In his comments on The Wild Angels, Alloway offers as concise a rationale for his interest in violence in the American cinema as he offers in Violent America: the Movies 1946–1964. The book had two purposes: one was to analyse the depiction of violence in American cinema; the other was the quest to find criteria germane to the discipline and type within the continuum. Although published in late 1971, the book had resulted from a series of talks and related movie showings between April and June in 1969. The original idea had been to hold a survey of several genres in collaboration with Tony Mussman (of the Department of Film at MoMA) and the artist Robert Smithson. Mussman moved to California and Smithson withdrew when science fiction as a genre was dropped, leaving Alloway to talk about violence. However, the series had to be retitled “The American Action Movie” because one of the film companies would not lend prints to a series called “Violent America.” Presenting a series about violent movies which, he recalled, “are the kind I'd always liked best,” was too good an opportunity to turn down: “I re-saw the movies I'd seen as a kid and wrote the book based on them. For me, the book is about the way I'm like everybody else and share with everyone else.” He probably thought back, too, not only to his ICA lecture series in 1954 and 1955, but also to his Independent Group-derived belief that “the whole of society is the province of an art critic's attention.”

Alloway realized that a study of violence would be viewed with distaste unless it was clearly perceived as morally deploring it. An investigation such as Hugh Davis Graham's near-contemporary Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (1969) had the authority and sociological relevance to justify it. But a book about violence in the movies, unless it was clearly condemnatory, seriously offended what Alloway called the “parent-teacher-librarian-columnist complex” who distrusted mass culture. Those in the “complex,” then as now, thought the depiction of violence might beget real violence. Alloway paraphrased the anxiety: “The idea is that a scene, any scene, of violence transmits to the spectator a simple desire to act out literally what has been seen, heard, or read.