (1993): 178–93.

———. The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

McCann, Sean. Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of the New Deal Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Naremore, James. "Dashiell Hammett and the Poetics of Hard-Boiled Detection." In Essays on Detective Fiction, edited by Bernard Benstock, 49–72. London: Macmillan, 1983.

Nevins, Francis M., Jr. Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die. New York: Mysterious Press, 1988.

———, ed. Cornell Woolrich: The Bride Wore Black, Phantom Lady, Rear Window, Waltz into Darkness. London: Zomba Books, 1983.

———, ed. Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004.

———. Nightwebs: A Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich. New York: Avon Books, 1971.

———, ed. Tonight, Somewhere in New York: The Last Stories and an Unfinished Novel by Cornell Woolrich. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005.

Nevins, Francis M., Jr., and Martin H. Greenburg. Darkness at Dawn: Early Suspense Classics by Cornell Woolrich. New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1988.

Nolan, William F. The Black Mask Boys. New York: William Morrow, 1985.

———, ed. Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook. Santa Barbara, CA: McNall & Rinehart, 1967.

O'Brien, Geoffrey. Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir. New York: Da Capo, 1997.

Orr, Christopher. "Cain, Naturalism and Noir." Film Criticism 25, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 47–64.

Orr, Stanley. "Late Victorian Adventure and Film Noir." Paradoxa 16 (2002): 123–52.

Pendo, Stephen. Raymond Chandler on Screen: His Novels into Film. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1976.

Phillips, Gene D. Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.

Rabinowitz, Paula. Black and White and Noir: America's Pulp Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Reid, David, and Jayne L. Walker. "Strange Pursuit: Cornell Woolrich and the Abandoned City of the Forties." In Shades of Noir, edited by Joan Copjec, 57–96. London: Verso, 1993.

Renzi, Thomas. Cornell Woolrich from Pulp Fiction to Film Noir. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "Black Window: Cornell Woolrich." Film Comment 20, no. 5 (1984): 36–38.

Ruhm, Herbert, ed. The Hard-Boiled Detectives: Stories from "Black Mask" Magazine. New York: Vintage, 1977.

Server, Lee. Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers. New York: Checkmark Books, 2002.

Shaw, Joseph T. The Hard-Boiled Omnibus. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946.

Speir, Jerry. Raymond Chandler. New York: Ungar, 1981.

Thomson, David. The Big Sleep. London: BFI, 1997.

Tuska, Jon. The Detective in Hollywood. New York: Doubleday, 1978.

Van Dover, J. K., ed. The Critical Response to Raymond Chandler. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Waller, Gregory A. "Mike Hammer and the Detective Film of the 1980s." Journal of Popular Film and Television 13, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 108–25.

Wilt, David. Hardboiled in Hollywood. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991.

Wolfe, Peter. Something More than Night: The Case of Raymond Chandler. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985.

Film Noir

Early Studies

Borde, Raymond, and Etienne Chaumeton. Panorama du film noir américain, 1941–1953. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1955.

———. A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953, translated by Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002.

Chabrol, Claude. "Evolution of the Thriller." In Cahiers du Cinema, the 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, edited by Jim Hillier, 158–64. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Chartier, Jean Pierre. "The Americans Are Making Dark Films Too." Revue du cinéma 2 (November 1946). Reprinted in Perspectives on Film Noir, edited by R. Barton Palmer, 25–27. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Durgnat, Raymond. "Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir." Cinema 6, no. 7 (1970). Reprinted in Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 37–52. New York: Limelight, 1996.

Frank, Nino. "Un nouveau genre 'policier': L'aventure criminelle." L'écran français (28 August 1946). Reprinted as "A New Kind of Police Drama: The Criminal Adventure," translated by Alain Silver, in Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 15–19. New York: Limelight, 1999.

Higham, Charles, and Joel Greenberg. "Black Cinema." In Hollywood in the Forties, 19–36. London: Tantivy Press, 1968.

Karimi, Amir Massourd. Toward a Definition of the American Film Noir, 1941–1949. New York: Arno Press, 1970.

Kracauer, Siegfried. "Hollywood's Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?" Commentary 2 (August 1946): 132–36.

Rey, Henri-Francois. "Hollywood Makes Myths Like Ford Makes Cars [last installment]: Demonstration by the Absurd: Films Noirs." L'écran franҫais 157 (29 June 1949). Reprinted in Perspectives on Film Noir, edited by R. Barton Palmer, 28–29. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Schrader, Paul. "Notes on Film Noir." Film Comment 8, no. 1 (1972). Reprinted in Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 53–64. New York: Limelight, 1996.

Siclier, Jacques. "Misogyny in Film Noir." From Le mythe de la femme dans le cinéma américain. Paris: Editium du Lerf, 1956. Reprinted in Perspectives on Film Noir, edited by R. Barton Palmer, 66–75. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Tailleur, Roger. "The Pink Horse; or, The Pipe Dreams of the Human Condition." Positif 9 (1953). Reprinted in Perspectives on Film Noir, edited by R. Barton Palmer, 39–43. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Vives, Madelene. "On Man: The Asphalt Jungle." Positif 6 (1952). Reprinted in Perspectives on Film Noir, edited by R. Barton Palmer, 50–58. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Wilson, Harry. "The Dark Mirror." Sequence 7 (Spring 1949): 19–22.

General Studies

Abrams, Jerold J. "From Sherlock Holmes to the Hard-Boiled Detective in Film Noir." In The Philosophy of Film Noir, edited by Mark T. Conard, 69–90. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.

Ballinger, Alexander, and Danny Graydon. The Rough Guide to Film Noir. London: Rough Guides, 2007.

Biesen, Sheri C. Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Bould, Mark. Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City. London: Wallflower Press, 2005.

Brion, Patrick. Le film noir. Paris: Nathan, 1992.

———. L'heritage du film noir. Paris: Éditions de la Martinière, 2008.

———. Mémoire du cinema: Le film noir. Geneva: Liber, 1995.

Brook, Vincent. Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009.

Buss, Robin. French Film Noir. London: Marion Boyars, 1994.

Cattrysse, Patrick. Pour une théorie de I'adaptation filmique: Le film noir américain. Bern: Peter Lang, 1992.

Cochrane, David. American Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Crowther, Bruce. Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror. London: Columbus, 1988.

Dickos, Andrew. Street with No Name: A History of Classic American Film Noir. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002.

Dimenberg, Edward. Film Noir and the Space of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Duncan, Paul. Film Noir: Films of Trust and Betrayal. Harpenden, U.K.: Pocket Essentials, 2000.

Fay, Jennifer, and Nieland, Justus. Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization. London: Routledge, 2009.

Gifford, Barry. Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

Grant, John. Noir Movies: Facts, Figures and Fun. London: AAPPL Artists' and Photographers Press, 2006.

Guérif, Franҫois. Le film noir américain. Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1999.

Guerri, Alberto. Il film noir: Storie americane. Rome: Gremese, 1998.

Hare, William. Early Film Noir: Greed, Lust, and Murder Hollywood Style. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.

Hibbs, Thomas S. Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption. Dallas: Spence, 2008.

Hirsch, Foster. The Dark Side of the Screen. New York: Da Capo Press, 1983.

———. Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir. New York: Limelight, 1999.

Holm, D. K. Film Soleil. Harpenden, U.K.: Pocket Essentials, 2005.

Kaufmann, Kai. Das Geschlecterverhältnis im amerikanischen Film noir. Aufsätze zu Film und Fernsehen, Bd. 45. Alfeld/Leine: Coppi-Verlag, 1997.

Keaney, Michael F. British Film Noir Guide. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

———. Film Noir Guide: 745 Films of the Classic Era, 1940–1959. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.

Lesuisse, Anne-Franҫoise. Du film noir au noir: Traces figurales dans le cinema classique Hollywoodien. Brussels: De Boeck, 2001.

Letort, Delphine. Du film noir au néo-noir: L'amérique en représentation. Paris: Éditions l'Harmattan, 2009.

Lyons, Arthur. Death of the Cheap: The Lost Movies of Film Noir. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000.

Marasco, Roberta. Il tempo nel cinema: Il film noir. Pavia: Università degli Studi, 1994.

Mayer, Geoff, and Brian McDonnell. The Encyclopedia of Film Noir. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007.

Meehan, Paul. Tech-Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

Meyer, David N. A Girl and a Gun: The Complete Guide to Film Noir on Video. New York: Avon Books, 1998.

Muller, Eddie. The Lost World of Film Noir. London: Titan Books, 1998.

Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Oliver, Kelly, and Benigno Trigo. Noir Anxiety. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Ottoson, Robert. A Reference Guide to the American Film Noir, 1940–1958. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981.

Palmer, R. Barton. Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir. New York: Twayne, 1994.

———, ed. Perspectives on Film Noir. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Pavés, Gonzalo M. El cine negro de la RKO: En el corazón de las tinieblas. Madrid: T&B Editores, 2003.

Phillips, Alastair, and Jim Hillier. 100 Film Noirs. London: BFI, 2009.

Porfirio, Robert, Alain Silver, and James Ursini, eds. Film Noir Reader 3. New York: Limelight, 2002.

Richardson, Carl. Autopsy: An Element of Realism in Film Noir. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992.

Robson, Eddie. Film Noir. London: Virgin Books, 2005.

Schatz, Thomas. Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1997.

Schwartz, Ronald. Neo-Noir: The New Film Noir Style from "Psycho" to "Collateral." Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005.

———. Noir Now and Then: Film Noir Originals and Remakes, 1944–1999. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.

Selby, Spencer. Dark City: The Film Noir. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997.

Sellmann, Michael. Hollywood's moderner film noir: Tendenzen, Motive, Ästhetik (Keiler Beiträge zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik). Berlin: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001.

Server, Lee. "The Black List: Essential Film Noir." In The Big Book of Noir, edited by Ed Gorman, Lee Server, and Martin H. Greenberg, 153–62. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998.

Sharp, Reggie, ed. Film Noir. Leeds: Paragon Press, 2000.

Simsolo, Noël. Le film noir: Vrais et faux cauchemars. Paris: Éditions Cahiers du Cinéma, 2005.

Silver, Alain, and James Ursini. Film Noir. Cologne, Germany: Taeschen, 2004.

———. L.A. Noir: The City as Character. Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Press, 2005.

———. The Noir Style. New York: Aurum Press, 1999.

Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward. Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style. New York: Overlook Press, 1992.

Silver, Alain, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini, and Robert Porfirio. The Film Noir Encyclopedia. New York: Overlook, 2010.

