On a map or from the air, nothing defines New York City more clearly than the rectilinearity of Central Park at the heart of the curvilinear island of Manhattan. And nothing encodes the paradox of the thinking that created Frederick Law Olmsted's first great park – and simultaneously distinguishes it from many of the parks inspired by Central Park – than the virtually perfect geometry of its outline. The Park simultaneously confirms the grid structure of the streets of Manhattan and dramatically interrupts this structure: streets that run vertically uptown and downtown or horizontally across town must, when they reach the horizontal and vertical boundaries of the park, leave their verticality and horizontality behind to traverse the Park before rejoining the grid of streets and avenues at the far boundaries of the Park's expanse. If the Cartesian clarity of midtown Manhattan has come to represent the efficiency of American capitalism that was making the United States a major industrial power during the years when the Greensward Plan was designed and Central Park constructed, the Park represented (and continues to represent) a counter-sensibility: as Olmstead and Vaux predicted.

At the end of Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America (1984), Max (James Woods) appears finally to be dead. Max, alias Secretary Bailey, Secretary of Commerce, has been killed on the eve of testifying before a Congressional Investigating Committee, late in 1968. Others due to testify have died in suspicious circumstances. Max has told Noodles (Robert de Niro), minutes before his disappearance, that he (Max) is “a dead man.” There is little doubt, it would seem, that he is dead, ingested by a refuse wagon. But he appeared to die once before in the spring of 1933, when Max, the bootlegger and labour fixer, was shot down and burned on his last liquor run before the end of Prohibition. Indeed, a full sized confectionary coffin to Prohibition is seen in the sequence, set in Moe's bar, just prior to his death – one coffin going, apparently, before another. If Max has died once, and lived … perhaps he can do it twice.

During World War II, when the Office of War Information urged the American film companies to help the nation win the war, the OWI's Bureau of Motion Pictures delivered both moral support and guidance. The BMP “Manual” (1942), for instance, encouraged producers to show women dropping off their children at day-care centers, then cheerfully heading off to jobs where they enjoyed equal opportunity and equal pay. Scenes like those may have been fantasy, and for some women wryly amusing, and yet, in the late 1940s and beyond, as one historian says, World War II came to be thought of as “the best war ever,” the war, according to myth, where there were no tensions over class, or race, or gender.

For close on to a hundred years discourses on national identity, European ethnic assimilation and the problem of class division within the Republic had been principally addressed in the popular arts through the agency of the black mask. During the 1930s, blackface in American films shifted from the idea implied in the racial slur, “nigger in the woodpile,” to the rather less visible, but no less derogatory, “octoroon in the kindling,” a phrase used in Her Man (Pathé, Tay Garnett, 1930) to suggest something is amiss, but which is used here to suggest the cultural miscegenation that informs much of the material discussed in this article.