The analysis examines the relationship from the perspectives of film history and technique, social history, criminal justice, and criminology and is intended both for general readers and for students in courses on criminology and film. It focuses on films that focus mainly on crime and its consequences. The text describes the history of crime films and the emergence of various genres, with emphasis on how, over time, movies have interacted with the social context in which they were produced. The second chapter examines the sociological and criminological messages that crime films provide about crime causes. Subsequent chapters focus on specific genres within the crime films category, including police films, courtroom dramas, and prison films. The final two chapters focus on crime films’ tendency to portray criminals as heroes, how films reconcile their message of criminal heroism with cultural assumptions about the wrongness of crime, and the probable future of crime films. The analysis concludes that crime films offer viewers contradictory sorts of satisfaction. These forms of satisfaction include the reality of what people fear to be true together with the fantasy of overcoming that reality and the pleasure of entering the realm of the forbidden and illicit coupled with the security of rejecting or escaping that realm in the end. Photographs, chapter notes, appended list of films cited, index, and 133 references