Spicer, Andrew. Film Noir. Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 2002.

———. Historical Dictionary of Film Noir. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010.

Stephens, Michel L. Film Noir: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Reference to Movies, Terms and Persons. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995.

Stokes, Lisa Oldham, and Michael Hoover. City on Fire. London: Verso, 1999.

Telotte, J. P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Thompson, Peggy, and Saeko Usukawa. Hard-Boiled: Great Lines from Classic Noir Films. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995.

Tuska, Jon. Dark Cinema: American "Film Noir" in a Cultural Perspective. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Vernet, Mark. "The Filmic Transaction: On the Openings of Films Noirs." Velvet Light Trap 20 (Summer 1983).

———. "Film Noir on the Edge of Doom." In Shades of Noir, edited by Joan Copjec, 1–32. London: Verso, 1993.

Wager, Jans B. Dames in the Driver's Seat: Rereading Film Noir. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.

Werner, Paul. Film Noir und Neo-Noir. Berlin: Vertigo Verlag, 2000.

Whitney, John. "A Filmography of Film Noir." Journal of Popular Film and Television 5 (1976): 321–71.

Williams, Tony. "British Film Noir." In Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 242–69. New York: Limelight, 1992.

———. Structures of Desire: British Cinema, 1939–1955. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Edited Collections

Cameron, Ian, ed. The Movie Book of Film Noir. London: Studio Vista, 1992.

Conard, Mark T., ed. The Philosophy of Film Noir. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.

———, ed. The Philosophy of Neo-Noir. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

Copjec, Joan, ed. Shades of Noir. London: Verso, 1993.

Gorman, Ed, Lee Server, and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. The Big Book of Noir. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998.

O'Connell, Jack, ed. Dark Alleys of Noir. Vashon, WA: Delta, 2002.

Palacios, Jesus, ed. Euro noir: Serie negra con sabor europeo. Madrid: T&B Editores, 2006.

Palmer, R. Barton, ed. Perspectives on Film Noir. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Porfirio, Robert, Alain Silver, and James Ursini, eds. Film Noir Reader 3: Interviews with Filmmakers of the Classic Noir Period. New York: Limelight, 2002.

Silver, Alain, and James Ursini, eds. Film Noir Reader. New York: Limelight, 1996.

———, eds. Film Noir Reader 2. New York: Limelight, 1999.

———, eds. Film Noir Reader 4: The Crucial Films and Themes. New York: Limelight, 2004.

Spicer, Andrew, ed. European Film Noir. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.

Neo-Noir

Andrews, David. "Sex Is Dangerous, So Satisfy Your Wife: The Softcore Thriller in Its Contexts." Cinema Journal 45, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 59–89.

Berrettini, Mark Louis. "Signs of Noir: Contemporary Film Noir and Social Difference in the United States." Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 2000.

Borde, Raymond, and Etienne Chaumeton. "Twenty Years Later: Film Noir in the 1970s." Écran 32 (1975). Reprinted in Perspectives on Film Noir, edited by R. Barton Palmer, 76–80. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Bould, Mark, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck, eds. Neo-Noir. London: Wallflower, 2009.

Brookover, Linda, and Alain Silver. "Mad Love Is Strange: More Neo-Noir Fugitives." In Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 189–96. New York: Limelight, 1999.

Cobb, Sharon Y. "Writing the New Noir Film." In Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 207–14. New York: Limelight, 1999.

Cochran, David. America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Conley, Tom. "Noir in the Red and Nineties in the Black." In Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays, edited by Wheeler Winston Dixon, 193–210. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Covey, William. "Girl Power: Female-Centered Neo-Noir." In Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 311–28. New York: Limelight, 1999.

Dyer, Richard. "Generic Definition: Neo-Noir." In Pastiche, 119–33. London: Routledge, 2007.

Erickson, Tom. "Kill Me Again: Movement Becomes Genre." In Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 307–30. New York: Limelight, 1996.

Gallafent, Edward. "Echo Park: Film Noir in the Seventies." In The Movie Book of Film Noir, edited by Ian Cameron, 254–66. London: Studio Vista, 1992.

Grant, Barry K. "Rich and Strange: The Yuppie Horror Film." In Contemporary Hollywood, edited by Steve Neale and Murray Smith, 280–93. London: Routledge, 1999.

Grist, Leighton. "Moving Targets and Black Widows: Film Noir in Modern Hollywood." In The Movie Book of Film Noir, edited by Ian Cameron, 267–85. London: Studio Vista, 1992.

Gross, Larry. "Film après Noir." Film Comment 12, no. 4 (1976): 44–49.

Hinson, H. "Bloodlines." Film Comment 21, no. 2 (1986): 14–16.

Hirsch, Foster. Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir. New York: Limelight, 1999.

Jameson, Richard. "Film Noir Today: Son of Noir." Film Comment 10, no. 6 (1974). Reprinted as "Son of Noir" in Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 197–205. New York: Limelight, 1999.

Kutner, C. Jerry. "Beyond the Golden Age: Film Noir Since the '50s." Bright Lights (Winter 1995): 23–32.

Levy, Emanuel. "The Resurrection of Noir." In Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Martin, Richard. Mean Streets and Raging Bulls: The Legacy of Film Noir in Contemporary American Cinema. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997.

Miklitsch, Robert. "Audio-Noir: Audiovisuality in Neo-Modernist Noir." In Neo-Noir, edited by Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck, 28–43. London: Wallflower, 2009.

Morgan, Jack. "Reconfiguring Gothic Mythology: The Film Noir–Horror Hybrid Films of the 1980s." Post Script 21, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 72–86.

Nelson, John S. "Four Forms for Terrorism: Horror, Dystopia, Thriller, and Noir." Poroi 2, no. 1 (August 2003). Reprinted in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, edited by Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, 181–96. London: Routledge, 2006.

Porfirio, Robert. "Whatever Happened to the Film Noir? The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946–1981)." Literature/Film Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1985). Reprinted in Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 85–98. New York: Limelight, 1999.

Rich, Ruby. "Dumb Lugs and Femmes Fatales: Film Noir Is Back with a Vengeance, from The Last Seduction to Devil in a Blue Dress." Sight and Sound 5, no. 11 (1995): 6–10.

Schwartz, Ginny. "It's Deja Vous All Over Again: Double Indemnity Resonates with Generation X." In Film Noir Reader 4: The Crucial Films and Themes, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 287–306. New York: Limelight, 2004.

Schwartz, Ronald. Neo-Noir: The New Film Noir Style from "Psycho" to "Collateral." Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005.

Silver, Alain. "Son of Noir: Neo-Film Noir and the Neo-B Picture." DGA Magazine 17, no. 3 (June–July 1992). Reprinted in Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 331–38. New York: Limelight, 1996.

Spicer, Andrew. "Problems of Memory and Identity in Neo-Noir's Existentialist Antihero." In The Philosophy of Neo-Noir, edited by Mark T. Conard, 47–63. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

Stanfield, Peter. '"Film Noir Like You've Never Seen': Jim Thompson Adaptations and Cycles of Neo-noir." In Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, edited by Steve Neale, 251–68. London: BFI, 2002.

Telotte, J. P. "Lost Memory and New Noir." Paradoxa 16 (2002): 177–89.

———. "Rounding Up the Usual Suspects: The Comforts of Character and Neo-Noir." Film Quarterly 51, no. 4 (1998): 12–20.

Verevis, Constantine. "Through the Past Darkly: Noir Remakes of the 1980s." In Film Noir Reader 4: The Crucial Films and Themes, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 307–22. New York: Limelight, 2004.

Ward, Elizabeth. "The Post-Noir P.I.: The Long Goodbye and Hickey and Boggs." ASUCLA Program Notes (Spring 1974). Reprinted in Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 237–41. New York: Limelight, 1996.

Warner, Marina. "Voodoo Road." Sight and Sound 7, no. 8 (1997): 6–10.

Gangster Films

Biesen, Sheri Chinen. "Reforming Hollywood Gangsters: Crime and Morality from Populism to Patriotism." In The Gangster Film Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 259–76. New York: Limelight, 2007.

Brode, Douglas. Money, Women and Guns: Crime Movies from "Bonnie and Clyde" to the Present. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1996.

Brown, Jeffrey A. "Bullets, Baddies, and Bad Guys: The 'Action-Cop' Genre." Journal of Popular Film and Television 21, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 79–87.

Burnett, W. R. The Asphalt Jungle. New York: Knopf, 1949.

———. High Sierra. New York: Knopf, 1940.

———. Little Caesar. New York: Dial Press, 1929.

Clarens, Carlos. Crime Movies: An Illustrated History of the Gangster Genre from D. W. Griffith to "Pulp Fiction." New York: Da Capo, 1997.

Cowie, Peter. The Godfather Book. London: Faber & Faber, 1997.

Fuller, Graham. "Right Villains." Film Comment 26, no. 5 (September–October 1990): 47–48, 51–52.

Grey, Harry. The Hoods. New York: Crown, 1953.

Grievesen, Lee, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield, eds. Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Hardy, Phil, ed. The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: The Gangster Film. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1998.

Hennelly, Mark M., Jr. "American Nightmare: The Underworld in Film." Journal of Popular Film and Television 6, no. 3 (1978): 240–61.

Hughes, Lloyd. The Rough Guide to Gangster Movies. London: Rough Guides, 2005.

Karpf, Stephen Louis. The Gangster Film: Emergence, Variation and Decay of a Genre, 1930–1940. New York: Arno Press, 1973.

Kobler, John. Capone. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992.

Lewis, Ted. Jack's Return Home. London: Michael Joseph, 1970.

Mason, Fran. American Gangster Cinema: From "Little Caesar" to "Pulp Fiction." Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

McCarty, John. Bullets over Hollywood: The American Gangster Picture from the Silents to "The Sopranos." New York: Da Capo, 1997.

Mitchell, Edward. "Apes and Essences: Some Sources of Significance in American Gangster Films." Wide Angle 1, no. 1 (1976). Reprinted in Film Genre III, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 219–28. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

Munby, Jonathan. Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from "Little Caesar" to "Touch of Evil." Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Nochimson, Martha. Dying to Belong: Gangster Movies in Hollywood and Hong Kong. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2007.

Rosow, Eugene. Born to Lose: The Gangster Film in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Ruth, David E. Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918–1934. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Schilling, Mark. The Yakuza Movie Book: A Guide to Japanese Gangster Films. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2003.

Shadoian, Jack. Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/Crime Film. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Sifakis, Carl. The Mafia Encyclopedia. New York: Facts on File, 1987.

