Martin Rubin, Thrillers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-58839-1, 319 pp, A$33.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Cambridge University Press)

Jonathan Munby,
Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
ISBN 0-226-55033-8, 263pp, US$16.00
(Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press)
Uploaded 1 November 2000

The “thriller” is perhaps one of the broadest and most amorphous descriptive categories applied to film, a term for which there is hardly any clear, received definition in the film studies field. Martin Rubin notes the problematic nature of the category right at the start of his book-length study Thrillers, emphasising in particular the difficulty in categorising the thriller film as a genre, since thrillers can arguably be said to include films which are also in such sundry genres as the gangster film, the spy film, the horror film, and the science fiction film. The problem of defining the thriller is thus a very challenging and interesting one-and one which immediately suggests the need for a substantive engagement with more difficult issues in genre theory. Such an engagement is unfortunately not forthcoming in Rubin’s brief introduction, though the author does very reasonably propose that the thriller might be better conceived of as a “metagenre” than a genre and that it is characterised in part by its provocation of certain emotional responses.

There appear to be a number of reasons for Rubin’s theoretical reticence at the start of the book – primarily, that his method is largely an inductive one whereby he analyses particular films which appear to fit the thriller mold on his way to adumbrating what characterises the thriller, and that, as the cover explains, the volume is designed to be accessible “to students and general filmgoers.” Rubin does succeed in this goal of accessibility (albeit with a writing style that is at times downright journalistic), and the book can indeed be recommended as a text for an introductory undergraduate course, on a topic for which teaching materials are quite scarce. The volume offers a highly readable overview of what a number of scholars have claimed about the categories of thriller literature and film, then moves on to a broad-ranging historical survey of American and European thriller films, focussing in particular on a number of key thriller movements or subgenres, as well as on such thriller auteurs as Lang and Hitchcock. The later chapters of the book offer more detailed analyses of individual films in a number of the thriller’s constitutive genres, in an effort to more clearly locate the distinctive elements of the thriller.

The lack of clear initial definitions, however-indeed, the lack of a forceful initial argument about the thriller category (its nature, significance, pertinence) – is something which ends up detracting from the volume throughout. Both the literature review and the historical survey need a somewhat stronger sense of focus, purpose, direction – a clearer suggestion of how the critical texts cited might fit into later arguments, of what the rationale is for the choices among particular subgenres and auteurs, and, ultimately, of what it is Rubin wants to claim about the thriller; I have no doubt that this could have been achieved to some extent without sacrificing the book’s readability. The lack of a more forcefully articulated general argument is all the more frustrating because of the numerous insightful, provocative, and potentially useful observations Rubin does make over the course of the volume. For example, Rubin offers some very illuminating contrasts between Hitchcock’s thriller work and Lang’s, between differing permutations of the detective film, and between the semidocumentary crime film and other adjoining genres.
Rubin’s interesting recurrent contentions about the thriller being characterised by eruptions within the ordinary of the unfamiliar – the exotic, the archaic, the heroic – could be explored still further: How does the thriller relate to other genres which feature similar eruptions? Does the thriller suggest itself as a means of working through cultural tensions between the present day and the past, of dealing with problems of history? The central importance of affect to the genre – and the numerous analytical complexities that issues of affect engender – are also given short shrift. (In fairness, Rubin himself devotes much of his brief “conclusion” to delineating some of these shortcomings – while offering relatively little in the way of summation.)

It should also be noted that Thrillers is the inaugural volume of a new series from Cambridge entitled “Genres in American Cinema,” intended for the general readership described above. It seems in some ways an odd choice – both because the thriller is difficult to define in relation to genre and because the volume devotes much of its attention to films which are not American. Nor is the relationship of the thriller to any of its various American contexts analysed in much detail, although this is briefly taken up at a number of points.

Certainly, the wide-ranging, amorphous nature of the thriller makes connecting it to a specific national context an all the more difficult enterprise, and in this sense Jonathan Munby’s task of exploring the historical and cultural dimensions of the gangster film (one of the many genres Rubin’s rubric overlaps) in Public Enemies, Public Heroes is a far more viable one. Munby’s book fulfills this task impressively in a number of areas, and I suspect it may become a useful reference point both for American Studies approaches to genre and for studies of censorship and the gangster film. Munby articulates a model for tracing a dynamic interrelationship between social institutions, industrial imperatives, censorship operations, and generic form; and uses this to offer a raft of substantive theses about the development and social significance of the gangster film and closely related genres.

