This book deals with the seldom-written topic featuring depictions of Imperial Japan from the time it was a totalitarian power to the productions of recent years. It especially covers wartime depictions, as well as the historical events that inspire the stories behind these productions. In the 1930s, Hollywood gave us the likeable Mr. Moto at the same time Japan was set on its expansionist course. When war broke out, both the Allies and the Axis produced propaganda films that increased hatred for the enemy. In the postwar years as the Cold War took hold, the US government encouraged friendship with their former wartime enemy. This book details correspondence between studio personnel and the Production Code office, as well as the critiques of film reviewers, historians and military figures from both sides of the conflict. It also examines behind-the-scenes machinations from both the Japanese and American governments in the censorship of controversial film content.

In their heyday, pulp westerns were one of America's most popular forms of entertainment. Often selling for less than 50 cents, the paperback books introduced generations to the ?exploits? of Billy the Kid and Jesse James, brought to life numerous villains (usually named ?Black? something, e.g., Black Bart and Black Pete), and created a West that existed only in the minds of several talented writers. It was only natural that filmmakers would look to the pulps for stories, adapting many of the works for the big screen and shaping the Western film genre. The adaptations of seven of the pulps? best writers?Ernest Haycox, Luke Short, Frank Gruber, Norman A. Fox, Louis L?Amour, Marvin H. Albert, and Clair Huffaker?are analyzed here. Insightful and humorous, the work looks at how the pulp novels and the movie adaptations reflected the times in which they were produced. It examines the clich's that became a part of the story: the rescue of the heroine, the gunfights, the evil banker or rancher ready to steal the land of the good, law-abiding citizens, and the harlot with a heart of gold. A critical examination of how the books were interpreted?or frequently misinterpreted?by filmmakers is included, along with commentary on the actors and directors who put the pulps on screen.

An examination of the careers of communist and liberal actors, screenwriters, playwrights, and directors in Hollywood from the late 1920s to the present, this book uses studio and PCA correspondence, FBI files, film and theater reviews, and other sources to reveal how all of these artists were concerned with and active in the cinema of social protest. It examines the works of those liberal stars and directors who collaborated with communist artists in New York and Hollywood, including John Garfield, Canada Lee, Frances Farmer, Paul Robeson, James Edwards, and Paul Muni; liberal filmmakers like Philip Dunne; and ex-communists (and HUAC-friendly witnesses) like Elia Kazan, Edward Dmytryk, and Robert Rossen. It also looks at the activities of the Communist Party in Hollywood and the far-reaching influence of the U.S.S.R.]

On June 29, 1908, U.S. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte ordered the creation of a special force within the Department of Justice. Consisting of 28 agents and eight former Treasury Department investigators, it was designed to stop interstate crimes yet had no power to arrest perpetrators or carry firearms. Named the Bureau of Investigation, the agency was soon bogged down with its own inherent ineffectiveness, becoming an object of corruption and contempt - until May 19, 1924. On that date, President Calvin Coolidge appointed John Edgar Hoover to replace the corrupt director. Hard-working with a no-nonsense attitude, Hoover immediately set about reorganizing the bureau, setting a standard that he expected his agents to follow. Hoover, impressed by Hollywood's manner of maintaining an image and manipulating the media, began to use some of these tricks to clean up his agency's image. Thanks in part to his efforts, movies of the 1930s shifted from glorifying outlaws and gangsters to glorifying lawmakers - and who better to play that role than Hoover's new, improved FBI? From crime-busting heroes to enemies of free speech, this volume examines the evolution of Hollywood's portrait of the FBI over the last 75 years. The book looks in-depth at how Hollywood's creative rewriting of history enhanced the FBI's reputation and discusses the historical events that shaped the bureau off-screen, including the various figures who tell the real FBI story - the gangsters, the politicians, the journalists, the communists. The main body of the work examines the filmmakers, actors, technicians, writers and producers who were responsible for FBI films, following the FBI from the birth of a cultural icon in the 1930s, through the spy-busting war years and the threat of the Red Menace, and, finally, to death of Hoover and the scandals of the 1960s. Studio correspondence and once confidential FBI memos are also included.

