Why is everyone talking about pulp movies

A.� American cinemas have been fascinated by the dark pathologies of pulp cinema since the 1930s. The genre thrived up until 1950, and an updated film version of the 1947 crime novel The Blank Wall by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, The Deep End, which stars Tilda Swinton (pictured on our home page), has renewed interest. There have been a number of films based on or inspired by pulp writers such as Cornell Woolrich (Original Sin) and James. M Cain (the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There). Next month sees the release of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive which has all the ingredients of a pulp plot - the Mob, amnesia and switched indentities.

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Q.� How did this fascination begin

A.� Hollywood acquired its appetite for these themes almost by accident. In 1941 John Huston was pitching an adaptation of The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, star writer of the magazine Black Mask, to Jack Warner. Huston got his secretary to map out the shots for the movie and she simply used Hammett's novel as a guide.

Warner loved it and Huston began filming Hammett's tough prose and the brutal, witty style was an instant hit.

In 1944, Raymond Chandler worked with Billy WIlder on Cain's Double Indemnity. In the same year, Chandler's Farewell My Lovely was filmed using flashback and sardonic voiceover. It proved so effective it established a style for the doom-laden crime movies, later dubbed film noir, that emerged from the wartime gloom of the 1940s.

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Q.� What are the key pulp films of this time - and why did they cease to be so popular

A.� Chandler quit Hollywood by the end of the 1940s and producers began looking elsewhere. During this time, films such as Rear Window, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Build My Gallows High and Kiss Me Deadly were released.

Despite their success, by the late 1950s postwar America was enjoying prosperity and technicolour and rock'n'roll had arrived and a new era in film-making took place.

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Q.� Is this where Pulp Fiction comes from

A.� Writer Jim Thompson renewed Hollywood's affair with pulp although he didn't live to see it. In 1955 he collaborated with a young Stanley Kubrick on the racetrack-robbery thriller The Killing and the First World War drama Paths of Glory. He died in obscurity in 1977. Then in 1990, three of his books were unexpectedly filmed. The most successful, The Grifters, updated Thompson's sadistic, claustrophobic world to the present. His influence continued with Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs in 1992. Experts agree its structure of circling around the run-up and aftermath of a robbery is clearly borrowed from Thompson's The Killing. Pulp Fiction in 1994 followed, its style a homage to the lurid covers of Thompson's paperback originals. After that, Thompson's successors, such as Walter Moseley came up with Devil In A Blue Dress and James Ellroy� with LA Confidential. Elmore Leonard came up with Get Shorty and Jackie Brown and was the hottest writer in town for a while.

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By Katharine MacColl