Silver, Alain, and James Ursini, eds. The Gangster Film Reader. New York: Limelight, 2007.

Smith, Jim. Gangster Films. London: Virgin, 2004.

Traill, Armitage. Scarface. New York: Edward Clode, 1930.

Warshow, Robert. "The Gangster as Tragic Hero." Partisan Review (1948). Reprinted in Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture, 127–33. New York: Doubleday, 1962.

Yaquinto, Marilyn. Pump 'Em Full of Lead: A Look at Gangsters on Film. New York: Twayne, 1998.

Censorship and Politics

Bernstein, Matthew. "A Tale of Three Cities: The Banning of Scarlet Street." Cinema Journal 35, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 27–52.

Castille, Philip Dubuisson. "Red Scare and Film Noir: The Hollywood Adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men." Southern Quarterly 33, nos. 2–3 (Winter–Spring 1995): 171–81.

Doherty, Thomas. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Hirsch, Joshua. "Film Gris Reconsidered." Journal of Popular Film and Television 34, no. 2 (2006): 82–93.

Humphries, Reynold. "The Politics of Crime and the Crime of Politics: Postwar Noir, the Liberal Consensus and the Hollywood Left." In Film Noir Reader 4: The Crucial Films and Themes, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 227–46. New York: Limelight, 2004.

Jacobs, Lea. The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Kemp, Philip. "From the Nightmare Factory: HUAC and the Politics of Noir." Sight and Sound 55, no. 4 (Autumn 1986): 266–70.

Leff, Leonard J., and Jerold L. Simmons. The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990.

Neve, Brian. Film and Politics in America. London: Routledge, 1992.

Palmer, Bryan D. "Night in the Capitalist, Cold War City: Noir and the Cultural Politics of Darkness." Left History 5, no. 2 (1997): 57–76.

Wead, George. "Toward a Definition of Filmnoia." Velvet Light Trap 13 (Fall 1974): 2–6.

The Blacklist

Anderson, Thom. "Red Hollywood." In Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society, edited by S. Ferguson and B. Groseclose, 141–96. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1986. Reprinted with an afterword in "Un-American" Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield, 225–75. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Buhle, Paul, and Dave Wagner. Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklisters in Film and Television, 1950–2002. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

———. Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America's Favorite Movies. New York: New Press, 2002.

Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Dick, Bernard F. Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989.

Doherty, Thomas. Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism and American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Fried, Albert. McCarthyism, the Great American Red Scare: A Documentary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Fried, Richard. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Krutnik, Frank, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield, eds. "Un-American" Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Maland, Charles J. "Film Gris: Crime, Critique and Cold War Culture." Film Criticism 26, no. 3 (2002): 1–30.

McGilligan, Patrick, and Paul Buhle, eds. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

Neve, Brian. "HUAC, the Blacklist, and the Decline of Social Cinema." In Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959, edited by Peter Lev, 65–86. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Polonsky, Abraham. "How the Blacklist Worked in Hollywood." Film Culture 50–51 (1970): 41–48.

Vaughn, Robert. Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting. New York: Putnam, 1972.

Cities

Arthur, Paul. "Los Angeles as Scene of the Crime." Film Comment 32, no. 4 (1996): 20–26.

———. "Murder's Tongue: Identity, Death and the City in Film Noir." In Violence and American Cinema, edited by J. D. Slocum, 153–75. London: Routledge, 2001.

Barnfield, Graham. "Hollywood's Noir Detours: Unease in the Mental Megalopolis." Architectural Design 76, no. 1 (January–February 2006): 104–7.

Blake, Richard A. Street Smart: The New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005.

Christopher, Nicholas. Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City. New York: Free Press, 1997.

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso, 1990.

Dimendberg, Edward. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

———. "From Berlin to Bunker Hill: Urban Space, Late Modernity, and Film Noir in Fritz Lang's and Joseph Losey's M." Wide Angle 19, no. 4 (1997): 62–93.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. "Night World: New York as a Noir Universe." In New York and the Filmic Imagination, edited by Murray Pomerance, 243–57. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Dorfman, Richard. "Conspiracy City." Journal of Popular Film and Television 7, no. 4 (1980): 434–56.

Hannigan, William, ed. New York Noir: Crime Photos from the "Daily News" Archive. New York: Rizzoli, 1999.

Heimann, Jim. Sins of the City: The Real Los Angeles Noir. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999.

Klein, Norman M. "Gold Fevers: Global L.A. and the Noir Imaginary." In Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000, edited by Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, 389–409. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/University of California Press, 2000.

———. "Staging Murders: The Social Imaginary, Film, and the City." Wide Angle 20, no. 3 (1998): 85–96.

Krutnik, Frank. "Something More than Night: Tales of the Noir City." In The Cinematic City, edited by David B. Clarke, 83–109. London: Routledge, 1997.

Lent, Tina Olsin. "The Dark Side of the Dream: The Image of Los Angeles in Film Noir." Southern Californian Quarterly 69, no. 4 (1987): 329–48.

Pomerance, Murray, ed. City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Reid, David, and Jayne L. Walker. "Strange Pursuit: Cornell Woolrich and the Abandoned City of the Forties." In Shades of Noir, edited by Joan Copjec, 57–96. London: Verso, 1993.

Rich, Nathaniel. San Francisco Noir. New York: Little Bookroom, 2005.

Shiel, Mark, and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds. Cinema and the City: Film and Societies in a Global Context. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2001.

Silver, Alain, and James Ursini. L.A. Noir: The City as Character. Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Press, 2006.

Staiger, Janet. "Future Noir: Contemporary Representations of Visionary Cities." In Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Annette Kuhn, 97–122. London: Verso, 1999.

Straw, Will. "Urban Confidential: The Lurid City of the 1950s." In The Cinematic City, edited by David B. Clarke, 110–28. London: Routledge, 1997.

Ward, Elizabeth, and Alain Silver. Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. New York: Overlook Press, 1987.

Gender

Biesen, Sheri Chinen. "Manufacturing Heroines: Gothic Victims and Working Women in Classic Noir Films." In Film Noir Reader 4: The Crucial Films and Themes, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 161–74. New York: Limelight, 2004.

Boozer, Jack. "The Lethal Femme Fatale in the Noir Tradition." Journal of Film and Video 51, nos. 3–4 (Fall 1999–Winter 2000): 20–35.

Bronfen, Elisabeth. "Femme Fatale: Negotiations of Tragic Desire." New Literary History 35, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 103–16.

Carter, Beverley. "The War of the Sexes: Men in Film Noir and D.O.A. (1950)." In Film Noir Reader 4: The Crucial Films and Themes, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 87–94. New York: Limelight, 2004.

Cohen, Margaret. "The Homme Fatal, the Phallic Father, and the New Man." Cultural Critique 23 (Winter 1992–93): 111–36.

Cowie, Elizabeth. "Film Noir and Women." In Shades of Noir, edited by Joan Copjec, 121–66. London: Verso, 1993.

Craig, Patricia, and Mary Cadogen. The Lady Investigates. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981.

Dick, Bernard F. "Columbia's Dark Ladies and the Femmes-Fatales of Film Noir." Literature/Film Quarterly 23, no. 3 (1995): 155–62.

Dijkstra, Bram. Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s. Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1987.

———. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Douglass, W. "The Criminal Psychopath as Hollywood Hero." Popular Film and Television 8, no. 4 (1981): 30–39.

Drew, Bernard, ed. Hard-Boiled Dames. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984.

Dyer, Richard. "Homosexuality and Film Noir." Jump Cut 16 (1977). In Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations, 52–72. London: Routledge, 1993.

———. "Resistance through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda." In Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 115–22. London: BFI, 1998.

Fischer, Lucy. "Mama's Boy: Filial Hysteria in White Heat." In Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 70–86. London: Routledge, 1993.

Fletcher, John. "Primal Scenes and the Female Gothic: Rebecca and Gaslight." Screen 36, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 341–70.

Forter, Greg. Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Gates, Philippa. Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.

Gillis, Stacy. "Cyber Noir: Cyberspace, (Post)Feminism and the Femme Fatale." In The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded, edited by Stacy Gillis, 74–85. London: Wallflower Press, 2005.

Grossman, Julie. "Film Noir's 'Femmes Fatales': Moving beyond Gender Fantasies." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24, no. 1 (2007): 19–30.

———. Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Hanson, Helen. Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007.

Harvey, Sylvia. "Woman's Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir." In Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 35–46. London: BFI, 1998.

Hollinger, Karen. "Film Noir, Voice-Over and the Femme Fatale." In Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 243–59. New York: Limelight, 1996.

Holmlund, Christine. "A Decade of Deadly Dolls: Hollywood and the Woman Killer." In Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation, edited by Helen Birch, 127–51. London: Virago, 1993.

———. "Sexuality and Power in Male Doppelgänger Cinema: The Case of Clint Eastwood's Tightrope." Cinema Journal 26, no. 1 (Fall 1986): 31–42.

Jones, A. '"She Was Bad News': Male Paranoia and the Contemporary New Woman." Camera Obscura 26–27 (1991): 297–320.

Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. Women in Film Noir. London: BFI, 1998.

Kearns, Cimberli. "The Homme Fatal: Living and Dying for Style." Cinefocus 3 (1995): 26–33.

Kennedy, Barbara. "Post-feminist Futures in Film Noir." In The Body's Perilous Pleasures: Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture, edited by Michele Aaron, 126–42. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

Kestner, Joseph. Sherlock's Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864–1913. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

———. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Lenz, K. "Put the Blame on Gilda: Dyke-Noir Versus Film-Noir." Theatre Studies 40 (1995): 17–26.

Liebman, N. "Piercing the Truth: Mildred and Patriarchy." Literature and Performance 8, no. 1 (1988): 39–52.

Maassen, Irmgard. "An Unsuitable Job for a Woman: Gender, Genre and the New Detective Heroine." In The Art of Murder: New Essays on Detective Fiction, edited by Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight, 153–66. Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1998.

Maida, Patricia D. Mother of Detective Fiction: The Life and Works of Anna Katherine Green. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1989.

Maio, Kathleen I. "Murder in Grandma's Attic." In Murderess Ink: The Better Half of the Mystery, edited by Dilys Winn, 47–49. New York: Workman, 1979.

Mann, Jessica. Deadlier than the Male: Why Are Respectable English Women So Good at Murder? New York: Macmillan, 1981.

Martin, Angela. '"Gilda Didn't Do Any of Those Things You've Been Losing Sleep Over!': The Central Women of 40s Films Noirs." In Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 202–28. London: BFI, 1998.

