Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions

Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson

By Peter Stanfield

Rutgers University Press

In the words of Richard Maltby . . . "Maximum Movies--Pulp Fictions describes two improbably imbricated worlds and the piece of cultural history their intersections provoked." One of these worlds comprises a clutch of noisy, garish pulp movies--Kiss Me Deadly, Shock Corridor, Fixed Bayonets!, I Walked with a Zombie, The Lineup, Terror in a Texas Town, Ride Lonesome--pumped out for the grind houses at the end of the urban exhibition chain by the studios' B-divisions and fly-by-night independents. The other is occupied by critics, intellectuals, cinephiles, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Manny Farber, and Lawrence Alloway, who championed the cause of these movies and incited the cultural guardians of the day by attacking a rigorously policed canon of tasteful, rarified, and ossified art objects. Against the legitimate, and in defense of the illegitimate, in an insolent and unruly manner, they agitated for the recognition of lurid sensational crime stories, war pictures, fast-paced Westerns, thrillers, and gangster melodramas were claimed as examples of the true, the real, and the authentic in contemporary culture--the foundation upon which modern film studies sits.

Stanfield's vivid prose, his attention to intellectual subtlety, and his grasp of large cinematic issues make for a very smart book that breaks new ground in its engagement with postwar American culture and criticism. R. Barton Palmer, author of Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir

Maximum Movies, Pulp Fictions is a well-researched, well written and deeply felt tribute to the films and cinephilic writers that laid the foundation for the discipline. Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Stanfield's vivid prose, his attention to intellectual subtlety, and his grasp of large cinematic issues make for a very smart book that breaks new ground in its engagement with postwar American culture and criticism. R. Barton Palmer, author of Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir

Maximum Movies, Pulp Fictions is a well-researched, well written and deeply felt tribute to the films and cinephilic writers that laid the foundation for the discipline. Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Peter Stanfield is a reader in film studies at the University of Kent, U.K. He is coeditor of Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film and "Un-American" Hollywood: Politics & Film in the Blacklist Era (both Rutgers University Press).

Introduction : yours till the boys come home
Position papers : in defense of pulp movies
A genealogy of pulp : Black mask to Mickey Spillane
A world of small insanities : the critical reception of Kiss me deadly
American primitive : Samuel Fuller's pulp politics
Authenticating pulp : Jim Thompson adaptations and neo-noir
Conclusion : hiding out in cinemas

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