Early in the Great Depression, Gerald W. Johnson remarked on the “fathomless pessimism” that had overtaken the American People: “The energy of the country has suffered a strange paralysis … We are in the doldrums, waiting not even hopefully for the wind which never comes.” Film developments of the decade were entwined with the ongoing economic crisis. This article offers an analysis of the extreme shifts in confidence in this period and argues for their relationship with the evolution of film noir, which had its roots in two film genres prominent in the period, the gangster and fallen-woman films, but which breaks with these genres, not after the onset of World War II, which has long been believed, but in the closing years of the 1930s.

This article theorizes a new periodization for film noir through a prewar category of “emergent noir”: seven films released between 1940 and 1942 – including The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane – that defined the genre's thematics, aesthetics, visual style, and moral ambiguity. Using archival research and trauma theory, the article analyzes High Sierra and This Gun for Hire as case studies of “failure narratives”: each film resonated with American audiences by validating the recent suffering of the Great Depression, allowing for a vicarious sense of revenge, and creating new ideals of individuality and masculinity. Both films were surprise box-office hits and created new film icons for the 1940s: Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, and Veronica Lake. All three were embodiments of “cool,” a concept herein theorized as a public mask of stoicism.

This paper hermeneutically examines the relationship between technology, masculinity, and modernity in John Boorman's film Deliverance (1972). It finds that the suburbanites who are victimized in Appalachia do not regress to a primal, premodern state but rely on their modern values to justify killing their assailants. The men's violence allegorizes the institutionalized violence of the power company that is damming the Cahulawassee River to power their suburban technological comforts. Hermeneutic analysis and critical theories of technology are combined to examine how each man reassesses his life, as one of modernity's beneficiaries, after encountering the displaced mountain people – modernity's others.

In 1923 the Ku Klux Klan produced two films, The Toll of Justice and The Traitor Within. This article considers, for the first time, what the representation, promotion and exhibition of these films suggests about the ways in which the Klan sought to promote and define itself at the height of its power. It examines the cinematic articulations of Klan policies and explores the broader engagement of the Klan and cinema. In doing this, the article repositions film as a contributing factor in the growth and development of the modern Klan during the 1920s.

Radical Irish nationalists attacked a musical farce, McFadden's Row of Flats, in 1902 and 1903, because of the green whiskers on the Irishman, the pigs in the Irish household, and the drunken, lascivious Irishwoman on stage. This play had been produced in Philadelphia, an Irish nationalist stronghold, for five years before Irish nationalists decided to stop the performances with direct confrontations in the theater. The timing of this decision and the style of the protest were based on competition among Irish nationalists, particularly the resurgence of Irish ethnocentrism and physical-force nationalism.