Dreams & Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film.(Book Review)

Dreams & Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film. Jack Shadoian. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

We can now read the second edition (the subtitle has been changed from the 1977 edition's The American Gangster/Crime Film) of one of the first book-length studies of the gangster movie. This reflects the burgeoning interest in genre studies and structuralism that arose in part to counter the auteur-dominated criticism of the 1960s. It fast became a standard reference work in the field. This original study, reprinted virtually unchanged here as Chapters 1-6, analyzes the American gangster film from its sound beginnings (Little Caesar, 1930, and Public Enemy, 1931) …