Maximum Movies-Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson

243 Pages·2011·4.072 MB·English

by  Professor Peter Stanfield

Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions
Also by Peter Stanfield
Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail
Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy
Body and Soul: Jazz and Blues in American Film, 1927–63
Edited Collections
Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film
“Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era
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Maximum Movies
Pulp Fictions
Film Culture and the Worlds of
Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane,
and Jim Thompson
PETER STANFIELD
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RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Stanfield, Peter, 1958–
Maximum movies—pulp fictions : film culture and the worlds of Samuel Fuller,
Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson / Peter Stanfield.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8135-5061-9(hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-5062-6
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Film noir—History and criticism. 2. Film criticism—United States—
History—20th century. 3. Film criticism—Great Britain—History—20th century.
4. Fuller, Samuel, 1912‒1997—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Spillane, Mickey,
1918‒2006—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Spillane, Mickey, 1918–2006—film
adaptations. 7. Thompson, Jim, 1906–1977—Criticism and interpretation.
8. Thompson, Jim, 1906‒1977—Film adaptations. 9. Detective and mystery
stories—Film adaptations. 10. Detective and mystery stories, American—History
and criticism. I. Title.
PN1995.9.F54S6855 2011
791.43(cid:2)655—dc22 2010041968
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Copyright © 2011by Peter Stanfield
Foreword Copyright © by Richard Maltby
All rights reserved
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Manufactured in the United States of America
For Damian, Andy, Kasia, and Mum

CONTENTS
Foreword by Richard Maltby ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Yours till the Boys Come Home 3
1 Position Papers: In Defense of Pulp Movies 12
2 A Genealogy of Pulp: Black Maskto Mickey Spillane 44
3 A World of Small Insanities: The Critical Reception
of Kiss Me Deadly 74
4 American Primitive: Samuel Fuller’s Pulp Politics 112
5 Authenticating Pulp: Jim Thompson Adaptations and
Neo-noir 152
Conclusion: Hiding Out in Cinemas 189
Notes 193
Index 217
vii

FOREWORD
M
aximum Movies—Pulp Fictions describes two improbably imbricated worlds
and the piece of cultural history their intersections provoked.
One of those worlds was occupied by a clutch of noisy, garish pulp movies
pumped out for the grind houses at the end of the urban exhibition chain by
the studios’ B-divisions and the fly-by-night independent production companies
that replaced them—Globe Enterprises, Parklane Pictures, Pajemer Productions,
Associates and Aldrich. These were the disposable products of a postwar mass
culture that packaged sex, violence, and “True Action” to working-class American
men in magazines like Inside Detective, Crime Confessions, Wildcat Adventures, and
Rage for Menand in paperbacks with titles like Homicide Johnnyand The Wayward
Ones(with minor abridgments). Constructed from a toolbox of interchangeable
generic parts, these expendable objects delivered their maximum impact when
they were consumed in “a fit of excitement” and immediately discarded, to be
replaced by a new sensation as soon as the program changed. They fed a sub-
terranean male culture in inarticulate revolt against the enervating, feminized
middlebrow world of conspicuous domestic suburban consumption. And
despite their contradictory promise that their readers and viewers could escape
consumer culture by consuming fantasy, some of these objects were occasion-
ally salvaged from aesthetic contempt by critics on a parallel mission to find
what Manny Farber called “a bit of male truth” in the activity of filmgoing. Like
Otis Ferguson and Robert Warshow, Farber emphasized the immediacy of the
movie experience, insisting that its ephemerality had nothing to do with the
contemplative consumption of art. These critics found this experience at its
most intense in the fast, functional, faceless action movies that played move-
ment against space and shone in the vitality of their grace notes, their exact
defining of male action, their “hard combat with low, common-place ideas.” Of
course Farber was slumming, but his dialogue with the class accents of pulp
culture engaged both the kinetic energies and the unrefined complexities of
serially produced industrial culture.
The other world of Maximum Moviesis the Britain of the long 1960s, where
for a moment a group of “unruly and truant” critics put pulp movies at the
center of an emergent film culture. Lawrence Alloway, in particular, extended
ix