Maxfield, James F. The Fatal Woman: Sources of Male Anxiety in American Film Noir, 1941–1991. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

McLean, Adrienne L. '"It's Only That I Do What I Love and Love What I Do': Film Noir and the Musical Woman." Cinema Journal 35, no. 1 (Fall 1993): 3–16.

Mizejewski, Linda. Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 2004.

Muller, Eddie. Dark City Dames: The Wicked Women of Film Noir. London: Regan Books, 2001.

Nickerson, Catherine Ross. The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.

Nyman, Jopi. Men Alone: Masculinity, Individualism, and Hard-Boiled Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997.

Parla, Paul, and Charles P. Mitchell. Screen Sirens Scream! Interviews with 20 Actresses from Science Fiction, Horror, Film Noir, and Mystery Movies, 1930s to 1960s. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.

Pidduck, Julianne. "The 1990s Hollywood Femme Fatale (Disfiguring Feminism, Family, Irony, Violence)." CineAction! (September 1995): 65–72.

Place, Janey. "Women in Film Noir." In Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 47–68. London: BFI, 1998.

Plain, Gill. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001.

Reichert, Tom, and Charlene Melcher. "Film Noir, Feminism, and the Femme Fatale: The Hyper-sexed Reality of Basic Instinct." In Mediated Women: Representations in Popular Culture, edited by Marian Meyers, 287–304. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1999.

Renov, Michael. Hollywood's Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988.

Russ, J. "Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's My Husband: The Modern Gothic." Journal of Popular Culture 6, no. 4 (1973): 666–91.

Slung, Michele, ed. Crime on Her Mind: Fifteen Stories of Female Sleuths from the Victorian Era to the Forties. New York: Pantheon, 1975.

Smith, Murray. "Film Noir, the Female Gothic and Deception." Wide Angle 10 (1988): 62–75.

Stables, Kate. "The Postmodern Always Rings Twice: Constructing the Femme Fatale in 90s Cinema." In Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 164–82. London: BFI, 1998.

Studlar, Gaylyn. "A Gunsel Is Being Beaten: Gangster Masculinity and the Homoerotics of the Crime Film, 1941–1942." In Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film, edited by Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield, 120–45. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Sussex, Lucy. Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Tasker, Yvonne. '"New Hollywood,' New Film Noir, and the Femme Fatale." In Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema, 115–36. London: Routledge, 1998.

Telotte, J. P. "The Woman in the Door: Framing Presence in Film Noir." In In the Eye of the Beholder: Critical Perspectives in Popular Film and Television, edited by Gary Edgerton, Michael T. Marsden, Jack Nachbar, 137–48. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997.

Thomas, Deborah. "How Hollywood Deals with the Deviant Male." In The Movie Book of Film Noir, edited by Ian Cameron, 59–70. London: Studio Vista, 1992.

Tracey, Grant. "Covert Narrative Strategies to Contain and Punish Women in The Big Heat (1953) and The Big Combo (1955)." In Film Noir Reader 4: The Crucial Films and Themes, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 119–32. New York: Limelight, 2004.

Wager, Jans B. Dames in the Driver's Seat: Rereading Film Noir. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.

———. Dangerous Dames: Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999.

Waldman, Diane. "At Last I Can Tell It to Someone! Feminine Point of View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Film of the 1940s." Cinema Journal 23, no. 2 (1983): 29–40.

Walker, Janet. "Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Postwar Psychoanalytic Psychiatry." In Psychoanalysis and Cinema, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 143–62. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Walsh, Andrea S. Women's Film and Female Experience, 1940–1950. New York: Praeger, 1985.

Warren, Denise. "Out of the Past: Semiotic Configurations of the Femme Fatale in Film Noir." Interdisciplinary Journal of German Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 2 (1997): 221–55.

Watson, Priscilla, and Manina Jones. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting in the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Williams, Linda Ruth. The Erotic Thrillers in Contemporary Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Wood, Nancy. "Women in Film Noir." CinéTracts 2, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 74–79.

African-American Crime Films

Ames, Christopher. "Restoring the Black Man's Lethal Weapon: Race and Sexuality in Contemporary Cop Films." Journal of Popular Film and Television 20, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 52–60.

Bailey, Frankie Y. Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Chan, Kenneth. "The Construction of Black Male Identity in Black Action Films of the Nineties." Cinema Journal 37, no. 2 (1998): 35–48.

Covey, William. "The Genre Don't Know Where It Came From: African American Neo-Noir since the 1960s." Journal of Film and Video 55, nos. 2–3 (Summer–Fall 2003): 59–72.

Diawara, Manthia. "Noir by Noirs: Toward a New Realism in Black Cinema." In Shades of Noir, edited by Joan Copjec, 261–78. London: Verso, 1993.

Flory, Dan. "Black on White: Film Noir and the Epistemology of Race in Recent African-American Cinema." Journal of Social Philosophy 31, no. 1 (2000): 82–116.

———. Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008.

Gates, Philippa. "Always a Partner in Crime: Black Masculinity in the Hollywood Detective Film." Journal of Popular Film and Television 32, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 20–29.

Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.

Jones, Jacquie. "The New Ghetto Aesthetic." Wide Angle 13, no. 3 (1991): 32–43.

Lawrence, Novotny. Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s. London: Routledge, 2007.

Massood, Paula J. Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.

Munby, Jonathan. "From Gansta to Gangster: The Hood Film's Criminal Allegiance with Hollywood." In The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, edited by James Chapman, Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper, 166–79. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Murphet, Julian. "Film Noir and the Racial Unconscious." Screen 39, no. 1 (1998): 22–35.

Nieland, Justus J. "Race-ing Noir and Re-Placing History: The Mulatta and Memory in One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress." Velvet Light Trap 43 (Spring 1999): 61–77.

Orr, David. "The Rural Noir of One False Move." Creative Screenwriting 7, no. 5 (September 2000): 55–59.

Reid, Mark A. "The Black Gangster Film." In Film Genre III, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 472–89. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

———. "New Wave Black Cinema in the 1990s." In Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays, edited by Wheeler Winston Dixon, 13–28. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Smith, R. J. The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Lost African American Renaissance. New York: Public Affairs/Perseus, 2006.

Wager, Jans. "Jazz and Cocktails: Reassessing the White and Black Mix in Film Noir." Literature/Film Quarterly 35, no. 3 (July 2007): 222–28.

Winokur, Mark. "The African-American Voice in the Nouvelle Gangster Film." Velvet Light Trap 35 (Spring 1995): 19–32.

Visual Style

Baxter, Peter. "On the History and Ideology of Film Lighting." Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 83–106.

Davis, Blair. "Horror Meets Noir: The Evolution of the Cinematic Style, 1931–1958." In Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, edited by Steffen Hantke, 191–212. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004.

Miklitsch, Robert. "Flesh for Fantasy: Aesthetics, the Fantasmatic, and Film Noir." In Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Essays on Slavoj Žižek, edited by Geoff Boucher et al., 17–39. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005.

Place, J. A., and L. S. Peterson. "Some Visual Motifs in Film Noir." Film Comment (January–February 1974). Reprinted in Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 65–76. New York: Limelight, 1996.

Porfirio, Robert. "The Killers: Expressiveness of Sound and Image in Film Noir." In Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 177–88. New York: Limelight, 1996.

———. "The Unsuspected (1947) and the Noir Sequence: Realism, Expressionism, Style." In Film Noir Reader 4: The Crucial Films and Themes, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 67–78. New York: Limelight, 2004.

Saada, Nicolas. "The Noir Style." In Film Noir Reader 4: The Crucial Films and Themes, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 175–90. New York: Limelight, 2004.

Silver, Alain, and James Ursini. The Noir Style. London: Aurum, 1999.

Music

Butler, David. Jazz Noir: Listening to Music from Phantom Lady to The Last Seduction. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.

Cooke, Mervyn. "Miklós Rózsa, Roy Webb and David Raksin: Film Noir and the Music of Psychological Drama." In A History of Music, 108–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Flinn, Caryl. Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Hanson, Helen. "Sound Affects: Post-Production Sound, Soundscapes and Sound Design in Hollywood's Studio Era." Music, Sound and the Moving Image 1, no. 1 (2007).

Marks, M. "Music, Drama, Warner Brothers: The Case of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon." In Music and Cinema, edited by James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer, 161–86. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000.

Marmorstein, Gary. Hollywood Rhapsody: Movie Music and Its Makers, 1900–1975. New York: Schirmer, 1997.

Ness, Richard. "A Lotta Night Music: The Sound of Film Noir." Cinema Journal 47, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 52–73.

Palmer, Christopher. The Composer in Hollywood. London: Marion Boyars, 1990.

Porfirio, Robert. "Dark Jazz: Music in the Film Noir." In Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 177–88. New York: Limelight, 1999.

Scheurer, Timothy. "Music for the Mean Streets: The Hard-Boiled Detective Film." In Music and Mythmaking in Film: Genre and the Role of the Composer. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

Younger, Richard. "Song in Contemporary Film Noir." Films in Review 45, nos. 7–8 (July–August 1994): 48–51.

Production and Marketing

Bassoff, Lawrence. Crime Scenes: Movie Posters of the Film Noir: The Classic Period, 1941–1959. Beverly Hills, CA: Lawrence Bassoff Collection, 1997.

Chopra-Gant, Mike. Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006.

Dussere, Erik. "Out of the Past, into the Supermarket: Consuming Film Noir." Film Quarterly 60, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 129–43.

Eyles, Allen. "Films of Enterprise." Focus on Film, no. 35 (April 1980): 13–37.

Haralovich, Mary Beth. "Selling Mildred Pierce: A Case Study in Movie Promotion." In Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, edited by Thomas Schatz, 196–202. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Jacobs, Lea. "The B film and the Problem of Cultural Distinction." Screen 33, no. 1 (1992): 1–13.

Kerr, Paul. "Out of What Past? Notes on the B Film Noir." Screen Education 32–33 (Autumn/Winter 1979–1980). In Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 107–27. New York: Limelight, 1996.

Mathis, Jack. Republic Confidential. Vol. 1, The Studio. Barrington, IL: Jack Mathis Advertising, 1999.

Muller, Eddie. The Art of Noir: The Posters and Graphics from the Classic Era of Film Noir. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2002.

Telotte, J. P. "Film Noir at Columbia: Fashion and Innovation." In Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a Studio, edited by Bernard F. Dick, 106–17. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992.

