Lee Grieveson

Peter Stanfield

Esther Sonnet

Mob Culture offers a long-awaited, fresh look at the American gangster film, exposing its hidden histories from the Black Hand gangs of the early twentieth century to The Sopranos. Departing from traditional approaches that have typically focused on the "nature" of the gangster, the editors have collected essays that engage the larger question of how the meaning of criminality has changed over time. Grouped into three thematic sections, the essays examine gangster films through the lens of social, gender, and racial/ethnic issues.

Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film

Mob Culture

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.

Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson

Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions

How the "dark continent" of blues and jazz provided Hollywood with a resonant resource to construct and negotiate the boundaries of American cultural identity Writing in the late 1930s, New York journalist Joseph Mitchell observed: "Except for the minstrel show, the strip act is probably America's only original contribution to the theater." In Body and Soul, Peter Stanfield's arguments echo Mitchell's observation. Stanfield begins by exploring how Hollywood used blackface minstrelsy to represent an emerging urban American theatrical history, and ends with a look at how American film at the close of the studio era represented urban decay through the figure of the burlesque dancer and stripper. In between, Stanfield considers the representation of American urban life in jazz, blues, ballads, and sin-songs and the manner in which the film studios exploited this "gutter" music. Alongside extensive, thought-provoking, and lively analysis of some of the most popular jazz and blues songs of the twentieth century--"Frankie and Johnny," "St. Louis Blues," "The Man I Love," "Blues in the Night," and "Body and Soul"--the book contains new work on blackface minstrelsy in early sound movies, racial representation and censorship, torch singers and torch songs, burlesque and strippers, the noir cityscape, the Hollywood Left, and hot jazz. Peter Stanfield is Senior Lecturer in film studies at the University of Kent. He is the author of The Lost Trail: Hollywood and 1930s Westerns, and Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy.

Jazz and Blues in American Film, 1927-63

Body and Soul

Alongside extensive, thought provoking, and lively analysis of some of the most popular jazz and blues songs of the 20th century, this text contains new work on blackface minstrelsy in early sound movies, racial representation and censorship, torch singers and torch songs, the Hollywood Left, and hot jazz.

“The best book on The Who. Stanfield understands that they were built entirely around opposition—they didn't want to be The Beatles or The Stones; they didn't even want to be The Who most of the time. He smartly states the case for peak Who as transgressive . . . the closest thing to Pop art British music has ever produced.”—Bob Stanley, author of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop “With impressive eloquence, A Band with Built-In Hate situates '60s Britain's most volatile and incendiary group at the heart of pop's wild vortex. . . . Stanfield digs brilliantly into The Who's transgressions, their up-ending of pop music into art-rock and proto-punk. He can see for miles.”—Barney Hoskyns, author of Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion and creator of Rock's Backpages “Ours is music with built-in hatred.”—Pete Townshend, cofounder of the Who This book is a biography of the Who unlike any other. From their inception as the Detours in the mid-sixties, to the late seventies, post-Quadrophenia, the Who are pictured through the prism of pop art and the radical leveling of high and low culture that it brought about—a drama that was consciously and aggressively performed by the band. Peter Stanfield lays down a path through the British pop revolution, its attitude and style, as it was uniquely embodied by the band: first, under the mentorship of arch-mod Peter Meaden, as they learned their trade in the pubs and halls of suburban London; and then with Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, two aspiring filmmakers, at the very center of things in Soho. Guided by the concerns of contemporary commentators—among them George Melly, Lawrence Alloway, and, most conspicuously, Nik Cohn—Stanfield tells the story of a band driven by fury, and of what happened when Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, and John Entwistle moved from backroom stages to international arenas, from explosive 45s to expansive concept albums. Above all, he tells of how the Who confronted their lost youth as it was echoed in punk.

Peter Stanfield

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