Choose one (1) of the following topics and write four page essay (that's four or more full pages) in standard MLA format which is thoughtful and supported with several specific examples from the work(s) you are analyzing. For this class the last topic will be the same for all of the essay assignments (it just seems like such a natural topic with lots of choice available). The other topics will offer you some variety. Your essay will be evaluated on both form and content. Do your best, and good luck!

  1. Expand on one of the following questions from our crime genre discussions. Be sure you are analyzing the films and readings (summaries and reviews will not work for this assignment); use the vocabulary and information about techniques you have learned from Anatomy of Film whenever possible:

    • Expand on the Discussion 8 question (explore details/features of a specific sub-genre in a work of literature or film).

    • From Disucssion 9 expand on question 2.

  2. Both of the crime (good guys and bad guys) lectures suggest that changes in the genre are really a reflection of the time in when they were written or filmed. Look at two or three works (either two+ stories or two+ novels or two+ movies; stick with one KIND of work here; don't mix books and films, for example) of crime fiction. Show how changes in style and content reflect changes in the times in which the films were made. DO NOT put down obvious examples, for example, if you compare a Raymond Chandler (hardboiled detective) novel to a Sue Grafton (hardboiled detective) novel, the OBVIOUS differences are things like: the newer book has newer cars; there are references to older news events in the older book, etc. WHO CARES? The fact that one features a male and the other a female detective MAY be significant; it suggests changing gender roles, and you may find other instances of male/female characters reflecting other such changes in the works. One work you look at may show distrust of an ideology (James Bond novels and international communism, for example); the shift may now be towards terrorits and Islam.

    Or you just might take the opposite approach. You might find that even though fifty years separate the two books or two films you choose, the corruption may not have changed. Your works may reveal that although times/customs have changed, croooked politicians and big business have been consistent bad guys in this genre for generations.

  3. By its nature this genre lends itself to considerations of "us" Vs. "them" (or "good guys" Vs. "bad guys"). Often these works use stereotypes based on current fears or biases of the audience watching/reading them. Examine common stereotypes of "bad guys" in crime stories, books, and/or films. You can look over a long period of time to show changing (or unchanging) targets of this stereotyping; for example, the villainous Fu Manchu of Sax Rohmer's novels reflected British fear and distrust of Asians in a time not far removed from uprisings and opium wars; James Bond's battle with an insidious Dr. No is an extension of this fear, now attached to the communist Chinese.

    Do not generalize in your own analysis; instead, be sure to put the stereotyping in context (having a German villain in a WWII movie, for example, makes sense as war-time propaganda).

    A fun variation on this is to look at books/films from a different country and see if the target of the stereotyping changes. I once had a Czech student who explained to my film/lit. class that in Czechoslovakia (which was in her childhood behind the Iron Curtain) there were movies like the James Bond films, but in the Soviet movies Americans and British were always the evil, greedy, corrupt, merciless villains, and the poor Soviet citizens were in danger of being anihilated by them daily; only their super-secret agents could protect them from the "bad guys" coming from the west :)

  4. Compare and contrast a classic work of literature with its improbable film mate. OK, this needs a bit of explanation. If you were to compare, say, the book and the movie versions of True Grit, you would have a fair amount to say, but the pairing is obvious, predictable. If, however, you were to pair Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with the musical West Side Story, you'd have some more dramatic comparison/contrast. For this topic do not pick obvious comparisons; look for a film that is somehow based on a work of literature without being just a copy of it. Here are a few (of many) possibilities:

    • Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale" (from The Canterbury Tales) and John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
    • Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now
    • Victor Fleming's film The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Gregory Maguire's The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West or the musical Wicked of the original novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
    • Beowulf (author unknown) and John Gardiner's Grendel (yes, this is comparing a book with a book) or any of a number of unusual film versions (there is a sci-fi version of Beowulf and an interesting film version of Michael Chrichton's The Thirteenth Warrior; stay away from the simple CGI film; it's really a fairly literal re-make)
    • Jane Austen's Emma and the Amy Heckerling's 1995 comedy Clueless
    • Homer's The Odyssey and William Saroyan's The Human Comedy
    • T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita
    • George Orwell's 1984 and Terry Gilliam's Brazil
    • loads of Shakespeare:
      • The Tempest and the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet or Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Book
      • Hamlet and Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well
      • Macbeth and Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood
      • King Lear and Akira Kurosawa's (do we see a pattern here?) Ran
      • A Midsummer Night's Dream and the teen comedy Get Over it! or Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
      • Twelfth Night and the teen comedy She's the Man
      • of course the topic mentions Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, but Baz Luhrmann's updated version of the play (reviewed poorly by Siskel and Ebert who said, "In one grand but doomed gesture, writer-director Baz Luhrmann has made a film that (a) will dismay any lover of Shakespeare, and (b) bore anyone lured into the theater by promise of gang wars, MTV-style" (how can you resist?); however, you will not get much mileage out of Franco Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet because it's too literal a translation of the original play

    There are tons of other options for this topic; I don't pretend to know them all, so if you have an idea that you think will work, you might want to run it by me first.

For some tips on writing about literature, go to

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