Preface

"Genre film is a trick we play on the dead," Voltaire might have said had he returned to life and been appointed to a chair in popular culture at Nanterre, and he would have had a point. Yet, actually, it is the historian or critic who plays the trick by fabricating a systematic means of examining the film.

Nevertheless, the filmmaker and the audience have silently conspired to create pleasing, informative, and evocative formulas, atmospheres, symbols, and themes that make up the recipe for popular genre films. In turn, the historian and critic incur a debt to sensitive and talkative audiences in the form of successive generations of students who respond to the genre. For their insights in class, in conversation, in papers, and in research projects, I owe a special debt to my students at Morgan State University and Stanford (in 1969-1970) : Sidney Cousin, Pat Feaster, Everett Marshburn, A. Ricardo Perry, Preston Winkler, Robert Bunn, Clarence Davis, Pamela Jones, and Michael Fuller.

I am grateful for insights shared in conversations with Lucia Lynn Moses, Harry Popkin, Ben Rinaldo, Jim Hoberman, Ken Jacobs, William Greaves, Ernie Smith, Carlton Moss, Stuart Heisler, Frank Capra, Erik Barnouw, David Culbert, Horace Coleman, Melvin Van Peebles, Ronald Goldwyn, Clayton Riley, Pearl Bowser, Ted Toddy, Michael Roemer, and Lester Sack. I have been permitted almost unlimited opportunities to study the generic films that make up the body of this book through the good offices and generosity of many persons. My greatest debts I owe to the unfailing kindness of the staff of the Library of Congress Motion Picture Section, William T. Murphy of the Audio-Visual Section of the Archives of the United States, Frank Holland of the National Film Library in Aston Clinton, Helen Cyr and her staff of the Audio-Visual Department of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Professor Robert Carringer and the Film Collection of the University of Illinois, Nate Zelikow, and John Baker.

A considerable burden of moonlit editorial work was done while I was working on another project during a year in Washington as a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow and a resident Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. I am grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation and to the Woodrow Wilson Center, and its director, James Billington, and his staff, for their generous support. The Woodrow Wilson Fellows provided scholarly comradeship that inspired my work. Ann Bain, Sue Gnagy, and Doug Kelso made the index, for which I am in their debt.

Finally, I owe thanks to Barbara Humphrys of the Library of Congress, Everett Marshburn of the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting, Professor J.R. Lyston of Essex Community College, and Professor Michael Bayton of Morgan State University, for their careful reading and criticism of the manuscript. My wife, Alma Taliaferro Cripps, and my children, Ben, Alma, and Paul, all contributed to the stimulating life out of which this book emerged.