Actors and Filmmakers

General

Bazin, André. "The Death of Humphrey Bogart." In Cahiers du Cinéma, the 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, edited by Jim Hillier, 98–101. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Cohen, Mitchell S. "The Actor: Villains and Victims." Film Comment 10, no. 6 (1974): 27–29.

Everson, William K. The Bad Guys. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1974.

Hannsberry, Karen B. Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.

———. Femme Noir: Bad Girls of Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998.

Hockley, Luke. "Film Noir: Archetypes or Stereotypes?" In Jung & Film: Post-Jungian Takes on the Moving Image, edited by Christopher Hauke and Ian Alister, 177–93. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Parish, James Robert. Hollywood Character Actors. New York: Arlington House, 1978.

———. Tough Guys. New York: Rainbow Books, 1976.

Petrie, Graham. Hollywood Destinies: European Directors in America, 1922–1931. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.

Phillips, Alastair, and Ginette Vincendeau, eds. Journeys of Desire: European Actors in Hollywood. London: BFI, 2006.

Phillips, Gene D. Exiles in Hollywood: Major European Film Directors in America. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1998.

Schlossheimer, Michael. Gunmen and Gangsters. Profiles of Nine Actors Who Portrayed Memorable Screen Tough Guys. Westport, CT: McFarland, 2001.

Sklar, Robert. City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Taylor, J. Russell. Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Émigrés, 1933–1950. London: Faber & Faber, 1983.

Twomey, Alfred E., and Arthur F. McClure. The Versatiles: A Study of Supporting Character Actors and Actresses in the American Motion Picture. New York: Barnes, 1969.

Wexman, Virginia. "Kinesis and Film Acting: Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep." Journal of Popular Film and Television 7, no. 1 (1978): 42–55.

Actors

Barnett, Vincent L. "Dualling for Judy: The Concept of the Double in the Films of Kim Novak." Film History 19 (2007): 86–101.

Bowers, Ronald. "Joan Bennett." Films in Review 28, no. 6 (June–July 1977): 321–37.

Buckley, Michael. "Richard Widmark." Films in Review 37, nos. 5–7 (1986): 222–29, 259–70.

Buford, Kate. Burt Lancaster: An American Life. New York: Knopf, 2000.

Coe, Jonathan. Humphrey Bogart: Take It and Like It. London: Bloomsbury, 1991.

Darke, Chris. "Robert Mitchum and Out of the Past." In LightReadings: Film Criticism and Screen Arts, 66–67. London: Wallflower, 2000.

Edelman, Rob. "John Garfield: Playing Out a Role." Views and Reviews (Fall 1974): 37–43.

Eyles, Allen. "Dana Andrews." Focus on Film 26 (1977): 13–22, 48–49.

Fishgall, Gary. Against Type: The Biography of Burt Lancaster. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Gansberg, Allan L. Little Caesar: A Biography of Edward G. Robinson. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004.

Hill, James. Rita Hayworth: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983.

Houston, David. "The Two Tom Neals: A Legacy." Filmfax 11 (July 1988).

Kogan, Frank. "Dan Duryea." In O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors, edited by Luc Sante and Melissa Holbrook Pierson, 105–15. London: Granta Books, 2000.

Love, Damien. Robert Mitchum: Solid, Dad, Crazy. London: B. T. Batsford, 2002.

Mangravite, Andrew. "Republican Noir [Robert Montgomery]." Film Comment (January–February 1994): 78–81.

Mank, Gregory. "Laird Cregar." Film Fan Monthly 150 (December 1973): 3–12.

Miller, Mark A. "Marie Windsor Interview." Filmfax 30 (December–January 1992).

O'Brien, Geoffrey. "Dana Andrews, or the Male Mask." In O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors, edited by Luc Sante and Melissa Holbrook Pierson, 35–46. London: Granta Books, 2000.

Rode, Alan K. Charles McGraw. Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007.

Schickel, Richard. James Cagney: A Celebration. London: Little, Brown, 1985.

Server, Lee. Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care." London: Faber & Faber, 2001.

Silver, Alain, and James Ursini, eds. Film Noir. The Directors. Montclair, NJ: Limelight Editions, 2012.

Thomson, David. "Junior." Film Comment 31, no. 5 (1995): 3–6.

Youngkin, Stephen D. The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005.

Directors

Adams, Jeffrey. "Orson Welles's The Trial: Film Noir and the Kafkaesque." College Literature 29, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 140–57.

Alpi, Deborah. Robert Siodmak. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998.

Andrew, Geoff. The Films of Nicholas Ray. London: BFI, 2004.

Appel, Alfred, Jr. "Fritz Lang's American Nightmare." Film Comment 10, no. 6 (November 1974): 12–17.

Armstrong, Richard. Billy Wilder: American Film Realist. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000.

Armstrong, Stephen B. Pictures about Extremes: The Films of John Frankenheimer. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

Arnold, Edwin T., and Eugene L. Miller. The Films and Career of Robert Aldrich. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986.

Ashbook, John. Brian De Palma. Harpenden, U.K.: Pocket Essentials, 2000.

Basinger, Jeanine. Anthony Mann. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

Bergan, Ronald. The Coen Brothers. London: Orion, 2000.

Bernard, Jami. Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies. New York: Harper-Perennial, 1995.

Bogdanovich, Peter. Fritz Lang in America. London: Studio Vista, 1967.

Brenez, Nicole. Abel Ferrara, translated by Adrian Martin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

Castro, Antonio, Santiago Rubin De Celis, and Andres Rubin De Celis. Jules Dassin: Violencia y Justicia. Madrid: T&B Editores, 2002.

Chion, Michel. David Lynch. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Christie, Ian, and David Thompson, eds. Scorsese on Scorsese. London: Faber & Faber, 1980.

Chute, David. "Tropic of Kasdan." Film Comment 17, no. 5 (1981): 49–52.

Ciment, Michel. Conversations with Losey. London: Methuen, 1985.

Combs, Richard. Robert Aldrich. London: BFI, 1978.

Connelly, Marie Katheryn. Martin Scorsese. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993.

Corman, Roger. How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. New York: Da Capo Press, 1990.

Coursodon, Jean-Pierre. "Robert Siodmak in Black and White." In The Big Book of Noir, edited by Ed Gorman, Lee Server, and Martin H. Greenberg, 41–46. New York: Cornell & Graf, 1998.

Crowe, Cameron. Conversations with Wilder. London: Faber & Faber, 1999.

Cunningham, Frank R. Sidney Lumet: Film and the Literary Vision. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001.

Dagrada, Elena. Robert Siodmak. Florence: Castoro Cinema, 1987.

Davison, Annette, and Erica Sheen. The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions. London: Wallflower, 2005.

Dawson, Jeff. Quentin Tarantino: The Cinema of Cool. New York: Applause Books, 1995.

Desser, David. "The Wartime Films of John Huston: Film Noir and the Emergence of the Therapeutic." In Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience, edited by Gaylyn Studlar and David Desser, 19–32. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.

De Toth, André. Fragments: Portraits from the Inside. London: Faber & Faber, 1994.

Dixon, Winston Wheeler. "Ida Lupino." In Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood, 134–51. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

Dmytryk, Edward. It's a Hell of a Life, but Not a Bad Living: An Autobiography. New York: Times Books, 1978.

Dombrowski, Lisa. The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I'll Kill You. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Dumont, Hervé. Robert Siodmak, le maître du film noir. Lausanne: Edition l'Homme, 1981.

Eisner, Lotte. Fritz Lang. London: Secker & Warburg, 1976.

Engel, Leonard, ed. Clint Eastwood, Actor and Director: New Perspectives. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2007.

Feeney, F. X., and Paul Duncan, eds. Michael Mann. Cologne: Taschen, 2006.

Finler, Joel W. The Movie Directors Story. London: Octopus Books, 1985.

Frayling, Christopher. Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death. Harlow, U.K.: Faber & Faber, 2000.

Fujiwara, Chris. The Cinema of Nightfall: Jacques Tourneur. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

———. The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger. London: Faber & Faber, 2009.

Fuller, Graham. "Kasdan on Kasdan." In Projections 3: Film-makers on Film-making, edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue, 111–50. London: Faber & Faber, 1994.

———. "Making Some Light: An Interview with Michael Mann." In Projections: A Forum for Film-makers, edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue, 262–78. London: Faber & Faber, 1992.

Garnham, Nicholas. Samuel Fuller. New York: Viking Press/BFI, 1971.

Georgakas, Dan. "Ida Lupino: Doing It Her Way." Cineaste 25, no. 3 (2000): 32–36.

Gow, Gordon. "Style and Instinct: Interview with Jules Dassin." Films and Filming 16, no. 4 (February 1970): 22–26, and no. 6 (March 1970): 66–70.

Grace, Pamela. "City of Nightmares: The New York of Sidney Lumet." In City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination, edited by Murray Pomerance, 183–200. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Greco, Joseph. "The File on Robert Siodmak in Hollywood, 1941–1951." Ph.D. diss., State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1999.

Grist, Leighton. The Films of Martin Scorsese, 1963–77: Authorship and Context. London: Macmillan, 2000.

Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: BFI, 2000.

Hammen, Scott. John Huston. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

Hardy, Phil. Samuel Fuller. London: Studio Vista, 1970.

Herzogenrath, Bernd. Edgar G. Ulmer: Essays on the King of the B's. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.

———. The Films of Edgar G. Ulmer. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009.

Horton, Andrew. "Jules Dassin: A Multi-National Filmmaker Considered." Film Criticism 8, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 21–35.

Huston, John. An Open Book. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994.

Isenberg, Noah. "Perennial Detour: The Cinema of Edgar G. Ulmer and the Experience of Exile." Cinema Journal 42, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 3–25.

Jackson, Kevin, ed. Schrader on Schrader. London: Faber & Faber, 2004.

Johnstone, Nick. Abel Ferrara: The King of New York. London: Omnibus Press, 1999.

Kaminsky, Stuart M. Don Siegel, Director. New York: Curtis Books, 1974.

———. John Huston: Maker of Magic. London: Angus & Robertson, 1978.

Karena, Cynthia. "Making Crime Pay: David Michôd on Animal Kingdom." Metro (June 2010): 12–15.

Kass, Judith M. Don Siegel. London: Tantivy Press, 1976.

Keenan, Richard C. The Films of Robert Wise. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007.

Kouvaros, George. Paul Schrader. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.

Kuhn, Annette, ed. Queen of the "B"s: Ida Lupino behind the Camera. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995.

Leemann, Sergio. Robert Wise on His Films: From Editing Room to Director's Chair. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1995.

