Studies of the western, crime movies, and film noir include William K. Everson, The Hollywood Western: 90 Years of Cowboys and Indians, Train Robbers, Sheriffs and Gunslingers, and Assorted Heroes and Desperados (1992, rev. ed. of A Pictorial History of the Western Film, 1969); Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship Within the Western (1969); Jon Tuska, The Filming of the West (1976); Lawrence Alloway, Violent America: The Movies, 1946–1964 (1971); Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies: From Griffith to The Godfather and Beyond (1980), a historical cross-genre survey; Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward (eds.), Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (1979), a critical reference work; Foster Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir (1981, reprinted 1983), an in-depth study; and Jon Tuska, Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective (1984). Experimental cinema is the subject of Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (1967). The social-issue movie is explored in Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (1981). For feminist studies of Hollywood films, see Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (1987); and E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (1983), which also covers independent films.
Two surveys of specific genres are Kalton C. Lahue, Continued Next Week: A History of the Moving Picture Serial (1964), and World of Laughter: The Motion Picture Comedy Short, 1910–1930 (1966, reprinted 1972). Other works on comedy include Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (1975); Gerald Mast, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, 2nd ed. (1979), a thematic study of silent and sound comedies and the relationship between intellectual content and comic form; and Andrew Horton (ed.), Comedy/Cinema/Theory (1991).
Musicals are discussed in John Kobal, A History of Movie Musicals: Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance, rev. ed. (1983), an extremely well-represented international survey; Ted Sennett, Hollywood Musicals (1981, reprinted 1985); Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (1982); Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (1987, reissued 1989), a definitive study of the structure of the genre; and Colin Larkin, The Virgin Encyclopedia of Stage and Film Musicals (1999).
For an overview of animated films, see Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons (1980); Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928 (1982), a scholarly discussion of pre-Disney works; and Christopher Finch, The Art of Walt Disney: From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms (1973, reprinted 1983), a richly illustrated study. David A. Cook