Militant Visions examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw black men, for the first time presenting African Americans as vital and integrated members of the nation. In the process, Elizabeth Reich reveals how the image of the proud and powerful African American serviceman was crafted by an unexpected alliance of government propagandists, civil rights activists, and black filmmakers. Contextualizing the figure in a genealogy of black radicalism and internationalism, Reich shows the evolving images of black soldiers to be inherently transnational ones, shaped by the displacements of diaspora, Third World revolutionary philosophy, and a legacy of black artistry and performance. Offering a nuanced reading of a figure that was simultaneously conservative and radical, Reich considers how the cinematic black soldier lent a human face to ongoing debates about racial integration, black internationalism, and American militarism. Militant Visions thus not only presents a new history of how American cinema represented race, but also demonstrates how film images helped to make history, shaping the progress of the civil rights movement itself. 

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. From Vogue contributor and Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, a personalized guide to eighties movies that describes why they changed movie-making forever-featuring exclusive interviews with the producers, directors, writers and stars of the best cult classics. For Hadley Freeman, movies of the 1980s have simply got it all. Comedy in Three Men and a Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ghostbusters, and Back to the Future; all a teenager needs to know in Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Say Anything, The Breakfast Club, and Mystic Pizza; the ultimate in action from Top Gun, Die Hard, Beverly Hills Cop, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; love and sex in 9 1/2 Weeks, Splash, About Last Night, The Big Chill, and Bull Durham; and family fun in The Little Mermaid, ET, Big, Parenthood, and Lean On Me. In Life Moves Pretty Fast, Hadley puts her obsessive movie geekery to good use, detailing the decade's key players, genres, and tropes. She looks back on a cinematic world in which bankers are invariably evil, where children are always wiser than adults, where science is embraced with an intense enthusiasm, and the future viewed with giddy excitement.

Product Description: A key concern in postwar America was “who’s passing for whom?” Analyzing representations of passing in Hollywood films reveals changing cultural ideas about authenticity and identity in a country reeling from a hot war and moving towards a cold one...read more

Originally designed as a story for boys, but with great appeal for adult readers, Stevenson's novel is narrated by the teenage Jim Hawkins, who outwits a gang of murderous pirates led by Long John Silver.

Product Description: In the early days of filmmaking, before many of Hollywood’s elaborate sets and soundstages had been built, it was common for movies to be shot on location. Decades later, Hollywood filmmakers rediscovered the practice of using real locations and documentary footage in their narrative features...read more

Product Description: Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn all made lasting impressions with the cinematic cross-dressing they performed onscreen. What few modern viewers realize, however, is that these seemingly daring performances of the 1930s actually came at the tail end of a long wave of gender-bending films that included more than 400 movies featuring women dressed as men...read more

Product Description: World War II coincided with cinema's golden age. Movies now considered classics were created at a time when all sides in the war were coming to realize the great power of popular films to motivate the masses. Through multinational research, One World, Big Screen reveals how the Grand Alliance--Britain, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States--tapped Hollywood's impressive power to shrink the distance and bridge the differences that separated them...read more

Product Description: Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes is a comparative study of the literary and cinematic representation of Mexican American masculine identity from early twentieth-century adventure stories and movie Westerns through contemporary self-representations by Chicano/a writers and filmmakers...read more

Product Description: The concept of North American borderlands in the cultural imagination fluctuated greatly during the Progressive Era as it was affected by similarly changing concepts of identity and geopolitical issues influenced by the Mexican Revolution and the First World War...read more

Product Description: The Holocaust has been the focus of countless films in the United States, Great Britain, and Europe, and its treatment over the years has been the subject of considerable controversy. When finally permitted to portray the atrocities, filmmakers struggled with issues of fidelity to historical fact, depictions of graphic violence, and how to approach the complexities of the human condition on all sides of this horrific event...read more

Product Description: Through an analysis of Cold War Era films including Border Incident , Where Danger Lives , and Touch of Evil , Stephanie Fuller illustrates how cinema across genres developed an understanding of what the U.S.-Mexico border meant within the American cultural imaginary and the ways in which it worked to produce the border...read more

Quart and Auster survey many of the public classics--fictional films whose critical acclaim, awards, or box office appeal indicate a connection with public consciousness--that have been produced in the United States since 1945. They analyze the cultural and social significance of these films, and how the formal elements of these works helped shape cinematic art. Their premise is that if Hollywood is the dream factory, then the post-World War II film--from The Best Years of Our Lives and Do the Right Thing--helps to unravel some of the central concerns and values of American society between 1945 and the present.This revised, expanded, and updated edition emphasizes the films of the 1980s, discussing ideologically antithetical Vietnam films such as Platoon and Rambo, feminist backlash films like Fatal Attraction, rural sagas such as Places in the Heart and Country, teen films such as Risky Business and Back to the Future, and films dealing with the civil rights struggle, black history, and black contemporary life such as Mississippi Burning, Glory, and Do the Right Thing. This book also explores the contested and contradictory meanings conveyed by many American films such as Sylvester Stallone's Rambo, which is seen as both a patriotic, pro-war cartoon and a populist attack against government experts and bureaucracy. This uniquely accessible political, cultural, and aesthetic analysis of post-World War II Hollywood films can be read and enjoyed by students, teachers, and the general public alike.

When a young man avenges the brutal murder of his father, he suddenly finds himself saddled with the unwarranted but widespread reputation of being a legendary gunfighter

Explosive! Amazing! Terrifying! You won’t believe your eyes!  Such movie taglines were common in the 1950s, as Hollywood churned out a variety of low-budget pictures that were sold on the basis of their sensational content and topicality. While a few of these movies have since become canonized by film fans and critics, a number of the era’s biggest fads have now faded into obscurity. The Cool and the Crazy examines seven of these film cycles, including short-lived trends like boxing movies, war pictures, and social problem films detailing the sordid and violent life of teenagers, as well as uniquely 1950s takes on established genres like the gangster picture.   Peter Stanfield reveals how Hollywood sought to capitalize upon current events, moral panics, and popular fads, making movies that were “ripped from the headlines” on everything from the Korean War to rock and roll. As he offers careful readings of several key films, he also considers the broader historical and commercial contexts in which these films were produced, marketed, and exhibited. In the process, Stanfield uncovers surprising synergies between Hollywood and other arenas of popular culture, like the ways that the fashion trend for blue jeans influenced the 1950s Western.  Delivering sharp critical insights in jazzy, accessible prose, The Cool and the Crazy offers an appreciation of cinema as a “pop” medium, unabashedly derivative, faddish, and ephemeral. By studying these long-burst bubbles of 1950s “pop,” Stanfield reveals something new about what films do and the pleasures they provide.    

Product Description: Studies of "Classic Hollywood" typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. Veronica Pravadelli complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, she breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases that follow Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the "Transition Era" and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films...read more

Product Description: Studies of "Classic Hollywood" typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. Veronica Pravadelli complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, she breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases that follow Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the "Transition Era" and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films...read more

Product Description: The 1940s is a lost decade in horror cinema, undervalued and written out of most horror scholarship. This collection revises, reframes, and deconstructs persistent critical binaries that have been put in place by scholarly discourse to label 1940s horror as somehow inferior to a “classical” period or “canonical” mode of horror in the 1930s, especially as represented by the monster films of Universal Studios...read more

Product Description: From the late 1940s until the early 1990s, the Cold War was perhaps the most critical and defining aspect of American culture, influencing television, music, and movies, among other forms of popular entertainment. Films in particular were at the center of the battle for the hearts and minds of the American public...read more