Lovell, Alan. Don Siegel: American Cinema. London: BFI, 1975.

Luddy, Tom, and David Thomson. "Penn on Penn." In Projections 4, edited by John Boorman, Tom Luddy, David Thomson, and Walter Donohue, 113–60. London: Faber & Faber, 1995.

Martin, Emanuela, ed. Robert Siodmak: Il re del noir. Bergamo: Stefanoni, 2000.

Massood, Paula J. "From Mean Streets to the Gangs of New York: Ethnicity and Urban Space in the Films of Martin Scorsese." In City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination, edited by Murray Pomerance, 77–90. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Mayer, Geoff. "Joseph H. Lewis." In Film Noir. The Directors, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, pp. 184–97. Montclair, NJ: Limelight Editions, 2012.

Mazierska, Ewa. Roman Polanski: Cinema of a Cultural Traveller. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007.

McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. London: Faber & Faber, 1998.

———. "'I'll Always Be an American': Jules Dassin Interviewed." Film Comment 32, no. 6 (November–December 1996): 34–48.

———. Robert Altman: A Biography. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.

McGowan, Todd. The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Missiaen, J.-C. "A Lesson in Cinema: Interview with Anthony Mann." Cahiers du Cinéma in English 12 (December 1967): 45–50.

Mortimer, Lorraine. "Blood Brothers: Purity, Masculinity and the Flight from the Feminine in Scorsese and Schrader." Cinema Papers 75 (September 1989): 30–36.

Mottram, James. The Coen Brothers: The Life of the Mind. London: B. T. Batsford, 2000.

Moullet, Luc. "Sam Fuller: In Marlowe's Footsteps." In Cahiers du Cinéma, the 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, edited by Jim Hillier, 145–55. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Neve, Brian. Elia Kazan: The Cinema of an American Outsider. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009.

Nevins, Francis M. Joseph H. Lewis: Overviews, Interview, and Filmography. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998.

Nochimson, Martha P. The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997.

O'Brien, David. Robert Altman: Hollywood Survivor. New York: Continuum, 1995.

Olson, Greg. David Lynch: Beautiful Dark. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008.

Orr, John, and Elzbieta Ostrowska, eds. The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World. London: Wallflower, 2006.

Ott, Frederick W. The Films of Fritz Lang. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1979.

Palmer, R. Barton. Joel and Ethan Coen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Plecki, Gerard. Robert Altman. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "Guilty by Omission [Nicholas Ray]." Film Comment (September–October 1991): 42–46, 50–57.

Russell, Carolyn R. The Films of Joel and Ethan Coen. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000.

Rybin, Steven. The Cinema of Michael Mann. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007.

Sarris, Andrew. "Don Siegel." Film Comment 27, no. 5 (September–October 1991).

Schnauber, Cornelius. Fritz Lang in Hollywood. Vienna: Europaverlag, 1986.

Schumacher, Michael. Francis Ford Coppola: A Film-maker's Life. London: Bloomsbury, 1999.

Server, Lee. Sam Fuller: Film Is a Battleground, a Critical Study, with Interviews, a Filmography and a Bibliography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994.

Siclier, Fabien, and Jacques Lévy. Jules Dassin. Paris: Édilig-Filmo, 1986.

Siegel, Joel. Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror. London: Secker & Warburg, 1972.

Sikov, Ed. On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder. New York: Hyperion, 1998.

Silver, Alain. "The Fragments of the Mirror: The Uses of Landscape in Hitchcock." Wide Angle 1, no. 3 (1976): 53–61.

Silver, Alain, and James Ursini. "John Farrow: Anonymous Noir." In Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 145–60. New York: Limelight, 1996.

———. Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich? His Life and Films. New York: Limelight, 1995.

Slide, Anthony, ed. De Toth on De Toth: Putting the Drama in Front of the Camera. London: Faber & Faber, 1996.

Smith, Robert E. "Mann in the Dark: The Films Noir of Anthony Mann." Bright Lights 5, no. 2 (1977). In Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 189–202. New York: Limelight, 1996.

Stevens, Bradley Jason. Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision. Godalming, U.K.: FAB Press, 2004.

Taylor, John Russell. "Encounter with Siodmak." Sight and Sound 28 (1959): 180–82.

Telotte, J. P. "Siodmak's Phantom Women and Noir Narrative." Film Criticism 11, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 1–10.

Thompson, David, and Ian Christie, eds. Scorsese on Scorsese. London: Faber & Faber, 1989.

Thompson, Frank T. Robert Wise: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Thompson, R. "The Flavor of Ketchup: Samuel Fuller Interviewed." Film Comment 13, no. 1 (1977): 25–31.

Tracey, Grant. "Film Noir and Samuel Fuller's Tabloid Cinema: Red (Action), White (Exposition) and Blue (Romance)." In Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 159–76. New York: Limelight, 1999.

Vincendeau, Gillian. Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris. London: BFI, 2003.

Walker, Michael. "Robert Siodmak." In The Movie Book of Film Noir, edited by Ian Cameron, 110–51. London: Studio Vista, 1992.

Wild, Christiane. Frauenfiguren bei David Lynch: Der Einfluss des Film Noir auf die Heldinnen von "Blue Velvet" und "Mulholland Drive." Berlin: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller.

Wildermuth, Mark E. Blood in the Moonlight: Michael Mann and Information Age Cinema. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005.

Willemen, Paul. "Anthony Mann: Looking at the Male." Framework 15–17 (Summer 1981): 16–20.

Williams, Tony. Body and Soul: The Cinematic Vision of Robert Aldrich. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004.

Wilmington, M. "Nicholas Ray: The Years at RKO." 2 parts. Velvet Light Trap 10 (1973): 46–56; 11 (1974): 35–41 (11).

Wood, Robin. Arthur Penn. London: Studio Vista, 1967.

———. "The Shadow World of Jacques Tourneur." Film Comment 8, no. 2 (1972): 64–70.

Woods, Paul A., ed. Joel and Ethan Coen: Blood Siblings. London: Plexus Books, 1996.

———, ed. Quentin Tarantino: The Film Geek Files. London: Plexus Books, 2000.

Producers

Bansak, Edmund G. Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995.

Bernstein, Matthew. Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Biesen, Sheri Chinen. "Joan Harrison, Virginia Van Upp and Women behind the Scenes in Wartime Film Noir." Quarterly Review of Film & Video 20 (2003): 125–44.

Bishop, Jim. The Mark Hellinger Story: A Biography of Broadway and Hollywood. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1952.

Schary, Dore. Heyday. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.

Siegel, Joel E. Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1972.

Telotte, J. P. Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

Writers

Becker, Lucille F. Georges Simenon. London: Hans, 2006.

Buhle, Paul, and Dave Wagner. A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Cousins, Mark. "Interview with Robert Towne." In Projections 6, edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue, 109–22. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.

Falk, Quentin. Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene. London: Quartet Books, 1984.

Mainwaring, Daniel. "Daniel Mainwaring Discusses Out of the Past." Velvet Light Trap 10 (Fall 1973): 44–45.

Miller, Gabriel. Daniel Fuchs. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

Pechter, William. "Interview with Abraham Polonsky." Film Quarterly 15, no. 3 (Spring 1962): 47–54.

Saltzman, Jack. Albert Maltz. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

Cinematographers

Alton, John. Painting with Light. London: Macmillan, 1949. Reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Bedford, Pat. "William Daniels, ASC: 'An Inventor of Detail.'" American Cinematographer 64, no. 3 (March 1983): 44–48.

Couchman, Jeffrey. "A Pair of Aces." American Cinematographer 84, no. 3 (2003): 78–86.

Darke, Chris. "Inside the Light: Interview with Darius Khondji." Sight and Sound 6, no. 4 (1996): 18–20.

Gach, Gary. "John Alton: Master of the Film Noir Mood." American Cinematographer 77, no. 9 (September 1996): 88–92.

McCarthy, Todd. "Through a Lens Darkly: The Life and Films of John Alton." In Painting with Light, by John Alton, ix–xxxix. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Rainsberger, Todd. James Wong Howe: Cinematographer. San Diego: A. S. Barnes, 1981.

World Crime Films

Asia

An, Jinsoo. "The Killer: Cult Film and Transcultural (Mis)Reading." In At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, edited by Esther Yau, 95–113. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Bliss, Michael. Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002.

Bowyer, Justin, ed. The Cinema of Japan and Korea. London: Wallflower, 2004.

Cheuk, Pak Tong. Hong Kong New Wave Cinema, 1978–2000. Bristol, U.K.: Intellect, 2008.

Cueto, Roberto, and Jesús Palacios, eds. Asia noir: Serie negra al estilo oriental. Madrid: T&B Editores, 2008.

Desser, David. Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Fang, Karen. John Woo's "A Better Tomorrow." Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005.

Fu, Poshek, and David Desser, eds. The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Geller, Theresa L. "Transnational Noir: Style and Substance in Hayashi Kaizo's The Most Terrible Time in My Life." In East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film, edited by Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai, 172–87. London: I. B. Tauris, 2008.

Gerow, Aaron. Kitano Takeshi. London: BFI, 2007.

Hall, Kenneth E. John Woo: The Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.

Hanke, Robert. "John Woo's Cinema of Hyperkinetic Violence: From A Better Tomorrow to Face/Off." Film Criticism 24, no. 1 (1999): 39–59.

Hoe-young, Ku. "Hong Kong Noir: Apocalyptic Film Genre from the Postmodern City of Hong Kong." Roadshow (June 1989).

———. "Hong Kong Noir: Heroic Tales of Fin-de-Siecle." In Two or Three Facts You Want to Know about Movies. Seoul: Hanul, 1991.

Inu, Nora. "Stray Dog." In 24 Frames: The Cinema of Japan and Korea, edited by Justin Bowyer and Jinhee Choi, 41–48. London: Wallflower, 2004.

Kim, Kyung Hyun. "Horror as Critique in Tell Me Something and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance." In New Korean Cinema, edited by Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer, 106–16. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

———. The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah, ed. Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.

Lee, Hyangjin. Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000.

———. "The Shadow of Outlaws in Asian Noir." In Neo-noir, edited by Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck, 118–35. London: Wallflower Press, 2009.

Marchetti, Gina, and Tan See Kam, eds. Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema: No Film Is an Island. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Min, Eungjun, Jinsook Joo, and Han-Ju Kwak. Korean Film: History, Resistance, and Democratic Imagination. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.

