Inventing The Public Enemy

Ruth shows that the media gangster was less a reflection of reality than a projection created from Americans' values, concerns, and ideas about what would sell.

In this study of Hollywood gangster films, Jonathan Munby examines their controversial content and how it was subjected to continual moral and political censure. Beginning in the early 1930s, these films told compelling stories about ethnic urban lower-class desires to "make it" in an America dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideals and devastated by the Great Depression. By the late 1940s, however, their focus shifted to the problems of a culture maladjusting to a new peacetime sociopolitical order governed by corporate capitalism. The gangster no longer challenged the establishment; the issue was not "making it," but simply "making do." Combining film analysis with archival material from the Production Code Administration (Hollywood's self-censoring authority), Munby shows how the industry circumvented censure, and how its altered gangsters (influenced by European filmmakers) fueled the infamous inquisitions of Hollywood in the postwar '40s and '50s by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Ultimately, this provocative study suggests that we rethink our ideas about crime and violence in depictions of Americans fighting against the status quo.

In Public Enemies, bestselling author Bryan Burrough strips away the thick layer of myths put out by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to tell the full story—for the first time—of the most spectacular crime wave in American history, the two-year battle between the young Hoover and the assortment of criminals who became national icons: John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers. In an epic feat of storytelling and drawing on a remarkable amount of newly available material on all the major figures involved, Burrough reveals a web of interconnections within the vast American underworld and demonstrates how Hoover’s G-men overcame their early fumbles to secure the FBI’s rise to power.

During the bleak days of the Great Depression, news of economic hardship often took a backseat to articles on the exploits of an outlaw from Indiana—John Dillinger. For a period of fourteen months during 1933 and 1934 Dillinger became the most famous bandit in American history, and no criminal since has matched him for his celebrity and notoriety. Dillinger won public attention not only for his robberies, but his many escapes from the law. The escapes he made from jails or “tight spots,” when it seemed law officials had him cornered, became the stuff of legends. While the public would never admit that they wanted the “bad guy” to win, many could not help but root for the man who appeared to be an underdog. Although his crime wave took place in the last century, the name Dillinger has never left the public imagination

Boaz Hagin carries out a philosophical examination of the issue of death as it is represented and problematized in Hollywood cinema of the classical era (1920s-1950s) and in later mainstream films, looking at four major genres: the Western, the gangster film, melodrama and the war film.

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.

&“An engrossing look inside Al Capone's murderous ranks.&” &–Kirkus Almost before the gunsmoke from the St. Valentine's Day Massacre cleared, Chicago police had a suspect: &“Machine Gun&” Jack McGurn. They just couldn't find him. But two weeks later police found McGurn and his paramour, Louise May Rolfe, holed up at the Stevens Hotel. Both claimed they were in bed on the morning of the shootings, a titillating alibi that grabbed the public's attention and never let go. Chicago Valentines is one of the most outrageous stories of the Capone era, a twin biography of a couple who defined the extremes and excesses of the Prohibition era in America. McGurn was a prizefighter, professional-level golfer, and the ultimate urban predator and hit man who put the iron in Al Capone's muscle. Rolfe, a beautiful blond dancer and libertine, was the epitome of fashion, rebellion, and wild abandon in a decade that shocked and roared. Every newspaper in the country followed their ongoing story. They were the most spellbinding subject of the new jazz subculture, an unforgettable duo who grabbed headlines and defined the exciting gangland world of 1920s Chicago. The story of Jack McGurn and Louise Rolfe, two lovers caught in history's spotlight, is more fascinating than any fiction. They were the prototypes for eighty years of gangster literature and cinema, representing a time that never loses its allure. Jeffrey Gusfield, a native Chicagoan, researched the history of Jack McGurn, Louise Rolfe, and the Capone years for more than four decades.

The gangster, in the hands of the Italian American artist, becomes a telling figure in the tale of American race, gender, and ethnicity - a figure that reflects the autobiography of an immigrant group just as it reflects the fantasy of a native population. From Wiseguys to Wise Men studies the figure of the gangster and explores its social function in the construction and projection of masculinity in the United States. By looking at the cultural icon of the gangster through the lens of gender, this book presents new insights into material that has been part of American culture for close to 100 years.