The hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and the many films noir later, apart from several other similarities, shared a special gangster jargon and street-wise language that lent an extra air of authenticity to those works. As the many weird expressions, prohibition-time lingo, proverbs and often sexists, racist and plainly offensive words used there quickly went […]
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Tag: 1930s United States
Selling Folk Music: An Illustrated History by Ronald D. Cohen and David Bonner (2018)
This title was designed to portray the various setups, styles, collages, and the cover art of both scores, books, festival ads, piano rolls, and vinyl that was marketed and sold in packages that related to the musical content of “folk music” in the United States at a certain period. So there is not too much […]
Dark City. The Real Los Angeles Noir by Jim Heimann (2018)
With Dark City a very unusual portrait of an American city is now available. It impresses with many pictures of the city of angels that show the really shadowy sides, the ones that inhabitants from the early 1910s until the 1950s experienced, and that provided the soil and inspiration for many novels and movies. As […]
Cowboys and Gangsters: Stories of an Untamed Southwest by Samuel K. Dolan (2016)
While most American historical books concentrate on just one period of time, one group of individuals or precisely one cultural event in American history, in Cowboys and Gangsters, we encounter quite a gripping set of bygone and cultural crossroads. Author Samuel K. Dolan, a movie director, documentary writer and producer, tells of both the last […]
Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music by Barry Mazor (2015)
This very musical biography is the classical blueprint for a music biopic or future TV series, although this has not yet been realized by the film industry. Mazor’s extensive research project on music marketer and Okeh Records producer Ralph Peer is the exciting story of a young clerk working both in shipping and in his […]
Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation by Nicholas Sammond (2...
The mere mention of the word ”minstrelsy“ brings back numerous unpleasant, racist, stereotypical and humiliating issues of the past. It is interesting to find out then, that many of the most popular cartoon characters were actually modeled on or even continued the line of minstrelsy characters: the most popular would be Walt Disney’s (early) Mickey […]
American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz (2014)
What actually was the idea of Englishman Allen Lane during WWII found its way to the United States: the invention of a small, affordable book format, available almost anywhere where you could buy chewing gum and cigarettes. Lane, after unsuccessfully searching for small-sized books to read on his daily train rides, in 1935 founded Penguin […]
Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood … by Katherine Spring (2013
It may be hard for us today to imagine what moviegoers in the 1920s must have felt when they watched their first talkies in the cinemas. By now, there have been a number of movies describing just this peculiar sensation. But what the audience must have experienced when suddenly their movie stars uttered words could […]
Mystery Movie Series of 1930s Hollywood by Ron Backer (2012)
There was a time when mystery stories were not written for the screen exclusively but were meant to be published and read by an audience. These texts, however, were the foundations for almost all the major mystery series listed in Backer’s book; as were some of the best film noir movies prior to Hollywood’s remodeling […]