3 - Critical Overview

Summary

Like comedies, westerns, horror films, and science fiction, the crime film has inspired dozens of volumes of critical commentary. It is difficult to write a coherent history of criticism of the crime film, however, especially because of its tendency to split into subgenres whose import is apparently only distantly related. The project of genre theory itself has depended throughout its history on the ascendancy of such critical methodologies as the structuralism of Tzvetan Todorov, which allows the systematic analysis of generic conventions, and the revisionist historicism of Rick Altman, which uncovers economic motives for the rise and fall of specific Hollywood genres. In the same way, critical responses to the crime film and its numerous subgenres have divided according to which modes of academic criticism have been fashionable from moment to moment: auteur criticism, mise-en-scène criticism, thematic criticism, structural criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, economic criticism, critical interrogations of race or gender or identity politics. Overlaid on these categories, however, is a different, surprisingly rigid series of categories dictated by the different crime subgenres themselves. The gangster film, the first crime subgenre to provoke serious commentary, tends to generate discussions of Hollywood mythmaking. Though this thematic strand continues in discussions of film noir, it is complemented by an equally strong thread of mise-en-scène criticism.