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This title features highly original readings that shed new light on familiar movies. It is an unifying and largely original Marxist perspective that offers a fresh look at social relations as expressed in Hollywood cinema. It is a new construction of the category of the crime film, supported by an understanding of the importance of crime and crime cinema in cinema and society as a whole. No society is without crime, prompting Nathaniel Hawthorne's narrator to make his famous statement in 'The Scarlet Letter' that, however high its hopes are, no civilization can fail to allot a portion of its soil as the site of a prison. By establishing the category of crime - by drawing a line between the lawful and criminal, however thin, blurry, or even effectively meaningless the line may in practice become - society offers its own perhaps most consequential self-definition. Film, argues Carl Freedman, is an especially fruitful medium for considering questions like these.

Body Heat (Film) --- Body Heat (Motion picture) --- Double Indemnity (Film) --- Double Indemnity (Motion picture) --- Godfather, The (Film) --- Godfather, The (Motion pictures) --- Goodfellas (Film) --- Goodfellas (Motion picture) --- La fièvre au corps (Film) --- Les affranchis (Film) --- Parrain, Le (Film) --- Crime films --- Films criminels --- History and criticism --- Histoire et critique --- United States --- Gangster films --- Coppola, Francis Ford --- Criticism and interpretation --- Scorsese, Martin --- Ford, John --- Wilder, Billy