Miyao, Daisuke. "Dark Visions of Japanese Film Noir: Suzuki Seijun's Branded to Kill." In Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, edited by Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer, 193–204. London: Routledge, 2007.

Morris, Meaghan, Siu Leung Li, and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, eds. Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Nolletti, Arthur, and David Desser. Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Otoko, Sono, and Kyobo Ni Tsuki. "Violent Cop." In 24 Frames: The Cinema of Japan and Korea, edited by Justin Bowyer and Jinhee Choi, 129–36. London: Wallflower, 2004.

Pang, Laikwan, and Day Wong, eds. Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005.

Schilling, Mark. The Yakuza Movie Book: A Guide to Japanese Gangster Films. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2003.

Schrader, Paul. "Yakuza-eiga: A Primer." Film Comment 10, no. 1 (January–February 1974). Reprinted in The Gangster Film Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 65–84. New York: Limelight, 2007.

Shin, Chi-Yun, and Julian Stringer, eds. New Korean Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Silva, Joaquin da. "Fukasaku and Scorsese: Yakuzas and Gangsters." In The Gangster Film Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 343–56. New York: Limelight, 2007.

Stokes, Lisa Odham, and Michael Hoover. City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema. London: Verso, 1999.

Stringer, Julian. '"Your Tender Smiles Give Me Strength': Paradigms of Masculinity in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow and The Killer." Screen 38, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 25–41.

Teo, Stephen. Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions. London: BFI, 1997.

Ursini, James. "Takeshi Kitano: Melancholy Poet of the Yakuza Film." In The Gangster Film Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 225–36. New York: Limelight, 2007.

Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Australia

Bertrand, Ina. "The Story of the Kelly Gang." In The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand, edited by Geoff Mayer and Keith Beattie, 11–18. London: Wallflower Press, 2007.

Cunningham, Stuart. "Hollywood Genres, Australian Movies." In An Australian Film Reader, edited by Albert Moran and Tom O'Regan, 235–41. Sydney: Currency Press, 1985.

Hamilton, Peter, and Sue Mathews. American Dreams: Australian Movies. Sydney: Currency Press, 1986.

Lewis, Glen. Australian Movies and the American Dream. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1987.

Mayer, Geoff. "A Hard-Boiled World: Goodbye Paradise and The Empty Beach." Literature/Film Quarterly 21, no. 2 (1993): 112–19.

———. "The Phantom Stockman." In The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand, edited by Geoff Mayer and Keith Beattie, 40–50. London: Wallflower Press, 2007.

McFarlane, Brian. Australian Cinema, 1970–1985. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1987.

McFarlane, Brian, and Geoff Mayer. New Australian Cinema: Sources and Parallels in American and British Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

McFarlane, Brian, Geoff Mayer, and Ina Bertrand, eds. The Oxford Companion to Australian Film. South Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Murray, Gabrielle. "Chopper." In The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand, edited by Geoff Mayer and Keith Beattie, 184–93. London: Wallflower Press, 2007.

O'Regan, Tom. Australian National Cinema. London: Routledge, 1996.

Sargent, Jack. "From the Belly of the Beast: Animal Kingdom." Metro (June 2010): 8–11.

Spicer, Andrew. "Goodbye Paradise." Metro 152 (April 2007): 118–29.

Stratton, David. The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1990.

France

Austin, Guy. Claude Chabrol. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1999.

Blanchet, Christian. Claude Chabrol. Paris: Rivages, 1989.

Braudy, Leo, ed. Focus on "Shoot the Piano Player." Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972.

Brunette, Peter, ed. Shoot the Piano Player. Oxford, U.K.: Roundhouse, 1993.

Burch, Noël, and Geneviève Sellier. "Evil Women in the Postwar French Cinema." In Heroines without Heroes, Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945–51, edited by Ulrike Sieglohr, 47–65. London: Cassell, 2000.

Darke, Chris. Alphaville. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007.

Duffy, J. "Message versus Mystery and Film Noir Borrowings in Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire." French Cultural Studies 13 (2002): 209–24.

Ehrlich, Evelyn. Cinema of Paradox: French Filmmaking under the German Occupation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Fairlamb, Brian. "Tough Guys and Fairy-Tales: A Case Study of the Influence of the Films of Nicholas Ray upon Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste." French Cultural Studies 1 (February 1996): 49–62.

Forbes, Jill. The Cinema in France after the New Wave. London: BFI/Macmillan, 1992.

———. "The Série Noire." In France and the Mass Media, edited by Nicholas Hewett and Brian Rigby, 87–97. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991.

Gauteur, Claude, and Ginette Vincendeau. Jean Gabin: Anatomie d'un mythe. Paris: Nathan, 1993.

Gorrara, Claire. The Roman Noir in Postwar French Culture: Dark Fictions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Guérif, Franҫois. Le cinéma policier franҫais. Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1981.

Holmes, Diana, and Robert Ingram. Franҫois Truffaut. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1998.

Insdorf, Annette. Franҫois Truffaut. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Kline, T. Jefferson. "Recuperating Hitchcock's Doubles: Experiencing Vertigo in Garcia's Place Vendôme." Studies in French Cinema 3, no. 1 (2003): 35–46.

Kuisel, Richard F. Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Lloyd, Christopher. Henri-Georges Clouzot. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.

Mayne, Judith. Le corbeau. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007.

Nochimson, Martha P. "Second Look: Touchez pas au grisbi." Cineaste 30, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 26–27.

Philippe, Olivier. Le cinéma policier franҫais contemporain. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1996.

Phillips, Alastair. Rififi. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009.

Powrie, Phil. "French Neo-noir to Hyper-noir." In European Film Noir, edited by Andrew Spicer, 55–83. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.

Rolls, Alistair. French and American Noir. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Vincendeau, Ginette. "France 1945–1965 and Hollywood: The Policier as Inter-National Text." Screen 33, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 50–80.

———. "French Film Noir." In European Film Noir, edited by Andrew Spicer, 23–54. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.

———. Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris. London: BFI, 2003.

———. "The New Lower Depths: Paris in French Neo-noir Cinema." In Neo-noir, edited by Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck, 103–7. London: Wallflower Press, 2009.

———. "Noir Is Also a French Word: The French Antecedents of Film Noir." In The Movie Book of Film Noir, edited by Ian Cameron, 49–58. London: Studio Vista, 1992.

———. Pépé le Moko. London: BFI, 1998.

———. Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. London: Continuum, 2000.

Germany

Bergfelder, Tim. "Exotic Thrills and Bedroom Manuals: West German B-Film Production in the 1960s." In Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, edited by Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, 197–219. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003.

———. "German Cinema and Film Noir." In European Film Noir, edited by Andrew Spicer, 138–63. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.

———. International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s. New York: Berghahn, 2005.

Bergfelder, Tim, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk, eds. The German Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2002.

Bromley, Roger. From "Alice" to "Buena Vista": The Films of Wim Wenders. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.

Cooke, Paul. "German Neo-Noir." In European Film Noir, edited by Andrew Spicer, 164–83. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.

Elsaesser, Thomas. Fassbinder's Germany: History Identity Subject. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996.

———. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary. London: Routledge, 2000.

Fehrenbach, Heide. Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Frey, Mattias. "No(ir) Place to Go: Spatial Anxiety and Sartorial Intertextuality in Die Unberührbare." Cinema Journal 45, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 64–80.

Gemünden, Gerd. "From 'Mr. M' to 'Mr. Murder': Peter Lorre and the Actor in Exile." In Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, edited by Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, 85–107. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003.

———. "The Gangster Film and Melodrama of Rainer Werner Fassbinder." In Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination, edited by Gerd Gemünden, 89–107. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Haase, Christine. "You Can Run, But You Can't Hide: Transcultural Filmmaking in Run Lola Run (1998)." In Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, edited by Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, 395–415. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003.

Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. London: Routledge, 2002.

Halle, Randall, and Margaret McCarthy, eds. Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003.

Hantke, Steffen. "Hollywood Horror Comes to Berlin: A Critical Reassessment of Robert Siodmak's Nachts, wenn der Teufel cam." In Caligari's Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945, edited by Steffen Hantke, 37–54. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007.

Jacobsen, Wolfgang, and Hans Helmut Prinzler, eds. Siodmak Bros.: Berlin–Paris–London–Hollywood. Berlin: Argon/Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, 1998.

Kapczynski, Jennifer M. "Homeward Bound? Peter Lorre's The Lost Man and the End of Exile." New German Critique 89 (Spring/Summer 2003): 145–72.

Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Loacker, Armin, ed. Austrian Noir: Essays zur österreichisch-amerikanischen Koproduction "Abenteur in Wein"/"Stolen Identity." Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2005.

Shandley, Robert. Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

Steadman Watson, Wallace. Understanding Fassbinder: Films as Private and Public Art. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

Wenders, Wim. On Film: Essays and Conversations. London: Faber & Faber, 2000.

Williams, Tony. "Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene: Trauma and Recent Historical Memory." In Caligari's Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945, edited by Steffen Hantke, 17–36. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007.

Great Britain

Bennett, R. "Lean, Mean and Cruel." Sight and Sound 5, no. 1 (1995): 34–36.

Bergfelder, Tim, and Christian Cargnelli, eds. Destination London: German-Speaking Émigrés in British Cinema, 1925–1950. Oxford, U.K.: Berghahn, 2008.

Brunsdon, Charlotte. London in Cinema: The Cinematic City since 1945. London: BFI, 2007.

Chapman, James. "Celluloid Shockers." In The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–1939, edited by Jeffrey Richards, 75–98. London: I. B. Tauris, 1998.

Chibnall, Steve. Brighton Rock. London: I. B. Tauris, 2005.

———. Get Carter. London: I. B. Tauris, 2003.

Chibnall, Steve, and Robert Murphy, eds. British Crime Cinema. London: Routledge, 1999.

Creeber, Glen. "Serial Killers: Murder, Masculinity and the Reinvention of the Crime Genre." In Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen, edited by Glen Creeber, 78–112. London: BFI, 2004.

Davies, Steven. "Get Carter" and Beyond: The Cinema of Mike Hodges. London: Batsford, 2002.

Duncan, Paul. "It's Raining Violence: A Brief History of British Noir." Crime Time 2, no. 3 (1999).

Durgnat, Raymond. "Some Lines of Enquiry into Postwar British Crimes." In The British Cinema Book. 3rd ed. Edited by Robert Murphy, 247–58. London: BFI, 2009.

Everson, William. "British Film Noir." Films in Review 38, no. 5 (May 1987): 285–89; no. 6 (June/July 1987): 341–47.

