The Books of My Life: Underworld USA

Several years ago I read an article, by whom I don't recall, in an edited collection on film history, the title of which I don't recall either. In an essay grounded in an ideology of telelogy about what the author called the "little books", the writer found these "little books" wanting particularly when compared to the illustrious achievements of the film analysis and film criticism of his own era.

The "little books" the author of the essay was referring to were the "little books" published by publishers such as the BFI, Viking, Indiana University Press, the University of California Press, Studio Vista, Praeger, and Zwemmer/Tantivy/Barnes, books in the BFI's Cinema One and Cinema Two and the Movie series. These "little books" were part of the flowering of auteurist dominated film analysis and film criticism in the1960s and early 1970s. And while each of these publishers and series' published monographs on auteurs, including books on Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Georges Franju, Jean-Luc Goddard, and Alain Resnais, they also published books on film theory, including Peter Wollen's seminal book on flim theory Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, books on stars, such as Ian Cameron's book on film heavies, and books on genre including Colin McArthur's book Underworld USA (New York: Viking, Cinema One, 1972).

In retrospect McArthur's book, which was influenced by auteurist film criticism and the structuralism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, is a classic. Even at the time of its publication Underworld USA was recognised as a seminal work in the analysis of film genre. McArthur's book explores the broader historical and sociological contexts of film making, putting the lie to the notion common among contemporary film analysts that auteurists were a bunch of backward looking neo-romantics who argued that film auteurs created film universes ex nihilo. Contemporary critics of auteurist criticism appear to have read little of the classic works in the genre preferring straw men to empirical actuality. McArthur's brief monograph explores, to use a word that has become the fad of the moment in academe, the intersection between historical and sociological contexts, the collaborative nature of the Hollywood mass production line, genre, and auteurism. McArthur explores the themes and iconography (including the mise-en-scene) of the gangster film and thrillers as they intersect with the work of film auteurs including Fritz Lang, John Huston, Jules Dassin, Robert Siodmak, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Don Siegel, and Jean-Pierre Melville, a French director whose gangster films and film thrillers of the late 1950s through 1970s reflect the influence of these Hollywood genres on French filmmaking, teasing out, in the process, the themes and iconography of these directors.