"As a genre of film the roots of which go all the way back to the birth of the medium and the reach of which extends all the way to the present day, the action film is a fascinating object of inquiry for scholars from a wide range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. In an effort to contribute to the increase in scholarship on the action film across the humanities, I will endeavor to explore in this chapter some of the most important and influential character types (the cop, the gangster, the cowboy, the swashbuckler), narrative tropes (foot and car chases, last-minute rescues, fight scenes), and visual techniques (camera movement to dynamize space, parallel editing to intensify time) as they emerged and evolved over the course of the first half-century of film propaedeutic to a comprehensive understanding of the action film"--