Author's note: Underworld U.S.A. was written at a moment of transition in British film culture. Auteurism 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 (1890–1976), John Huston (1906–87), Jules Dassin (1911–2008), Robert Siodmak (1900–73), Elia Kazan (1909–2003), Nicholas Ray (1911–79), Samuel Fuller (1912–97), Don Siegel (1912–91) and Jean-Pierre Melville (1917–73). The extract reproduced here consists of the book's 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.

Chapter 1: Genre

In order to reach the reality of American cinema one must first confront the notion of Hollywood. If an audience, even (or perhaps especially) an educated and sophisticated one, were asked what Hollywood means to them, their replies would very likely include the words ‘glossy’, ‘glamorous’ and ‘escapist’. They would probably offer the polar opposition that Hollywood movies equal ‘entertainment’, European movies equal ‘art’; with the addition that discussion of Hollywood should therefore be the province of the sociologist rather than the film critic. This view is held most widely in the United States itself. It is still difficult to find an educated American who takes Hollywood movies seriously. American undergraduates rush to see the latest Godard or Bergman, but if they go to see American movies at all it is usually in the spirit of viewing a lovable piece of kitsch, like the young Vassar girl in a recent novel who went to the Museum of Modern Art to take in a Bogart retrospective.