Maximum MoviesPulp Fictions

Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson
In the words of Richard Maltby . “Maximum Movies–Pulp Fictions describes two improbably imbricated worlds and the piece of cultural history their intersections provoked.” One of these worlds comprises a clutch of noisy, garish pulp movies–Kiss Me Deadly, Shock Corridor, Fixed Bayonets!, I Walked with a Zombie, The Lineup, Terror in a Texas Town, Ride Lonesome–pumped out for the grind houses at the end of the urban exhibition chain by the studios’ B-divisions and fly-by-night independents. The other is occupied by critics, intellectuals, cinephiles, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Manny Farber, and Lawrence Alloway, who championed the cause of these movies and incited the cultural guardians of the day by attacking a rigorously policed canon of tasteful, rarified, and ossified art objects. Against the legitimate, and in defense of the illegitimate