For more than a century the Western film has proven to be an enduring genre. At the dawn of the 20th century, in the same years that The Great Train Robbery begat a film genre, Owen Wister wrote ,em>The Virginian, which began a new literary genre. From the beginning, both literature and film would usually perpetuate the myth of the Old West as a place where justice always triumphed and all concerned (except the villains) pursued the Law. The facts, however, reflect abuses of due process: lynch mobs and hired gunslingers rather than lawmen regularly pursued lawbreakers; vengeance rather than justice was often employed; and even in courts of law justice didn't always prevail. Some films and novels bucked this trend, however. This book discusses the many Western films as well as the novels they are based on, that illustrate distortions of the law in the Old West and the many ways, most of them marked by vengeance, in which its characters pursued justice. The author has used correspondence from studio files, letters from the Production Code office, newspaper and magazine reviews, passages from the novels to analyse not only the filmmakers' intentions but also how the films, contrary to reality, became a showcase of America as it promoted the principles of due process, trial by jury, and innocence before proven guilty.

For over eighty years, we've seen the many faces of the Third Reich on screen, in documentaries, newsreels, and especially fictional stories ranging from comedies and musicals to war films, horror and science fiction (and even westerns!); a great many of these comment as much on the filmmakers and the nation the film was made as much as they do Nazism itself. Hollywood and other filmmakers would use the image of the brutal Nazi as an all-purpose villain in escapist adventures set during and after the war, but just as often use him to attack the evil he symbolized. Through studio files, Production Code office correspondence, and the works of noted historians and film critics, I'll reveal many of the behind-the-scenes machinations in the making of these films, whether produced in Hollywood, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or the Eastern Block nations. Also included are concise biographies of several military and political figures who are the subject of several productions using Nazi characters, from Adolf Hitler to Adolf Eichmann, and compare how the cinema version differs from real-life. But especially, you'll see how the cinematic world viewed these killers in their various guises and how they depicted the ultimate evil to befall the twentieth century from its inception to the present day.

The history of American Indians on screen, like the history of any other ethnicity portrayed in a Hollywood film, can be compared to a light shining through a prism. We may have seen bits and pieces of the genuine culture portrayed, but rarely did we see a satisfying and informative whole picture. In films like Cecil B. DeMille's The Plainsman, the Indian was a murderous savage with few, if any, redeeming qualities. By the time of Delmer Daves' Broken Arrow and other westerns like it, the portrait of the Indians became that of a misunderstood people who only wanted peace. In the wake of Kevin Costner's Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves, filmmakers would basically continue this trend into the 1990s and beyond, forever destroying the picture of the Indian as a murderous savage but unfortunately going to the other extreme. This book deals with the changing image of the American Indian in the Western film genre, contrasting the fictionalized images of native Americans portrayed in classic films from Francis Boggs' Curse of the Redman to Michael Mann's Last of the Mohicans against the historical reality of life on the American frontier. The book tells the stories of frontier warriors, Indian and white, revealing how their stories were often drastically altered on screen according to the times the films were made, the stars involved in the film's production, and the social/political beliefs of the filmmakers. The book also uses studio correspondence, letters from government files, and passages from western novels adapted for the screen, to illustrate the various points of view of the authors who had a direct hand in shaping the Hollywood image of the American Indian. The book features 84 photographs, an index, and a bibliography of more than 100 sources.

Through a century of movies, the U.S. military held sway over war and service-oriented films. Influenced by the armed forces and their public relations units, Hollywood presented moviegoers with images of a faultless American fighting machine led by heroic commanders. This book examines this cooperation with detailed narratives of military blunders and unfit officers that were whitewashed to be presented in a more favorable light. Drawing on production files, correspondence between bureaucrats and filmmakers, and contemporary critical reviews, the author reveals the behind-the-scenes political maneuvers that led to the rewriting of history on-screen.

Drawing on studio files, newspaper critiques, internet sources and scholarly studies of Mexican cinema, this critical history focuses on film depictions, in Hollywood and in Mexico, of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The political and military battles of the revolution are discussed in detail, and contrasted with the film industry's mostly uninformative take on the conflict. Important figures of Mexican history are discussed - Benito Juqrez, Porfirio Diaz, Francisco Madero Jr., Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata - as well as non-Latinos whose actions were influential. Performers, production personnel and literary sources for films dealing with revolutionary Mexico, from the silent The Life of General Villa to Cinco De Mayo: La Batalla of 2013, are covered.