Extract from Underworld U.S.A.

Abstract

Underworld U.S.A. was written at a moment of transition in British film culture. Auterism was still dominant though, if not totally called in question, inflected to take account of other determinations on cinematic meaning, most notably genre. It is therefore a ‘broken-backed’ book, the first four chapters written from a genre perspective, the succeeding nine devoted to directors who produced distinguished work in the gangster film and film noir: Fritz Lang, John Huston, Jules Dassin, Robert Siodmak, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Don Siegel and Jean-Pierre Melville. The extract reproduced here consists of the first two chapters, the first arguing for the centrality of genre in Hollywood cinema, the second describing the recurrent overlapping iconography of the gangster film and film noir, plus a summary of the two succeeding genre chapters.