A Tall Order

Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film is a multi-authorial attempt to study "Hollywood gangster films within the material complexity of their production in order to illustrate how the gangster film has provided audiences with a rich narrative space for the articulation of shifting cultural desires and anxieties and to show how the gangster figure is produced differently within historical intersections of cultural identity and the shifting cultural figurations of criminality" (1). A tall order, indeed; but Mob Culture succeeds in presenting a cyclical history of the gangster film by looking at its motifs, characterizations, and narrative structures while placing those characteristics into clear-cut, cultural contexts.

Mob Culture first provides information about both the production of gangs and early American gangster films. Lee Grieveson begins with an interesting study on how crime and urban gangs were represented in films produced from 1906 to the 1920s. Richard Maltby continues with an adequate coda to Grieveson's article, writing on how production companies had to defend themselves against critics who believed that gangster films had a bad effect on potential criminals. Finally, Ronald W. Wilson's fascinating article about the Kefauver Crime Committee Hearings discusses syndicate films that used "topical sources" to depict "the 'greater menace' of organized crime as a primarily alien conspiratorial threat in postwar America" (68).

Mob Culture's second section is less successful in its dealing with gender and sexuality in American gangster movies. Esther Sonnet writes about gangster films from 1929-1931, aptly explaining that they "pivot on the capacity for female sexual desire to disrupt and destabilize class and ethnic boundaries" (107), but fails to elaborate on how female audiences viewed these films. Gaylyn Studler then writes about homosocial relationships in 1940's crime films but is vague when linking homosocial and homosexual relationships into a singular concept. Next, Mary Elizabeth Strunk's article is a brilliant piece of writing that speaks on the cinematic and cultural significance of Ma Barker, who served as a positive and negative figurehead representing "the changing status of white American mothers in their imagined roles as nation-builders and citizens" while "declining [the] authority of the state-sponsored family norms[…]" (147). The final article concludes with detailed studies on sartorial codes (Sonnet and Peter Stanfield) and how sexuality is represented in The Sopranos (Martha P. Nochimson).

Mob Culture's final section deals with race and politics in American gangster films. Praise can be given to Jonathan Munby for his article on the underworld films of Oscar Micheaux and Ralph Cooper while Girogio Beriellini's and Stanfield's articles on Italian, Asian and African-American representations are less significant in their scope, but well-written and researched. Munby's most compelling argument: the Stock Market crash of 1929 and the incorporation of sound allowed African-American entertainers to catapult into stardom and create subversive cinematic texts that fore-grounded sideshows that put on display vital independent Black expression and creative energy (269).

Mob Culture is certainly a recommended text about a cycle in American cinema that proved to be rich in production value as well as in cultural significance.