Film Genres

In this pathfinding new work, the author has included many of the major (and minor) cop film titles to emerge from Hollywood over the decades.

From the Roman Praetorian Guard to the English shire-reeve to the U.S. marshals, lawmen have a long and varied history. At first, such groups were often corrupt, guilty of advancing a political agenda rather than protecting citizens. It was about the turn of the twentieth century that police officers as we know them came into being. At this time, a number of police reforms such as civil service and police unions were developed. Citizen committees were formed to oversee police function. About this same time, the technology of motion pictures was being advanced. Movies evolved from silent films with a limited budget and short running time to films with sound whose budget was ever rising and whose audience demanded longer, more complex story lines. ...

Robbers, gangsters, murderers, and criminals of every description have long been a staple of popular entertainment. Movies are no exception, and film buffs and scholars alike now have a complete guide to the vast array of films that make up the fascinating world of crime cinema. The BFI Companion to Crime offers detailed information on the sub-genres and motifs of movies dealing with criminals and their behavior: prison dramas, heist stories, kidnappings, the exploits of serial killers, juvenile delinquents, and hired guns. ...

This eloquent, streetwise book is a paean to America's Rust Belt and a compelling exploration of four milieus caught up in a great transformation of city life. With loving attention to detail and a fine sense of historical context, Carlo Rotella explores women's boxing in Erie, Pennsylvania; Buddy Guy and the blues scene in Chicago; police work and crime stories in New York City, especially as they converged in the making of the movie The French Connection; and attempts at urban renewal in the classic mill city of Brockton, Massachusetts. ...

According to Neal King, cop action movies point both an accusatory finger and homoerotically murderous race at powerful white men. A close look at a massive and hugely popular fictional culture, Heroes in Hard Times considers the over 190 cop action movies released between 1980 and 1997; examines the generic moral logic that they offer; and explores the crisis in American masculinity that, King argues, propels the action in their stories. King studies how, in the cop action genre, working-class police officers weigh in on such topics as racial justice, homosexuality, misogyny, unemployment, worker resistance, affirmative action, drug use, poverty, divorce, and the use of violence to deal with social problems. ...

Movies play a central role in shaping our understanding of crime and the world generally, helping us define what is good and bad, desirable and unworthy, lawful and illicit, strong and weak. Crime films raise controversial issues about the distribution of social power and the meanings of deviance, and they provide a safe space for fantasies of rebellion, punishment, and the restoration of order. In the first comprehensive study of its kind, Nicole Rafter examines the relationship between society and crime films from the perspectives of criminal justice, film history and technique, and sociology. ...

A hybrid genre that fuses the moral landscape of the western and the urban settings of film noir and police procedurals, the action film as we know it today is a relatively new genre, having taken shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s and become a fully recognized and immensely popular cinematic form in the 1980s.

The “detective film” can be defined as a film that focuses on a detective-hero’s investigation into the mystery surrounding a crime; however, detective films vary in terms of content and themes, and often cross over into other genres, including science fiction (e.g., Blade Runner [1982]), the western (e.g., Tall in the Saddle [1944]), and even the musical (e.g., The Singing Detective [2003]). This makes defining the genre difficult, and, in fact, many scholars and critics place the “detective film” into the broader category of “film noir” (along with criminal-heroes) or the “crime film” (along with the gangster). This tendency to generalize is reflected in the sources listed in this article: while there will be some books and articles devoted solely to the detective film, many—even influential sources—may only discuss the genre specifically in a brief section. The majority of scholarship in English that addresses the genre tends to focus on American—specifically Hollywood—films.