Gomez, J. A. "The Theme of the Double in The Third Man." Film Heritage 6 (1971): 7–12.

Hill, John. "Allegorising the Nation: British Gangster Films of the 1980s." In British Crime Cinema, edited by Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy, 160–71. London: Routledge, 1999.

MacCabe, Colin. Performance. London: BFI, 1998.

Mann, Dave. Britain's First TV/Film Crime Series and the Industrialisation of Its Film Industry, 1946–1964. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2009.

McFarlane, Brian. The Encyclopedia of British Film. London: Methuen, 2003.

———. "Losing the Peace: Some British Films of Postwar Adjustment." In Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History, edited by Tony Barta, 93–107. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.

Miller, Laurence. "Evidence for a British Film Noir Cycle." In Re-Viewing British Cinema, 1900–1992, edited by Winston Wheeler Dixon, 155–64. New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.

Mottram, James. '"Following On': Christopher Nolan and Jeremy Theobald Interviewed." In Christopher Nolan, "Memento" and "Following," 93–102. London: Faber & Faber, 2001.

Murphy, Robert. "British Film Noir." In European Film Noir, edited by Andrew Spicer, 84–111. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.

———. Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939–49. London: Routledge, 1989.

———. "A Revenger's Tragedy—Get Carter." In British Crime Cinema, edited by Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy, 123–33. London: Routledge, 1999.

———. "Riff-Raff: British Cinema and the Underworld." In All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, edited by Charles Ban, 286–305. London: BFI, 1986.

———. Smash and Grab: Gangsters in the London Underworld, 1920–60. London: Faber & Faber, 1993.

Petley, Julian. "The Lost Continent." In All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, edited by Charles Barr, 98–119. London: BFI, 1986.

Pirie, David. A New Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema. London: I. B. Taurus, 2008.

Pulleine, Tim. "Spin a Dark Web." In British Crime Cinema, edited by Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy, 27–36. London: Routledge, 1999.

Ripley, Mike, and Maxim Jakubowski. "Fresh Blood: British Neo-Noir." In The Big Book of Noir, edited by Ed Gorman, Lee Server, and Martin H. Greenberg, 317–22. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998.

Spicer, Andrew. "British Film Noir." In Film Noir, 175–203. Harlow, U.K.: Longman/Pearson Education, 2002.

———. "British Neo-Noir." In European Film Noir, edited by Andrew Spicer, 112–37. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.

———. "British Neo-Noir and the Male Anti-Hero." Anglo Files 128 (September 2003): 11–19.

———. "The Mark of Cain: Eric Portman and British Stardom." In Stellar Encounters: Stardom in Popular European Cinema, edited by Tytti Soila, 108–17. New Barnet, Herts., U.K.: John Libbey, 2009.

Williams, Tony. "British Film Noir." In Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 242–69. New York: Limelight, 1999.

Italy

Armes, Roy. Patterns of Realism. London: Tantivy Press, 1971.

Bacon, Henry. Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Baranski, Zygmunt G., and Rebecca J. West, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. New York: Continuum, 2001.

Caldwell, L. "What about Women? Italian Films and Their Concerns." In Heroines without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945–51, edited by Ulrike Sieglohr, 131–46. London: Cassell, 2000.

Heiney, Donald. America in Modern Italian Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964.

Koven, Mikel J. La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006.

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Luchino Visconti. 3rd ed. London: BFI, 2003.

Restivo, Angelo. The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Wood, Mary C. "Francesco Rosi: Heightened Realism." In Projections 8, edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue, 273–95. London: Faber & Faber, 1998.

———. "Italian Film Noir." In European Film Noir, edited by Andrew Spicer, 236–72. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.

———. "Revealing the Hidden City: The Cinematic Conspiracy Thriller of the 1970s." Italianist 23 (2003): 150–62.

Latin America

Berg, Charles Ramirez. Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967–1983. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.

Finkielman, Jorge. The Film Industry in Argentina. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.

Foster, David William. Gender and Society in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.

Haddu, Miriam. Contemporary Mexican Cinema, 1989–1999: History, Space, and Identity. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2007.

Herschfield, Joanne. "La Devoradora: The Mexican Femme Fatale." In Mexican Cinema/Mexican Woman, 1940–1950, edited by Joanne Herschfield, 107–31. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996.

Johnson, Randal, and Robert Stam. Brazilian Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

King, John. Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America. London: Verso, 1990.

Martin, Michael T., ed. New Latin American Cinema. 2 vols. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.

Mora, Carl J. Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society, 1896–2004. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.

Nagib, Lúcia, ed. Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007.

———. New Brazilian Cinema. London: I. B. Tauris, 2003.

Noble, Andrea. Mexican National Cinema. London: Routledge, 2005.

Noreiga, Chon A. Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Paranaguá, Paulo Antonio, ed. Mexican Cinema. London: BFI, 1995.

Schwartz, Ronald. Latin American Films, 1932–1992: A Critical Filmography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005.

Shaw, Lisa, and Stephanie Dennison. Brazilian National Cinema. London: Routledge, 2006.

———, eds. Latin American Cinema: Essays on Modernity, Gender and National Identity. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005.

Thompson, Currie K. "Two Takes on Gender in Argentine Film Noir." Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 4, no. 2 (2007): 121–30.

Xavier, Ismail. Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modem Brazilian Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

New Zealand

Babington, Bruce. A History of New Zealand Fiction Film: Staunch As? Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.

Conrich, Ian. "Kiwi Gothic: New Zealand's Cinema of a Perilous Paradise." In Horror International, edited by Steven Schneider and Tony Williams, 114–27. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005.

Conrich, Ian, and Stuart Murray, eds. Contemporary New Zealand Cinema: From New Wave to Blockbuster. London: I. B. Tauris, 2008.

———, eds. New Zealand Filmmakers. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007.

McDonnell, Brian. "Sleeping Dogs." In The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand, edited by Geoff Mayer and Keith Beattie, 101–7. London: Wallflower, 2007.

Scandinavia

Bondebjerg, Ib. "Danish Film Noir: Style, Themes, and Narration." In Film Style and Story: A Tribute to Torben Grodal, edited by Lennard Højbjerg and Peter Schepelern, 23–43. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2003.

Iversen, Gunnar. "Learning from Genre: Genre Cycles in Modern Norwegian Cinema." In Transnational Cinema in a Global North: Nordic Cinema in Transition, edited by Andrew Nestingen and Trevor G. Elkington, 261–78. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005.

Spain

Allinson, Mark. "Pilar Miró's Last Two Films: History, Adaptation and Genre." In Spanish Cinema: Calling the Shots, edited by Rob Rix and Roberto Rodriguez-Saon, 33–45. Leeds, U.K.: Trinity and All Saints, 1999.

Davies, Ann. "Spanish Neo-Noir." In European Film Noir, edited by Andrew Spicer, 210–35. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.

D'Lugo, Marvin. The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Hopewell, John. Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema after Franco. London: BFI, 1986.

Kinder, Marsha. Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Mira, Alberto. "Transformation of the Urban Landscape in Spanish Film Noir." In Spaces in European Cinema, edited by Myrto Konstantarakos, 124–37. Exeter: Intellect, 2000.

Morgan-Tamosunas, Rikki. "Screening the Past: History and Nostalgia in Contemporary Spanish Cinema." In Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, edited by Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, 111–22. London: Arnold, 2000.

Stone, Rob. "Spanish Film Noir." In European Film Noir, edited by Andrew Spicer, 185–209. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.

Vernon, Kathleen M. "Reading Hollywood in/and Spanish Cinema: From Trade Wars to Transculturalism." In Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation, edited by Marsha Kinder, 35–64. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

Magazines and Journals

There is no print journal specifically devoted to the crime film, but articles on specific films, film cycles, subgenres, and directors appear in most film journals, notably Film Comment, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, and Literature/Film Quarterly.

Internet Resources

There are a number of online film journals (such as Senses of Cinema) that include articles on crime films as well as specialist websites devoted to specific types of crime film such as film noir.

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. www.oscars.org

American Film Institute. www.afi.com

Berardinelli, James. www.reelviews.net

Box Office Mojo. <http://boxofficemojo.com>

Bright Lights. www.brightlightsfilm.com

Classic Noir Online: www.classicnoir.com

Danger and Despair Knitting Circle: A Resource for Classic Film Noir. www.noirfilm.com

Dark City: Film Noir and Fiction. www.eskimo.com/noir

Dark Room (La Chambre Noir). <http://cinepad.com/filmnoir/dark_room.htm>

Film Journal. www.thefilmjournal.com

Film Noir Foundation. www.filmnoirfoundation.org

Film Noir 'Net. <http://bernardschopen.tripod.com/noir.html>

Film Noir Studies. www.filmnoirstudies.com

Filmsite: Crime and Gangster Films. www.filmsite.org/crimefilms.html

Filmsite: Detective and Mystery Films. www.filmsite.org/mysteryfilms.html

Filmsite: Film Noir. www.filmsite.org/filmnoir.html

Filmsite: Thrillers and Suspense. www.filmsite.org/thrillerfilms.html

Internet Movie Database. www.imdb.com

Noir of the Week. <http://noiroftheweekblogspot.com>

Screening the Past. www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast

Senses of Cinema. <http://sensesofcinema.com>

TSPDT-Film Noir: They Shot Dark Pictures Didn't They? www.theyshootpictures.com/noir.htm
About the Author

Dr. Geoff Mayer is a reader and associate professor at La Trobe University (Australia) where he is head of the School of Communication, Arts, and Critical Enquiry and teaches film history and film genre. He has published the following books: he is coauthor of Encyclopedia of Film Noir (2007), coeditor of The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand (2007), author of Roy Ward Baker (2004), author of Guide to British Cinema (2003), coeditor of The Oxford Companion to Australian Film (1999), coauthor of New Australian Cinema: Sources and Parallels in American and British Film (1992), and author of Film as Text (1991) and Media Studies: Narrative, Audience, Values and Process (1991). He has a chapter ("Studio Production Practices") in the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Film Noir, edited by Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson. His most recent publication was a chapter on the director Joseph H. Lewis in Film Noir: The Directors, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini (2012).

Geoff was a consultant and on-camera film historian on the 2011 documentary Stunt Love, directed by Matthew Bate. This film traces the remarkable Hollywood career of Australian-born director, actor, writer, and producer J. P. McGowan and the films he made with his American wife, actor Helen Holmes. Geoff is currently writing a critical and historical dictionary of the action film from 1912 to 2012 with particular emphasis on the film serial and serial form.

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