On a related topic:
The Gangster Film (1998)
The Overlook Film Encyclopedia
Dir. Phil Hardy
Subject: Genre > Gangster films
Screening Sherlock (2025)
A Cultural History of the Great Detective on Film and Television
Perplexing Plots (2023)
Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder
Watching the Cops (2023)
Essays on Police and Policing in 21st Century Film and Television
Dir. Marcus K. Harmes, Barbara Harmes and Meredith A. Harmes
Encyclopedia of Weird Detectives (2019)
Supernatural and Paranormal Elements in Novels, Pulps, Comics, Film, Television, Games and Other Media
by Paul Green
Maximum Movies - Pulp Fictions
Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson
Average rating:
0 | rating | ![]() |
0 | rating | ![]() |
0 | rating | ![]() |
0 | rating | ![]() |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
In the words of Richard Maltby . . . "Maximum Movies--Pulp Fictions describes two improbably imbricated worlds and the piece of cultural history their intersections provoked." One of these worlds comprises a clutch of noisy, garish pulp movies--Kiss Me Deadly, Shock Corridor, Fixed Bayonets!, I Walked with a Zombie, The Lineup, Terror in a Texas Town, Ride Lonesome--pumped out for the grind houses at the end of the urban exhibition chain by the studios' B-divisions and fly-by-night independents. The other is occupied by critics, intellectuals, cinephiles, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Manny Farber, and Lawrence Alloway, who championed the cause of these movies and incited the cultural guardians of the day by attacking a rigorously policed canon of tasteful, rarified, and ossified art objects. Against the legitimate, and in defense of the illegitimate, in an insolent and unruly manner, they agitated for the recognition of lurid sensational crime stories, war pictures, fast-paced Westerns, thrillers, and gangster melodramas were claimed as examples of the true, the real, and the authentic in contemporary culture--the foundation upon which modern film studies sits.
About the Author:
Peter Stanfield is a reader in film studies at the University of Kent, U.K. He is coeditor of Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film and "Un-American" Hollywood: Politics & Film in the Blacklist Era (both Rutgers University Press).
Press Reviews:
"Stanfield's vivid prose, his attention to intellectual subtlety, and his grasp of large cinematic issues make for a very smart book that breaks new ground in its engagement with postwar American culture and criticism."
— R. Barton Palmer
"Maximum Movies, Pulp Fictions is a well-researched, well written and deeply felt tribute to the films and cinephilic writers that laid the foundation for the discipline."
— Quarterly Review of Film and Video
"Stanfield's vivid prose, his attention to intellectual subtlety, and his grasp of large cinematic issues make for a very smart book that breaks new ground in its engagement with postwar American culture and criticism."
— R. Barton Palmer
"Maximum Movies, Pulp Fictions is a well-researched, well written and deeply felt tribute to the films and cinephilic writers that laid the foundation for the discipline."
— Quarterly Review of Film and Video
See the publisher website: Rutgers University Press
> From the same author:
Dirty Real (2024)
Exile on Hollywood and Vine with the Gin Mill Cowboys
Subject: Countries > United States
Hoodlum Movies (2018)
Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966-1972
'Un-American' Hollywood (2007)
Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era
by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve and Peter Stanfield
Subject: History of Cinema
Body And Soul (2005)
Jazz And Blues In American Film, 1927-63
Mob Culture (2005)
Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film
Dir. Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet and Peter Stanfield
Subject: Genre > Gangster films
Horse Opera (2002)
The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy