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, in an insolent and unruly manner, they agitated for the recognition of lurid sensational crime stories, war pictures, fast-paced Westerns, thrillers, and gangster melodramas were claimed as examples of the true, the real, and the authentic in contemporary culture--the foundation upon which modern film studies sits.

本書は、低俗と切り捨てられたＢ級映画の咆哮を、批評の力で文化の正典へと昇華させた情熱的なクロニクルです。サミュエル・フラーらが描いた剥き出しの暴力や情念が、ゴダールら先鋭的な知性と衝突する瞬間の火花を見事に捉えています。単なる映画史の解説を超え、既存の価値観に反旗を翻し、不純な美を追い求める人間の生の躍動を描き出している点に、深遠な文学的魅力が宿っています。 映像化作品では、これら伝説的なパルプ映画の濃密な色彩やスピード感が直接的に網膜を刺激しますが、原作本はその狂気の背後にある哲学的必然性を鮮やかに言語化しています。テキストが解き明かす批評的背景と、スクリーンに溢れる扇情的な映像が共鳴し合うとき、私たちは通俗的な娯楽の中に潜む、真にリアルでオーセンティックな魂の叫びを目撃することになるのです。