The connecting thread throughout Julie Levinson's The American Success Myth on Film is that success, the idea that anybody (though usually young men) can “overcome their humble beginnings and all other hurdles to advancement” (2), is not an ahistorical and natural phenomenon. Rather, success as a myth is equal parts durable, evolving, and contradictory, and it is appealing precisely because it sidesteps the realities of social limitations and systemic inequalities in favor of a can-do spirit of individual self-making. Its contradictions form the crux of Levinson's analysis, as she articulates cultural ambivalence toward what it means to be successful and how American cinema negotiates the ideological dualities at the myth's core: spiritual versus material fulfillment, domesticity versus mobility, community versus individuality, and leisure versus work.

Levinson is consistent throughout the book, never straying from her claim that films both reify and challenge the American success myth. Her most salient point in the introductory chapter, which provides a brief historical overview of myths and success in America, is that the ideals of success still found in American cinema were not native to cinema, but rather have evolved over time across media (12). Cinema is merely the latest to narrativize success and negotiate its complexities. Levinson further justifies her study of cinema by arguing that the film industry's consolidation in the early twentieth century coincided with increasing ambivalence toward success and that cinema and its formal system have done more than previous media “to engrave the success myth and its ideological tensions in the popular imagination” (18). In the remaining four chapters, Levinson explains how American cinema negotiates the taken-for-granted infallibility of the success myth, differentiating films under analysis as those about mobility, the corporate workplace, gender roles, and unemployment. The films themselves run the gamut from silent cinema such as The Crowd (1928) to contemporary blockbusters such as The Pursuit of Happyness (2006).

Each chapter in the analysis is quite lengthy, focussing on numerous films, and Levinson's treatment of the films is sharp and incisive. In the second chapter, about different paths of mobility, she critiques the naive notion that success is blind to individual circumstances. Using The Pursuit of Happyness, she posits that cinema glosses over factors such as race and class in order to abstract main characters as generic American constructs (25). In chapter 4, a standout chapter about gender roles, she uses All about Eve (1950) and Working Girl (1988), among other films, to exemplify the dialectic of seasoned veteran and ambitious newcomer, with the former woman serving as a warning for the latter of aggressive careerism at the expense of upward mobility through marriage (116, 119–20). However, she has a tendency throughout each chapter to hop from one film to the next with little significant insight, often describing particular film scenes or characters as emblematic of certain success myth contradictions without critically engaging the films in their totality.

Although Levinson takes an admittedly limited, thematic approach to the very broad topic of cinema and success, her contribution to genre studies is quite significant even though it is not her primary methodology. Particularly with regard to Hollywood gangster cinema, Levinson extends Robert Warshow's research on gangsters as extreme perversions of the American dream by directly analogizing their moneymaking ventures to the corporate drive for legitimate upward mobility. In so doing, she recasts gangster films as the most ardent critics of the success myth by virtue of gangsters' inevitable violent downfall.

The book's brevity (177 pages, excluding the notes and Index), however, works against it in that some intriguing ideas are left unexplored. For example, Levinson makes the early point that the American success myth was upended by a shift in capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century and that films gradually spoke to the human impact of America's increased corporatism (12). She then makes generic references throughout to a new corporate capitalism post-World War II, particularly with regard to its systematic dehumanization in the service of corporate profits, but she overlooks the role of neoliberalism as the defining logic of this new capitalism in redefining success in a globalized world.

Though it occasionally only hints at larger implications, Levinson's book is an accessible and useful companion to the wealth of research on the transformation of work and culture and a revealing analysis of success through the lens of American cinema. She thankfully avoids an outright condemnation or endorsement of the success myth, choosing instead to keep the focus on cinema as an important investigatory medium that encourages us to question the notion that success is an American certainty.