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This main focal point of this chapter is The Spanish Prisoner’s generic status. It introduces the labels ‘con artist film’ and ‘con game film’ and argues that Mamet’s film is an example of the second category. Although con game films share a number of traits and conventions with crime films and thrillers (almost universally film critics have labelled The Spanish Prisoner a crime film and/or a thriller) they also present fundamental differences. Arguably, the most important difference is that while the disruption of the equilibrium in the narrative of crime films is marked by physical violence, in con artist films it is marked by failure in a character’s cognitive abilities to recognise the truth behind appearances. This failure is also “anticipated” on a spectatorial level as the dense plots of such films and their complicated narration prevent all but the most alert of spectators from grasping the finer details of elaborate confidence tricks that constitute the narratives of such films. After introducing the key characteristics of the con artist and the con game film, the chapter provides a close analysis of The Spanish Prisoner as a representative example of the latter generic label.

This chapter places Italy's 1970s within a broad continuum in post-war Western Europe, in which wartime schisms were silenced and shelved, only to reappear decades later into a transformed cultural landscape. An attendant sense of national 'taking stock' manifested itself in an acute awareness of the weight of the past, and of the present moment's significance as a turning point in Italian history. The chapter analyses this point in detail by looking at the influence of the USA in the post-war years, with a particular focus on Italy's film industry. As a barometer for the intimate economic and cultural relationship between the two nations, Italian cinema embodied wider tensions between the local and the global, and the 'crime film' is taken as a case in point.

This chapter examines the ways in which a range of films shot in New Towns or other suburban locations in Britain during the 1970s offer evidence of shifts in representations of criminal behaviour which can be tied to the apparent modern ‘newness’ of these locations. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the film The Offence employs location shooting and impressively designed interiors (shot in the studio) in order to evoke a rapidly changing nation which is unsure of how to police itself. The chapter develops in order to examine how far crime and gangster films of the period such as The Squeeze and Get Carter often depict cruelty being meted out to young, innocent characters, and places these representations within socio-cultural context.

In 2007, the collection of amateur films from Cinemateca do Capitólio (Porto Alegre, Brazil) won a restoration grant, work that was developed at the laboratories of Cinemateca Brasileira. The films, produced between 1932 and 1962, were shot by five different filmmakers: Sioma Breiman, an Ukrainian immigrant that established a solid career as a professional photographer; Fernando Moreira Machado, a doctor and amateur filmmaker, and João Carlos Caldasso, Nelson Furtado and Moacyr Flores, active members of the Foto-Cine Clube Gaúcho. This chapter undertakes a brief investigation of the amateur filmmaking scene in Porto Alegre taking as a starting point the fiction films from the collection of the Cinemateca do Capitólio and their production context. Most of the titles were collectively produced either by the members of the Foto-Cine Clube Gaúcho, founded in 1951 and still active today, or the group of friends that surrounded Doctor Fernando Moreira Machado. After this historical contextualisation, the analysis will turn to the crime films Dawn Steps and The Jewelry Store Robbery; silent films that bring a close resemblance in their narrative structure-usage of flashbacks, different points of views, female characters in search of revenge-creating an intricate narrative structure that expresses the efforts in dialoguing with established movie genres.

In the late 1920s, a group of Viennese craftsmen under the direction of the chimney sweep (and passionate piano player, wrestler and drama student) Franz Hohenberger, shot a feature-length crime movie modelled on then current French and American examples of this popular genre. The resulting film, The Green Cockatoo (1929) tells the melodramatic story of two vagabonds, who rescue a virtuous girl from the clutches of Chinese hoodlums, whilst offering a series of other ‘attractions’ that demonstrate affiliation with a range of other amateur genres; from the slapstick comedy to the ‘chaser’ film and the travelogue. Recognising a range of such suggestive commercial inter-texts, the study explores the conditions that shaped the ‘bricolage’ characterising The Green Cockatoo, and asks whether these are attributable to local cultural traditions, sourced in perverse amateur impulses, or whether they are simply modellings of influential international examples? Do they address a particular context of amateur exhibition, or are they the result of an obstinate cultural practice to be associated with amateurism, equally determined by technological developments, socio-historical factors and intermediate references?

Chapter 8 demonstrates the ways in which ideological constraints in studio-era Hollywood shaped the aesthetic properties of an entire body of crime films, now commonly known as film noir. The ideological restrictions of the Production Code Administration posed creative problems that noir filmmakers solved through visual and narrative contortion. The contortions created challenges for audiences, who had to decode and make sense of films that may not show complete clarity or coherence in their storytelling. Film noir remains aesthetically engaging because it operates near the boundaries of classicism without sacrificing classical Hollywood’s accessibility and formal unity.

This chapter, written by Tom Gunning, pursues the relentless immersion, at street level, of the urbanite in a city doubly composed of the seen and unseen, image and shadow. Making evident what the city shares with the uneasy world-view of film noir, Gunning’s essay casts light on the ways in which experiences of urban culture, modernity, and the cinema are inextricably linked. This brings into play another aspect of cinematicity, namely that the city from the nineteenth century onwards had become what Gunning calls a ‘hyper-visual zone’ whose inhabitants were bombarded by an array of visual stimuli and partial impressions, as if preparing them for the onslaught of the moving pictures themselves. Beneath the visible facade of the city, as the detective figure that emerged in the literature of the period makes abundantly clear, also however lurk dark corners, dangerous places, and invisible threats. It is here, Gunning argues, that the police’s bull’s eye lantern and the flash of the journalist’s camera make visible what was invisible.

Chapter 2 illustrates an aesthetically productive balance between easy understanding and cognitive challenge in classical Hollywood cinema with extended analyses of His Girl Friday and Double Indemnity. These films combine classical narrative, stylistic, ideological, and genre properties with artistic devices that complicate formal patterning and thwart audience expectations.