Munby makes an interesting case, for example, for the particular importance of the arrival of sound to the gangster genre, owing to the signifying power of the gangster’s ethnically- and class-inflected speech in post-Crash America. It is in part by way of such audible language that the early-1930s (pre-Production Code) gangster is able to stand in for a popular challenge to hegemonic notions of landed (WASP) “Americanness,” and that the gangster film in turn is able to demonstrate an oppositional political potential, despite its mainstream Hollywood source. Munby goes on to demonstrate ways in which a number of post-Code gangster and crime film cycles are able to find strategies to retain this oppositional edge and thereby, in effect, to circumvent the primary ideological aims of the Production Code, often by way of intertextual reference to the earlier prohibited cycle and its central dissenting figure. There are therefore significant, if generally overlooked, generic and ideological connections between the 1930s gangster films and later crime film cycles. This is even so, Munby argues, for film noir, in spite of the fact that it is often seen as breaking with earlier generic tradition; and such a continuity is borne out through an extended analysis of correspondences between the concerns of noir’s European exile directors and the tendencies of the 1930s films. The volume closes with some engaging but brief observations about how recent controversies over “gangsta” rap and associated films further continue the tradition of the gangster as an anti-hegemonic figure emerging from within popular culture, speaking for those who might otherwise be silenced. (Munby also makes note here of the earlier black gangster traditions he chooses not to discuss – a curious omission given their evident proximity to the issues he takes up.)

While Public Enemies, Public Heroes is a work of strong potential importance, there are more than a few difficulties with its presentation of its arguments. One substantial problem which arises in a number of chapters is the author’s tendency to argue in circles, repeating his main contention in different (and sometimes, unfortunately, not so different) terms, where he should rather be supporting his main contentions with additional textual analysis and generic contextualisation and moving with a clear itinerary towards his conclusion. For example, Munby’s analysis of film noir, while nuanced and innovative in its claims for the cycle’s multiple lineages and distinct ideological purchase, is rather vague in its stylistic analysis (despite the author’s claims for the particular import of the visual style) and is also so singularly focussed one might gain the impression only German and Austrian exiles made such films. Munby’s claims about the importance of Little Caesar (US 1930), Public Enemy (US 1931), and Scarface (US 1932) could certainly be buttressed by more of the kind of close textual analysis that Rubin’s work excels at–as well as by a clearer sense of larger trends and figures for gangster film production in the 1930s. (Thomas Doherty’s Pre-code Hollywood (1999), for example, gives one a more concrete sense of the gangster film’s broader industrial context in the brief section devoted to the cycle.) Far more cursory is Munby’s analysis of silent gangster texts – which would seem to be crucial for his argument in that he is claiming the importance of the above-mentioned 1930s classics lies in their newly talking (and, hence, ethnically marked) nature. Indeed, for the same reasons, Munby should spend more time demonstrating just how ethnicity (even if it is Anglo ethnicity) is figured in the silent gangster film and how, for that matter, speech is figured in these films. Munby’s repeated references to D.W. Griffith’s 1912 one-reeler The Musketeers of Pig Alley as “the first gangster feature film” also do not inspire much confidence.

The problem of a lack of solid, focussed organisation at the chapter level is echoed at times on the paragraph level, a number of paragraphs confusingly shifting theme midway. Quite a few individual sentences could stand rewriting as well, for reasons of grammar, grace and/or clarity; particularly irksome to this reviewer is the writer’s regular habit of using the expression “the latter” in instances where there is no clearly designated “former.”

In conclusion, then, Rubin’s and Martin’s studies each have distinctive strengths and frustrating flaws. While the former volume may serve as an effective introductory undergraduate genre text (despite its definitional quandaries), the latter offers a number of useful new perspectives on the gangster film (despite the thinness and awkwardness of some of its argumentation).

Adam Knee